The Earthquake Days

In the earthquake days I could not hear you over the din or it might have been the dinner bell but that’s odd because I’m usually the one cooking if not dinner then a plan to build new fault lines through the dangerous valley. I can’t give you an answer right now because I’m late for my 
resurrection, the one where I step into my angel offices and fuck the sun senseless. That eclipse last week? Because of me. You’re welcome. The postman rattles up with your counter offer and I’m off to a yoga class avoiding your call yes like the plague because son you can read in the dark and I have no hiding place left. You know me too well and you know it. We walk hand in hand down the hill into the Castro avoiding the nudist protest not because we are afraid but because we already know all about this city, its engineered 
foundations, the earthquake-proofed buildings, the sea walls. No tempest will catch us unaware while we claim our share of the province of penumbral affections. You have no reason to trust me but I swear I lie down in this metal box as it thunders and looks inside my brain. I am terrified nothing is wrong because otherwise how will I rewrite the maps unmoored a deep sea a moor a cosmonaut Who needs saving more than the one who forgot how the lazy cartographer mislabeled his birthplace as Loss? Riding the bus out to the end of the lines and back I collect trash for art, oil spill, spent forest, the mind is at work and everything is at stake. I demand statehood for my states of mind, senators for my failure, my disappointment, the slander and my brain unmapped reveals no explanation for danger the ground untamed. I make paintings of nothing and stand before them like mirrors. I recently became a man but I do not want to let go of my weakness, instead want to meet God in heaven and in long psychotropic odes have Him send me again digging in the dirt to unleash tantric animal governors to lay down the orgasmic law twice skewered and miserable in the old photographs, miserable in my body, huddled next to my mother, recently permed and aglow so unaware of what is about to hit her. I am the answer to Bhanu’s question: “Who is responsible for the suffering of your mother?” and so sick I considered that sickness could bring us closer and Shahid and Allen in heaven slap me silly because they want me to know that this world is worth its trembling. At the next table over a mother tries to reconcile her bickering sons. I have no brother but the one I invent has always got my back, he drowns out the mullahs so my mother can hear me finally. In a different book Jesus never suffered, never was flogged or died went whole into heaven without passion. Shall I then deny myself passport through the stark places unsalvageable, imagine it, the Mother of Sorrows did never grieve in the new season trees smell of semen and the tectonic plates make their latest explosive move: to transubstantiate my claim by unveiling this city down to its stone. Everyone I know wants to douse the hungry flames, flee the endless aftershocks, unravel every vexing question. You owe me this witness. I owe you the fire.