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Our age bereft of nobility How can our faces show it? I look for love. My lips stand out dry and cracked with want of it. Oh it is well. My poem shall show the need for it. Again we go driven by forces we have no control over. Only in the poem comes an image that we rule the line by the pen in the painter’s hand one foot away from me. Drawing the face and its torture. That is why no one dares tackle it. Held as they are in the hands of forces they cannot understand. That despair is on my face and shall show in the fine lines of any man. I had love once in the palm of my hand. See the lines there. How we played its game, are playing now in the bounds of white and heartless fields. Fall down on my head, love, drench my flesh in the streams of fine sprays. Like French perfume so that I light up as mountain glorys and I am showered by the scent of the finished line. No circles but that two parallels do cross And carry our souls and bodies together as the planets, Showing light on the surface of our skin, knowing that so much of it flows through the veins underneath. Our cheeks puffed with it. The pockets full. 2. Pushed on by the incompletion of what goes before me I hesitate before this paper scratching for the right words. Paul Klee scratched for seven years on smoked glass, to develop his line, LaVigne says, look at his face! he who has spent all night drawing mine. The sun also rises on the rooftops, beginning w/ violet. I begin in blue knowing why we are cool. 3. My middle name is Joseph and I walk beside an ass on the way to what Bethlehem, where a new babe is born. Not the second hand of Yeats but first prints on a cloudy windowpane. America, you boil over 4. The cauldron scalds. Flesh is scarred. Eyes shot. The street aswarm with vipers and heavy armed bandits. There are bandages on the wounds but blood flows unabated. The bath- rooms are full. Oh stop up the drains. We are run over. 5. Let me ramble here. yet stay within my own yardlines. I go out of bounds without defense, oh attack. 6. At last the game is over and the line lengthens. Let us stay with what we know. That love is my strength, that I am overpowered by it: desire that too is on the face: gone stale. When green was the bed my love and I laid down upon. Such it is, heart’s complaint, You hear upon a day in June. And I see no end in view when summer goes, as it will, upon the roads, like singing companions across the land. Go with it man, if you must, but leave us markers on your way. South of Mission, Seattle, over the Sierra Mountains, the Middle West and Michigan, moving east again, easy coming into Chicago and the cattle country, calling to each other over canyons, careful not to be caught at night, they are still out, the destroyers, and down into the South, familiar land, lush places, blue mountains of Carolina, into Black Mountain and you can sleep out, or straight across into States I cannot think of their names. This nation is so large, like our hands, our love it lives with no lover, looking only for the beloved, back home into the heart, New York, New England, Vermont green mountains, and Massachusetts my city, Boston and the sea. Again to smell what this calm ocean cannot tell us. The seasons. Only the heart remembers and records in words of works we lay down for those men who can come to them. 7. At last. I come to the last defense. My poems contain no wilde beestes, no lady of the lake music of the spheres, or organ chants, yet by these lines I betray what little given me. One needs no defense. Only the score of a man’s struggle to stay  with what is his own, what lies within him to do. Without which is nothing, for him or those who hear him And I come to this, knowing the waste, leaving the rest up to love and its twisted faces my hands claw out at only to draw back from the blood already running there. Oh come back, whatever heart you have left. It is my life you save. The poem is done. 6.18.58

Last night, I went to a gay bar with a man I love a little. After dinner, we had a drink. We sat in the far-back of the big backyard and he asked, What will we do when this place closes? I don't think it's going anywhere any time soon, I said, though the crowd was slow for a Saturday, and he said—Yes, but one day. Where will we go? He walked me the half-block home and kissed me goodnight on my stoop— properly: not too quick, close enough our stomachs pressed together in a second sort of kiss. I live next to a bar that's not a gay bar —we just call those bars, I guess— and because it is popular and because I live on a busy street, there are always people who aren't queer people on the sidewalk on weekend nights. Just people, I guess. They were there last night. As I kissed this man I was aware of them watching and of myself wondering whether or not they were just. But I didn't let myself feel scared, I kissed him exactly as I wanted to, as I would have without an audience, because I decided many years ago to refuse this fear— an act of resistance. I left the idea of hate out on the stoop and went inside, to sleep, early and drunk and happy. While I slept, a man went to a gay club with two guns and killed forty-nine people. Today in an interview, his father said he had been disturbed recently by the sight of two men kissing. What a strange power to be cursed with: for the proof of men's desire to move men to violence. What's a single kiss? I've had kisses no one has ever known about, so many kisses without consequence— but there is a place you can't outrun, whoever you are. There will be a time when. It might be a bullet, suddenly. The sound of it. Many. One man, two guns, fifty dead— Two men kissing. Last night I can't get away from, imagining it, them, the people there to dance and laugh and drink, who didn't believe they'd die, who couldn't have. How else can you have a good time? How else can you live? There must have been two men kissing for the first time last night, and for the last, and two women, too, and two people who were neither. Brown people, which cannot be a coincidence in this country which is a racist country, which is gun country. Today I'm thinking of the Bernie Boston photograph Flower Power, of the Vietnam protestor placing carnations in the rifles of the National Guard, and wishing for a gesture as queer and simple. The protester in the photo was gay, you know, he went by Hibiscus and died of AIDS, which I am also thinking about today because (the government's response to) AIDS was a hate crime. Now we have a president who names us, the big and imperfectly lettered us, and here we are getting kissed on stoops, getting married some of us, some of us getting killed. We must love one another whether or not we die. Love can't block a bullet but neither can it be shot down, and love is, for the most part, what makes us— in Orlando and in Brooklyn and in Kabul. We will be everywhere, always; there's nowhere else for us, or you, to go. Anywhere you run in this world, love will be there to greet you. Around any corner, there might be two men. Kissing.

The scene changes Five hours later and I come into a room where a clock ticks. I find a pillow to muffle the sounds I make. I am engaged in taking away from God his sound. The pigeons somewhere above me, the cough a man makes down the hall, the flap of wings below me, the squeak of sparrows in the alley. The scratches I itch on my scalp, the landing of birds under the bay window out my window. All dull details I can only describe to you, but which are here and I hear and shall never give up again, shall carry with me over the streets of this seacoast city, forever; oh clack your metal wings, god, you are mine now in the morning. I have you by the ears in the exhaust pipes of a thousand cars gunning their motors turning over all over town. 6.15.58

Because you used to leaf through the dictionary, Casually, as someone might in a barber shop, and Devotedly, as someone might in a sanctuary, Each letter would still have your attention if not For the responsibilities life has tightly fit, like Gears around the cog of you, like so many petals Hinged on a daisy. That’s why I’ll just use your Initial. Do you know that in one treasured story, a Jewish ancestor, horseback in the woods at Yom Kippur, and stranded without a prayer book, Looked into the darkness and realized he had Merely to name the alphabet to ask forgiveness— No congregation of figures needed, he could speak One letter at a time because all of creation Proceeded from those. He fed his horse, and then Quietly, because it was from his heart, he Recited them slowly, from aleph to tav. Within those Sounds, all others were born, all manner of Trials, actions, emotions, everything needed to Understand who he was, had been, how flaws Venerate the human being, how aspirations return Without spite. Now for you, may your wife’s X-ray return with good news, may we raise our Zarfs to both your names in the Great Book of Life.

The cruel majority emerges! Hail to the cruel majority! They will punish the poor for being poor. They will punish the dead for having died. Nothing can make the dark turn into light for the cruel majority. Nothing can make them feel hunger or terror. If the cruel majority would only cup their ears the sea would wash over them. The sea would help them forget their wayward children. It would weave a lullaby for young & old. (See the cruel majority with hands cupped to their ears, one foot is in the water, one foot is on the clouds.) One man of them is large enough to hold a cloud between his thumb & middle finger, to squeeze a drop of sweat from it before he sleeps. He is a little god but not a poet. (See how his body heaves.) The cruel majority love crowds & picnics. The cruel majority fill up their parks with little flags. The cruel majority celebrate their birthday. Hail to the cruel majority again! The cruel majority weep for their unborn children, they weep for the children that they will never bear. The cruel majority are overwhelmed by sorrow. (Then why are the cruel majority always laughing? Is it because night has covered up the city's walls? Because the poor lie hidden in the darkness? The maimed no longer come to show their wounds?) Today the cruel majority vote to enlarge the darkness. They vote for shadows to take the place of ponds Whatever they vote for they can bring to pass. The mountains skip like lambs for the cruel majority. Hail to the cruel majority! Hail! hail! to the cruel majority! The mountains skip like lambs, the hills like rams. The cruel majority tear up the earth for the cruel majority. Then the cruel majority line up to be buried. Those who love death will love the cruel majority. Those who know themselves will know the fear the cruel majority feel when they look in the mirror. The cruel majority order the poor to stay poor. They order the sun to shine only on weekdays. The god of the cruel majority is hanging from a tree. Their god's voice is the tree screaming as it bends. The tree's voice is as quick as lightning as it streaks across the sky. (If the cruel majority go to sleep inside their shadows, they will wake to find their beds filled up with glass.) Hail to the god of the cruel majority! Hail to the eyes in the head of their screaming god! Hail to his face in the mirror! Hail to their faces as they float around him! Hail to their blood & to his! Hail to the blood of the poor they need to feed them! Hail to their world & their god! Hail & farewell! Hail & farewell! Hail & farewell!

’inept’ipéecwise cilaakt: (I am wanting to) hold a wake / (I am wanting to) hold the body Had this body been made of nothing but its bright skeleton & autumn- blown skin I would shut my eyes into butterfly wings on a mapped earth. Had the gods even their own gods, I could re- learn the very shape of my face in a puddle of sky- colored rain. Extinction is to the hands as the lips are to the first gesture the tongue carves into the slick mouth just before prayer. In every way the world fails to light the soft inner machine & marrow of the bones in motion — I imagine smudging my tongue along a wall like the chest I dare to plunge in- to, the Braille of every node blooming out as if the first day- light of wintered snowfall. This night — like any fleshed boy I dream of a lyre strung with the torn hair of hímiin& in place of my dried mouth — there it is. Whispers in the blue-black dark after c’álalal c’álalal reach out toward my teeth to strum this wilting instrument. & once awake, I’m holding its frame to build a window back in- to the world. Had this body been held after all these years, I would enter you to find my frozen self & touch. Like the gutted animal we take in offering. & live.

I’ve tracked myself from day to day how many steps through a field of snow how many hours have I slept what have I eaten what did I burn calories or cigarettes what birds have poured through Bellefontaine where mausoleums bear the names of Busch and Brown Lemp and Spink on marble white as winter endive when I can read my title clear to mansions in the skies

God love you Dana my lover lost in the horde on this Friday night, 500 men are moving up & down from the bath room to the bar. Remove this desire from the man I love. Who has opened the savagery of the sea to me. See to it that his wants are filled on California street Bestow on him lar- gesse that allows him peace in his loins. Leave him not to the moths. Make him out a lion so that all who see him hero worship his thick chest as I did moving my mouth over his back bringing our hearts to heights I never hike over anymore. Let blond hair burn on the back of his neck, let no ache screw his face up in pain, his soul is so hooked. Not heroin. Rather fix these hundred men as his lovers & lift him with the enormous bale of their desire. 6.20.58

I sit in Lees. At 11:40 PM with Jimmy the pusher. He teaches me Ju Ju. Hot on the table before us shrimp foo yong, rice and mushroom chow yuke. Up the street under the wheels of a strange car is his stash—The ritual. We make it. And have made it. For months now together after midnight. Soon I know the fuzz will interrupt, will arrest Jimmy and I shall be placed on probation. The poem does not lie to us. We lie under its law, alive in the glamour of this hour able to enter into the sacred places of his dark people, who carry secrets glassed in their eyes and hide words under the coats of their tongue. 6.16.58

Can’t stop eating you, movie-style extra butter microwave popcorn. Can’t stop watching you, rented movie about an immigrant family from Lebanon. Can't help but weep, seeing the family wave goodbye to relatives in the Beirut airport—tear salt mixing with popcorn salt. Can’t hide my mess, myself from the friend beside me. Can’t answer his question,Does it remind you of your family, leaving China? I want to say,No, it’s completely different, which in many ways it is, but really I’m remembering what a writer friend once said to me,All you write about is being gay or Chinese—how I can’t get over that, & wonder if it’s true, if everything I write is in some way an immigrant narrative or another coming out story. I recall a recent poem, featuring fishmongers in Seattle, & that makes me happy—clearly that one isn’t about being gay or Chinese. But then I remember a significant number of Chinese immigrants live in Seattle & how I found several of the Pike Place fishmongers attractive when I visited, so I guess that poem's about being gay & Chinese, too. So I say to my friend,I'm not sure,& keep eating the popcorn. Thank god we chose the giant “family size” bag. Can’t stop the greasy handfuls, noisy mouthfuls. Can’t eat popcorn quietly. Later, during my friend’s smoke break, still can’t come up with a worthy response to his radical queer critique of homonormativity, of monogamy, domesticity, front lawn glory.These middle-class gays picking out garden gnomes, ignoring all the anti-racist work of decolonization that still needs to be done—don’t you think they’re lame? I say,Yeah, for sure, but think, marriage, house, 1 kid, 2 cats—how long have I wanted that? Could I give that up in the name of being a real queer? Probably can’t. & it’s like another bad habit I can’t give up. Eating junk, can’t. Procrastinating, can’t. Picking scabs, can’t. Being friends with people who challenge my beliefs & life plans, can’t. Reading & believing in Ayn Rand, though? Can, Brief phase as a Christian because I liked the cross as an accessory? Can. WWJD? Can. White heterosexist patriarchy? Can. America . . . can’t. Can’t help but think, when we get back to the movie, how it was my father’s decision to move here, not my mother’s, just like the parents on screen. Can’t stop replaying my mother’s walk onto the plane, carrying me, though I was getting too old for it, holding me, my face pressed into her hair, her neck, as she cried, quietly—can’t stop returning to this scene of leaving, can’t stop pausing the scene, thinking I’ve left something out again, something else my mother told me. Like my grandmother at the airport, how she saw my small body so tied to my mother’s body, & still she doubted, she had to say,You better not lose him.& my mother kept that promise till she couldn’t, she lost me, in the new country, but doesn’t that happen to all parents & their children, one way or another, & don’t we need to get lost? Lost, dizzy, stubbly, warm, stumbling, whoa—that’s what it felt like, 17, kissing a boy for the first time. Can’t forget it. Can’t forget when my mother found out & said, This would never have happened if we hadn’t come to this country. But it would’ve happened, every bit as dizzy, lost, back in China. It didn’t happen because of America, dirty Americans. It was me, my need. My father said,You have to change, but I couldn’t, can’t give you up, boys & heat, scruff & sweet. Can’t get over you. Trying to get over what my writer friend said,All you write about is being gay or Chinese. Wish I had thought to say to him,All you write about is being white or an asshole. Wish I had said,No, I already write about everything— & everything is salt, noise, struggle, hair, carrying, kisses, leaving, myth, popcorn, mothers, bad habits, questions.