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107 I have always been the way I am even when I wasn't the way I am and none can ever know the way I am because I am not merely the way I am 122 Him or someone else, what's it to me if every time I'm lonely afterward? Alone here with my moribility . . . if there only were such a lovely word . . . 124 These hemorrhoids, this bleeding from behind . . . I'm spilling out of all my holes—yes, all. My ass is wrecked . . . (My speech is so refined . . .) There ought to be a plumber I could call. 154 You want to die with me, you dumb shit? Excavate my heart with your shovel? This is getting to be a hell of a habit. Want me to swear on my knees? Grovel?

Her body is not so white as anemony petals nor so smooth—nor so remote a thing. It is a field of the wild carrot taking the field by force; the grass does not raise above it. Here is no question of whiteness, white as can be, with a purple mole at the center of each flower. Each flower is a hand’s span of her whiteness. Wherever his hand has lain there is a tiny purple blemish. Each part is a blossom under his touch to which the fibres of her being stem one by one, each to its end, until the whole field is a white desire, empty, a single stem, a cluster, flower by flower, a pious wish to whiteness gone over— or nothing.

To celebrate his final Pride, in June, my friend, lymphatic, thin, and in distress, managed to dress in drag. He shot the moon: outstretched, he’d used his dying to think—obsess— about the Prada pumps, their skin a snake; the heavy pantyhose, two pair; the moot but lacy underthings; the makeup, cake, to overlay his pain. I called him beaut- i-ful; he said he felt like Greta Garbo in Queen Christina(our campy interplay); I countered that he looked more like a hobo- sexual in heels. We howled. That day, we never left his Castro flat. His rhinestone glittered, and everywhere, the smell of cologne.

(excerpt) "Throughout these infinite orbs of mingling light, Of which yon earth is one, is wide diffus'd A Spirit of activity and life, That knows no term, cessation, or decay; That fades not when the lamp of earthly life, Extinguish'd in the dampness of the grave, Awhile there slumbers, more than when the babe In the dim newness of its being feels The impulses of sublunary things, And all is wonder to unpractis'd sense: But, active, steadfast and eternal, still Guides the fierce whirlwind, in the tempest roars, Cheers in the day, breathes in the balmy groves, Strengthens in health, and poisons in disease; And in the storm of change, that ceaselessly Rolls round the eternal universe and shakes Its undecaying battlement, presides, Apportioning with irresistible law The place each spring of its machine shall fill; So that when waves on waves tumultuous heap Confusion to the clouds, and fiercely driven Heaven's lightnings scorch the uprooted ocean-fords, Whilst, to the eye of shipwreck'd mariner, Lone sitting on the bare and shuddering rock, All seems unlink'd contingency and chance, No atom of this turbulence fulfils A vague and unnecessitated task, Or acts but as it must and ought to act. Even the minutest molecule of light, That in an April sunbeam's fleeting glow Fulfils its destin'd, though invisible work, The universal Spirit guides; nor less, When merciless ambition, or mad zeal, Has led two hosts of dupes to battlefield, That, blind, they there may dig each other's graves, And call the sad work glory, does it rule All passions: not a thought, a will, an act, No working of the tyrant's moody mind, Nor one misgiving of the slaves who boast Their servitude to hide the shame they feel, Nor the events enchaining every will, That from the depths of unrecorded time Have drawn all-influencing virtue, pass Unrecogniz'd or unforeseen by thee, Soul of the Universe! eternal spring Of life and death, of happiness and woe, Of all that chequers the phantasmal scene That floats before our eyes in wavering light, Which gleams but on the darkness of our prison, Whose chains and massy walls We feel, but cannot see. "Spirit of Nature! all-sufficing Power, Necessity! thou mother of the world! Unlike the God of human error, thou Requir'st no prayers or praises; the caprice Of man's weak will belongs no more to thee Than do the changeful passions of his breast To thy unvarying harmony: the slave, Whose horrible lusts spread misery o'er the world, And the good man, who lifts with virtuous pride His being in the sight of happiness That springs from his own works; the poison-tree, Beneath whose shade all life is wither'd up, And the fair oak, whose leafy dome affords A temple where the vows of happy love Are register'd, are equal in thy sight: No love, no hate thou cherishest; revenge And favouritism, and worst desire of fame Thou know'st not: all that the wide world contains Are but thy passive instruments, and thou Regard'st them all with an impartial eye, Whose joy or pain thy nature cannot feel, Because thou hast not human sense, Because thou art not human mind. "Yes! when the sweeping storm of time Has sung its death-dirge o'er the ruin'd fanes And broken altars of the almighty Fiend Whose name usurps thy honours, and the blood Through centuries clotted there has floated down The tainted flood of ages, shalt thou live Unchangeable! A shrine is rais'd to thee, Which, nor the tempest-breath of time, Nor the interminable flood Over earth's slight pageant rolling, Availeth to destroy— The sensitive extension of the world. That wondrous and eternal fane, Where pain and pleasure, good and evil join, To do the will of strong necessity, And life, in multitudinous shapes, Still pressing forward where no term can be, Like hungry and unresting flame Curls round the eternal columns of its strength."

Exalted life this not because you know slavish attention or sit bathed in the royal jellies and rarer distillates nor because it commences backlit all by droning buzz and the mellow scent of lilac but for your ignorance of desire for your cloistering, Liege Never wondering what tastes abound in distant clusters so rich is your interior your fecundity your multiple dark imaginings Never saying as I do Why and again Why Never saying as I do to the world of surrounding combs Do you think I may someday escape

Seven dog-days we let pass Naming Queens in Glenmacnass, All the rare and royal names Wormy sheepskin yet retains, Etain, Helen, Maeve, and Fand, Golden Deirdre's tender hand, Bert, the big-foot, sung by Villon, Cassandra, Ronsard found in Lyon. Queens of Sheba, Meath and Connaught, Coifed with crown, or gaudy bonnet, Queens whose finger once did stir men, Queens were eaten of fleas and vermin, Queens men drew like Monna Lisa, Or slew with drugs in Rome and Pisa, We named Lucrezia Crivelli, And Titian's lady with amber belly, Queens acquainted in learned sin, Jane of Jewry's slender shin: Queens who cut the bogs of Glanna, Judith of Scripture, and Gloriana, Queens who wasted the East by proxy, Or drove the ass-cart, a tinker's doxy, Yet these are rotten — I ask their pardon — And we've the sun on rock and garden, These are rotten, so you're the Queen Of all the living, or have been.

Airport bus from JFK cruising through Queens passing huge endless cemetery by Long Island’s old expressway (once a dirt path for wheelless Indians) myriad small tombstones tilted up gesturing statues on parapets stone arms or wings upraised lost among illegible inscriptions And the setting yellow sun painting all of them on one side only with an ochre brush Rows and rows and rows and rows of small stone slabs tilted toward the sun forever While on the far horizon Mannahatta’s great stone slabs skyscraper tombs and parapets casting their own long black shadows over all these long-haired graves the final restless places of old-country potato farmers dustbin pawnbrokers dead dagos and Dublin bouncers tinsmiths and blacksmiths and roofers house painters and house carpenters cabinet makers and cigar makers garment workers and streetcar motormen railroad switchmen and signal salesmen swabbers and sweepers and swampers steam-fitters and key-punch operators ward heelers and labor organizers railroad dicks and smalltime mafiosi shopkeepers and saloon keepers and doormen icemen and middlemen and conmen housekeepers and housewives and dowagers French housemaids and Swedish cooks Brooklyn barmaids and Bronxville butlers opera singers and gandy dancers pitchers and catchers in the days of ragtime baseball poolroom hustlers and fight promoters Catholic sisters of charity parish priests and Irish cops Viennese doctors of delirium now all abandoned in eternity parcels in a dead-letter office inscrutable addresses on them beyond further deliverance in an America wheeling past them and disappearing oblivious into East River’s echoing tunnels down the great American drain

The people people work with best Are often very queer The people people own by birth Quite shock your first idea; The people people choose for friends Your common sense appall, But the people people marry Are the queerest folks of all.

My heart was a dystopian berry budding in water tiger lilies claiming hocus-pocus wonder. I was broken vanity, vixen vase, victorious tête- à-tête — the Scrabble game nobody won because the tiles aspired speculums. Ocean-misaligned brook / brook-misaligned agua — where else could these gospels have dawned if not in the bellies of men hyenaing a becoming? Twerking in church, I outperformed the candles diarized in the simpleminded annexation.       Wussup, Blastoise with the veiniest homebound pika-pika aim? Wussup, Sims Chumbawamba Family Portrait Simulation? St. Sunny of the Sissies beheld the bukkake throng of mojo-coated cartilage squandered on the refurbished bunk for new cetaceans. A dazzling jeremiad shone me dead until I gridlocked the algebraic expressions of my body in question marks. These syndicated fiyahs stigmatized my herculean magma shades, but I held these walls apart, every inch of my mascara cut off apple pie. You watched me hobble home while the streets coalesced magenta. Tell Momma the holes I cover with one error swell — & there are only inadvertent landscapes to dollop with nonetheless.

What is a man? A quiet between two bombardments.