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Foil'd by our fellow-men, depress'd, outworn, We leave the brutal world to take its way, And, Patience! in another life , we say The world shall be thrust down, and we up-borne. And will not, then, the immortal armies scorn The world's poor, routed leavings? or will they, Who fail'd under the heat of this life's day, Support the fervours of the heavenly morn? No, no! the energy of life may be Kept on after the grave, but not begun; And he who flagg'd not in the earthly strife, From strength to strength advancing—only he, His soul well-knit, and all his battles won, Mounts, and that hardly, to eternal life.

At the gym, they told me I would not die, I would only get sexier, and I believed them. I spent my nights wondering if this was going to turn into something long-term, if this was what is meant by casual, or if this was just my annual catastrophic disappointment because if it wasn’t, then I would have to brace myself. I took my medication and looked at pictures of people who were not in love with me. I deleted their names from my cache, said hello to my cat over the phone, took more medication. Days passed. I learned it’s hard to measure your own increasing sexiness. I enlisted bystanders. I passed mirrors and pretended they were not mirrors, but clean windows, and I was not myself, I was a clean stranger. Some days I was sure she wanted to come home with me, and I had to let her down easy, through the window, like a priest. Once I’d been unleashed from thoughts of my own death I was free to be loved in the way I always knew I’d deserved: reciprocally, in Fiji, our bodies lithe and bronzed like gods, but at the same time I felt like a vampire, and none of my friends could relate. They were jealous of my book deal, my time spent at the ashram while they were here, suffering another winter, their unsexiness a flourescent sign that blinks all night.

Miss Bliss, once I thought I was endless since father was perpetual in his grade school of seedlings in cups, the overly loved pets, and recess while mother was the lipsticked dancing girl on the Steel Pier who would outstep Hitler. I was insufferable when I rolled the Volkswagen bus two times and lived with the snow chains like costumed jewels slung over me and the spare rolled away as in a folktale. The pact I made in the spinning instant said in my language of American boy, Put up or shut up, to God, the State Trooper who was kind and spoke of service and punishment and giving yourself away. Now, I’m alive through the agency of iron and contract work and appeals to the fallen—angel and dusk— but wet-winged and still without you, Miss Bliss, who took me inside where there was an ocean before which we were children. That calm, that fear, that witness of the two-thirds of everything else.

Within this narrow cell that I call "me", I was imprisoned ere the worlds began, And all the worlds must run, as first they ran, In silver star-dust, ere I shall be free. I beat my hands against the walls and find It is my breast I beat, O bond and blind!

No he is not an urn singer nor does he carry on rapport with negative forces within extinction he is the brush fire singer who projects from his heart the sound of insidious subduction of blank anomaly as posture of opaque density as ash he distanced from prone ventriloqual stammer from flesh & habit & drought the performer part poltergeist & Orisha part broken in-cellular dove part glance from floating Mongol bastions where the spires are butane where their photographic fractals are implanted with hypnosis because he allegedly embodies a green necrotic umber more like a vertical flash or a farad posing like a tempest in a human chromium palace therefore his sound a dazed simoom in a gauntlet a blizzard of birds burned at the touch of old maelstroms because he gives off the odour of storms this universal Orisha like a sun that falls from a compost of dimness out of de-productive hydrogen sums out of lightless fissures which boil outside the planet yes he sings at a certain pitch which has evolved beyond the potter’s field beyond a tragic hummingbird’s cirrhosis surmounting primeval flaw surmounting fire which forms in irreplaceable disjunction under certain formations of the zodiac he is listless he intones without impact his synodic revelations no longer of the law of measured palpable destinations because he sings in such a silence that even the Rishis can’t ignore as though the hollow power which re-arises from nothingness perpetually convinces like a vacuum which splits within the spinning arc of an intangible solar candle such power can never be confusedly re-traced because it adumbrates & blazes like a glossary of suns so that each viral drill each forge casts a feeling which in-saturates a pressure bringing to distance a hidden & elided polarity like a subjective skill corroded & advanced he sings beyond the grip of a paralytic nexus where blood shifts beyond the magnet of volume where the nerves no longer resonate inside an octagonal maze stung at its source by piranhas

Sei allem Abschied voran: half a line from Rilke’s Die Sonette an Orpheus as my motto, I rehearsed my elegiac art (“be in advance of all parting”) and won, I thought, with each song deeper, until I stood before the keeper in whom I’ve come to recognize myself.

Do not hang your head or clench your fists when even your friend, after hearing the story, says,My mother would never put up with that. Fight the urge to rattle off statistics: that, more often, a woman who chooses to leave is then murdered. The hundredth time your father says,But she hated violence, why would she marry a guy like that?—

Naked she lay, clasped in my longing arms, I filled with love, and she all over charms; Both equally inspired with eager fire, Melting through kindness, flaming in desire. With arms, legs, lips close clinging to embrace, She clips me to her breast, and sucks me to her face. Her nimble tongue, love’s lesser lightning, played Within my mouth, and to my thoughts conveyed Swift orders that I should prepare to throw The all-dissolving thunderbolt below. My fluttering soul, sprung with the pointed kiss, Hangs hovering o’er her balmy brinks of bliss. But whilst her busy hand would guide that part Which should convey my soul up to her heart, In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er, Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore. A touch from any part of her had done ’t: Her hand, her foot, her very look's a cunt. Smiling, she chides in a kind murmuring noise, And from her body wipes the clammy joys, When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?” She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due; Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?” But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive, To show my wished obedience vainly strive: I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive. Eager desires confound my first intent, Succeeding shame does more success prevent, And rage at last confirms me impotent. Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn, Applied to my dear cinder, warms no more Than fire to ashes could past flames restore. Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry, A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie. This dart of love, whose piercing point, oft tried, With virgin blood ten thousand maids has dyed, Which nature still directed with such art That it through every cunt reached every heart— Stiffly resolved, ’twould carelessly invade Woman or man, nor ought its fury stayed: Where’er it pierced, a cunt it found or made— Now languid lies in this unhappy hour, Shrunk up and sapless like a withered flower. Thou treacherous, base deserter of my flame, False to my passion, fatal to my fame, Through what mistaken magic dost thou prove So true to lewdness, so untrue to love? What oyster-cinder-beggar-common whore Didst thou e’er fail in all thy life before? When vice, disease, and scandal lead the way, With what officious haste doest thou obey! Like a rude, roaring hector in the streets Who scuffles, cuffs, and justles all he meets, But if his king or country claim his aid, The rakehell villain shrinks and hides his head; Ev’n so thy brutal valor is displayed, Breaks every stew, does each small whore invade, But when great Love the onset does command, Base recreant to thy prince, thou dar’st not stand. Worst part of me, and henceforth hated most, Through all the town a common fucking post, On whom each whore relieves her tingling cunt As hogs on gates do rub themselves and grunt, Mayst thou to ravenous chancres be a prey, Or in consuming weepings waste away; May strangury and stone thy days attend; May’st thou never piss, who didst refuse to spend When all my joys did on false thee depend. And may ten thousand abler pricks agree To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.

From the outset I hated the city of my ancestors. I was fearful I’d be put in the dungeon below the cathedral. The best example of the Romanesque a guide was saying in German      in English      in French where are buried eight German kings      four queens twenty-three bishops      four Holy Roman Emperors all of whom used this bishopric on the river as the seat of the kingdom. On the old gate at one end a clock told an ancient form of time. I sulked along behind my parents as the guide gave facts about the war with the Saracens      about the place where the Jews bathed about the child like me whose father the Peaceful having already produced an heir by his first marriage could marry      for love.

Piraeus Archeological Museum On the journey to the mundane afterlife, You travel equipped to carry on your trade: A bronze, small-toothed saw to make repairs, The stylus and the ink pot and the scraper, Wax tablets bound into a little book. Here is the tortoise shell for the cithara, Bored through with holes for strings, natural sound box. Here is the harp's wood triangle, all empty— The sheep-gut having long since decomposed Into a pure Pythagorean music. The beeswax, frangible with centuries, Has puzzled all your lyrics into silence. I think you were a poet of perfection Who fled still weighing one word with another, Since wax forgives and warms beneath revision.