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About me young careless feet Linger along the garish street; Above, a hundred shouting signs Shed down their bright fantastic glow Upon the merry crowd and lines Of moving carriages below. Oh wonderful is Broadway — only My heart, my heart is lonely. Desire naked, linked with Passion, Goes trutting by in brazen fashion; From playhouse, cabaret and inn The rainbow lights of Broadway blaze All gay without, all glad within; As in a dream I stand and gaze At Broadway, shining Broadway — only My heart, my heart is lonely.

After Suji Kwock Kim 1 decorating the dead is among the most basic human instincts, to return the borrowed body & acknowledge Earth as maker & home. Neanderthals used antlers & flowers. Egyptians had pyramids with peasants buried in the walls they built. some niggas just get a pine box. hopefully you get a hole or a flame. some only get a cold cabinet in the morgue until somebody or nobody claims them as a loss. 2 a permanent fixture on my to-do list is research life insurance plans. pick a good one with a fair rate & enough money to buy a nice box. 3 everything gonna be all right this morning

I sit across the table from my partner in the atrium of the psychiatric holding facility our hands churched into our laps. We are not allowed to touch. The air between us thick as Perspex. They tell me all the ways this place resembles a prison. • Everything a sterile white so clean it could almost disinfect a memory. • In 1787, Jeremy Bentham conceived of what would become the most common prison design: the panopticon. Intended to control prisoners through the illusion that they are always under surveillance. • My partner tells their therapist they are afraid of taking their own life, that they balanced on a building’s edge, & three officers escort them from the room. • The first cop who ever handcuffed me [was my father] left me bound till my fingers blued. On the days when I can’t remember his face, he becomes the scent of vodka & zip ties the sound of cuffs & a bottle petaling into blades. • At the booking office they remove my glasses & the guards blur into a procession of fathers. • I bring my partner clothes & pads when the hospital decides to hold them longer, shove each shirt that could mark them as queer back inside the closet & shut it [like a mouth]. • The word faggot scrawls across the jail guard’s lips like graffiti. • When I visit my partner they insist on staying inside the sky above the patio cordoned off  with chicken wire. • I plead my sentence down in exchange for: my face, my prints, my DNA & ten years probation. When I see a cop, I fear even my breath criminal & when my therapist asks me if  I’m suicidal I lie. Perhaps both are a kind of  surveillance. • Tear gas floods the street, sharpens water to a blade hidden in the orbit of my eye. & just like this, a squad car remakes my sadness a weapon. If my partner snaps cuffs around my wrists [& I asked for this] have they also weaponized my desire? • A woman in the facility tells my partner: I know what you are. Says: Sinner. Says: Anti-christ. My partner goads her on, babbles in false tongues & is confined to their room for safety. • Once, a cop dragged me into an alley & beat me like he knew exactly what I was. What does it say if sometimes when I ask my partner to hit me I expect his fist tightened in their throat, his voice bruising their tongue? • I am arrested & placed [in the men’s jail] in solitary confinement. They tell me this is protective custody. That they couldn’t afford the lawsuit if  I were killed. In this way, they tell me I am a woman only when I am no longer breathing. • The origin of the word prison is the Latin prehendere— to take. It follows, then, that to take your life is to prison the body beneath dirt. • [Historically, suicide is a criminal act]. • Balanced on a building’s edge, I imagine some permutation of  this moment where to fail at death would be a breach of my probation. • We both weep for the first time upon release when we see the sky. Pale blue sliced through with a single helix of razor wire & bordered in sterile white.

I butterflied Australian rack of lamb with shallots, garlic, parsley, butter, wine (some in the pan, some for the palate). Although the livestock loved in nursery rhyme avoided clumps of mint, it served my family nonetheless. I am no PETA zealot (leather jacket, handbag, wallet, shoes) but wonder if the deeds we do pursue us in the afterlife. Does the fleecy creature have a tenderable claim? My lambent mind considers our short lease on life, the oven hot. Am I to blame? Who gave thee such a tender voice? asked Blake. Myself am Hell. I watch the mutton bake.

December 13, 1993 John Gordon Boyd died on the birthday of three remarkable, and remarkably different, writers: Heinrich Heine, Kenneth Patchen, Ross McDonald John, too, was just as remarkable, blessed with an inherent “graciousness” and with extraordinary eyes & ears… I think of two texts on the grievous occasion of his death: “Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what I can touch, and look at. My Gods dwell in temples made with hands.” — Oscar Wilde, in De Profundis and two lines in Rainier Maria Rilke, John’s favorite poet, that say it all… Was tun Sie, Gott, Wenn ich bin st ü rbe? “What will you do, God, when I am dead?”

I have not disappeared. The boulevard is full of my steps. The sky is full of my thinking. An archbishop prays for my soul, even though we met only once, and even then, he was busy waving at a congregation. The ticking clocks in Vermont sway back and forth as though sweeping up my eyes and my tattoos and my metaphors, and what comes up are the great paragraphs of dust, which also carry motes of my existence. I have not disappeared. My wife quivers inside a kiss. My pulse was given to her many times, in many countries. The chunks of bread we dip in olive oil is communion with our ancestors, who also have not disappeared. Their delicate songs I wear on my eyelids. Their smiles have given me freedom which is a crater I keep falling in. When I bite into the two halves of an orange whose cross-section resembles my lungs, a delta of juices burst down my chin, and like magic, makes me appear to those who think I've disappeared. It's too bad war makes people disappear like chess pieces, and that prisons turn prisoners into movie endings. When I fade into the mountains on a forest trail, I still have not disappeared, even though its green façade turns my arms and legs into branches of oak. It is then I belong to a southerly wind, which by now you have mistaken as me nodding back and forth like a Hasid in prayer or a mother who has just lost her son to gunfire in Detroit. I have not disappeared. In my children, I see my bulging face pressing further into the mysteries. In a library in Tucson, on a plane above Buenos Aires, on a field where nearby burns a controlled fire, I am held by a professor, a general, and a photographer. One burns a finely wrapped cigar, then sniffs the scented pages of my books, scouring for the bitter smell of control. I hold him in my mind like a chalice. I have not disappeared. I swish the amber hue of lager on my tongue and ponder the drilling rigs in the Gulf of Alaska and all the oil-painted plovers. When we talk about limits, we disappear. In Jasper, TX you can disappear on a strip of gravel. I am a life in sacred language. Termites toil over a grave, and my mind is a ravine of yesterdays. At a glance from across the room, I wear September on my face, which is eternal, and does not disappear even if you close your eyes once and for all simultaneously like two coffins.

We won’t pretend we’re not hungry for distinction but what can ever distinguish us enough? This country, this language won’t last long, the race will die, later the cockroach, earth itself, and last this beer bottle: silicon fused by man, almost indestructible, like a soul: it will go spinning ever farther from the nearest thing until space, continually deepening, drowns in itself. Yet we keep a hungry eye on old schoolmates and everyone born in the year of our own birth, and spend the nights in ranting over them, their money, fashionable companions, pliant critics. To live just a little longer than they do: that would be triumph. Hence exercise and diets, and the squabble over who will write the history of this paradise of demons casting each other out.

With Donne, whose muse on dromedary trots, Wreathe iron pokers into true-love knots; Rhyme's sturdy cripple, fancy's maze and clue, Wit's forge and fire-blast, meaning's press and screw.

i Tell me it was for the hunger & nothing less. For hunger is to give the body what it knows it cannot keep. That this amber light whittled down by another war is all that pins my hand to your chest. i You, drowning between my arms — stay. You, pushing your body into the river only to be left with yourself — stay. i I’ll tell you how we’re wrong enough to be forgiven. How one night, after backhanding mother, then taking a chainsaw to the kitchen table, my father went to kneel in the bathroom until we heard his muffled cries through the walls. And so I learned that a man, in climax, was the closest thing to surrender. i Say surrender. Say alabaster. Switchblade. Honeysuckle. Goldenrod. Say autumn. Say autumn despite the green in your eyes. Beauty despite daylight. Say you’d kill for it. Unbreakable dawn mounting in your throat. My thrashing beneath you like a sparrow stunned with falling. i Dusk: a blade of honey between our shadows, draining. i I wanted to disappear — so I opened the door to a stranger’s car. He was divorced. He was still alive. He was sobbing into his hands (hands that tasted like rust). The pink breast cancer ribbon on his keychain swayed in the ignition. Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? I was still here once. The moon, distant & flickering, trapped itself in beads of sweat on my neck. I let the fog spill through the cracked window & cover my fangs. When I left, the Buick kept sitting there, a dumb bull in pasture, its eyes searing my shadow onto the side of suburban houses. At home, I threw myself on the bed like a torch & watched the flames gnaw through my mother’s house until the sky appeared, bloodshot & massive. How I wanted to be that sky — to hold every flying & falling at once. i Say amen. Say amend. Say yes. Say yes anyway. i In the shower, sweating under cold water, I scrubbed & scrubbed. i In the life before this one, you could tell two people were in love because when they drove the pickup over the bridge, their wings would grow back just in time. Some days I am still inside the pickup. Some days I keep waiting. i It’s not too late. Our heads haloed with gnats & summer too early to leave any marks. Your hand under my shirt as static intensifies on the radio. Your other hand pointing your daddy’s revolver to the sky. Stars falling one by one in the cross hairs. This means I won’t be afraid if we’re already here. Already more than skin can hold. That a body beside a body must make a field full of ticking. That your name is only the sound of clocks being set back another hour & morning finds our clothes on your mother’s front porch, shed like week-old lilies.

December 1789 When infant Reason first exerts her sway, And new-formed thoughts their earliest charms display; Then let the growing race employ your care Then guard their opening minds from Folly’s snare; Correct the rising passions of their youth, Teach them each serious, each important truth; Plant heavenly virtue in the tender breast, Destroy each vice that might its growth molest; Point out betimes the course they should pursue; Then with redoubled pleasure shall you view Their reason strengthen as their years increase, Their virtue ripen and their follies cease; Like corn sown early in the fertile soil, The richest harvest shall repay your toil.