478 Identity poems

When he wakes up out of sleep, the brown boy remembers two things: his white man calls and breaks the groans of Kevin Bacon, naked and writhing in pain on a hard and wet black street. Bacon has been beaten with broken bottles and has had his chest smashed in with a large flaming couch section. A mob of whites poured gasoline all over his chiseled stomach and then lit him afire. Brad Pitt lay next to him, his stomach breathless and glistening in the flame’s light. The brown boy knows this is somewhere between movie and dream, staring at each stomach; but more importantly, he knows that despite the fire, the bodies did not burn. They did not char or turn black. They simply shined in sweat. The brown boy will commit to his memory, most, Brad Pitt’s dying, and how he eventually turned over on his stomach, his penis turned down and scrape fucking the street—Brad Pitt ejaculating and on fire, the liquid shooting out of him as he looked up, staggered to his feet to let out something between groaning and laughter out to the black sky. Though Pitt had been beaten with bottles and wood, it was not clear where he was hurt, only that he was a screaming surface, dripping with lit gasoline and semen. As the brown boy ponders this surface, the white man has chosen to phone his brown boy. Their first conversation of the day is bound by this scene—and dutifully, for the white man, he wants to start from the beginning: Brad Pitt and Kevin Bacon are in a boxing ring in the middle of a football field. They are both wearing white boxer shorts, no gloves, and about to perform a dance routine. I am standing next to them, looking at Brad Pitt’s hair flop down over his face. He smiles at me before the music starts. From everywhere, broken glass bottles hurl at their bodies, and they are splashed with gasoline. We are also in a dark alley lit by fire. The two are still standing, looking over at me, though I can’t tell who is smiling. I only know Brad Pitt winks at me while Kevin Bacon is on the street, writhing as a large white flaming couch section is smashed onto his chest. My mother was dead in the dream. I was looking through a dense stash of clothes in a cabinet. All of them were soiled, and none of the clothes were hers. I remember holding a pair of purple and green Speedos that were woven to a pair of matching polyester tennis shorts. These shorts were my father’s. I remember my mother making all of his tennis shorts. I also remember pulling out a pair of long sweatpants that were much too large for my mother and holding them up as crumbs fell from the legs. I tried to smell them, wanting to think of her alive. What the brown boy doesn’t say is that he wondered, in the dream, how his father was getting through this—living alone with only her smell left behind. Or how he pulled the sweatpants up to his nose and mouth, absorbing the whole of her scent through his body. Without revealing his father’s grief or his own, the brown boy breathes in the smell of Giorgio mixed with eleven years of shifts at the convalescent home, and gives the white man what he thought he wanted. He quickly shot to the end, where Brad Pitt grinds his fat cock in the pavement, the curve of it pushing down bent and spewing semen into the street. Kevin Bacon stands up and groans, laughing as his bowels leak from his stomach. I was thinking about that before you called. The brown boy knows the white man wants to hear the brown boy rise from sleep, hear the spill from his head in the morning without saying a word. Though this morning, to this dream, the white man has two responses: He calls the dream bizarre and says nothing about the brown boy’s mother, only I feel sorry for Brad Pitt.

That there are things that can never be the same about my face, the houses, or the sand, that I was born under the sign of the sheep, that like Abraham Lincoln I am serious but also lacking in courage, That from this yard I have been composing a great speech, that I write about myself, that it’s good to be a poet, that I look like the drawing of a house that was pencilled by a child, that curiously, I miss him and my mind is not upon the Pleaides, that I love the ocean and its foam against the sky, That I am sneezing like a lion in this garden that he knows the lilies of his Nile, distant image, breakfast, a flock of birds and sparrows from the sky, That I am not the husband of Cassiopeia, that I am not the southern fish, that I am not the last poet of civilization, that if I want to go out for a walk and then to find myself beneath a bank of trees, weary, that this is the life that I had, That curiously I miss the sound of the rain pounding on the roof and also all of Oakland, that I miss the sounds of sparrows dropping from the sky, that there are sparks behind my eyes, on the radio, and the distant sound of sand blasters, and breakfast, and every second of it, geometric, smoke from the chimney of the trees where I was small, That in January, I met him in a bar, we went home together, there was a lemon tree in the back yard, and a coffee house where we stood outside and kissed, That I have never been there, curiously, and that it never was the same, the whole of the island, or the paintings of the stars, fatherly, tied to sparrows as they drop down from the sky, O rattling frame where I am, I am where there are still these assignments in the night, to remember the texture of the leaves on the locust trees in August, under the moonlight, rounded, through a window in the hills, That if I stay beneath the pole star in this harmony of crickets that will sing, the bird sound on the screen, the wide eyes of the owl form of him still in the dark, blue, green, with shards of the Pacific, That I do not know the dreams from which I have come, sent into the world without the blessing of a kiss, behind the willow trees, beside the darkened pansies on the deck beside the ships, rocking, I have written this, across the back of the sky, wearing a small and yellow shirt, near the reptile house, mammalian, no bigger than the herd, That I wrote the history of the war waged between the Peloponnesians and the south, that I like to run through shopping malls, that I’ve also learned to draw, having been driven here, like the rain is driven into things, into the ground, beside the broken barns, by the railroad tracks, beside the sea, I, Thucydides, having written this, having grown up near the ocean.

Metaphor     metaphor     my pestilential aesthetic A tsunami powers through     my mother’s ruins Delta     delta     moist loins of the republic Succumb to the low-lying succubus     do! Flagpole     flagpole     my father’s polemics A bouquet of     fuck-u-bastard flowers Fist me     embrace me     with your phantom limbs Slay me     with your slumlord     panegyrics Flip over     so I can see your pastoral mounts Your sword     slightly parting     from the scabbard Girl skulls     piled like fresh-baked loaves A foul wind     scours my mother’s cadaver Ornamental     Oriental     techno     impresarios I am your parlor rug     your chamber bauble Love me     stone me     I am all yours Pound     Pound     my father’s Ezra Freedom     freedom     flageolet-tooting   girls Dancing     on the roof     of the maquiladoras

This is the body of, waiting to turn on. graced with a little tremor, a little-known form, a fibrous hook, a flimsy lever that makes the jar work a lever and a clasp :voila. The pathetic filofax unfurls, the owl describes; on air; makes an apse; lopes left off the phonepole, woodenly. we rise above the wind park, commemorially. our whorled fossil, pinned open. our emergency kit holds aspirin. digitalis. adrenalin-in-in.

Into my stomach an explosion of stars where I rely on myself, my government name, bony letters of fingers that tunnel your bisected heart, skyward with dark. Parasites bed my inner lining— Am I not the rubberized universe? I am its buffer and get to name things for what they are, who they serve—what order. A plural centipede burrows outbound, crawls the spine of my hand, tells my pencil to move along, give out lead. Months of illness do that to a puppet, gnaw at her strings, place moths on her neighbors, blend them with gypsies who live the treetops uprooted. Dare the deliberately happy to butterfly the gnarled roots of life— That we pass too many pounds of flesh uncut. Too much genius hermitted in stereo. The round tables forgetting their bird seed. Clovers push luck to surround these hollow legs. Why no windows on the sides of houses? Why no flames beneath stones that burn? Why do all minutes lead the blue carp and black eel now? We’ll be passing through heaven in a split pea shell, emptied of light, hard as effusive green ore the blood corrupts daily, within and without.

Barbie Chang’s tears are the lights of the city that go off on off on the men walking around the city move but Barbie Chang doesn’t she cannot promote herself if she had legs she would stop begging if she had a head she would stop her own wedding but the city has no extra bedding it is not ready yet the maids are still making beds Barbie Chang is still making things up there are always storms long arms drinks with pink umbrellas because they know she is confused like a seahorse light avoids her town on the map B2 C4 she wants to be used she doesn’t want to be with you it is morning again and Barbie Chang is already mourning the men the night men who are always right who never write back she prefers to sleep on her back so she can see the eyes of her attackers in the morning a bed with questions with her depression on each side two small holes from knees

Back when I used to be Indian I am standing outside the pool hall with my sister. She strawberry blonde. Stale sweat and beer through the open door. A warrior leans on his stick, fingers blue with chalk. Another bends to shoot. His braids brush the green felt, swinging to the beat of the jukebox. We move away. Hank Williams falls again in the backseat of a Cadillac. I look back. A wind off the distant hills lifts my shirt, brings the scent of wounded horses.

First sew yourself into a pom pom mushroom Strut across the thirstland past faerie lights Shout complaints inside volcanic mancaves Scout for the last unlocated spring of ylem Then plait a cottage out of kestrel fluff Stir potato eyes into a vat of dislocated feelings Write a luculent novel five winters long Till dismay ferments enough nuclear energy to power Your moon buggy beyond the nacaret fields Stopping only to gather the pollen of the Umbiferous True Then plunge over cliffs sporting moth wings Dropping to the bottommost of the besprinkled sea And make your way up through the rain shadow On two cat feet in hostile territory All the while you compose a callithumpian song To nail a ritual within the astrobleme So bend dragons and constellate your enemies Fox on your shoulder spend a month sun-grazing A hundred hawks exploding before your stride Which will bring you luck on this godawful day You must make a new life by yourself like all Lurching tellurians stuck in eviternity

I took back the night. Wrested it from the Chinese, many of  whom were shorter than me. Two billion outstretched Chinese hands, give or take a few thousand amputees. A cheap knockoff, the night proved to be —Nokla not Nokia on the touchscreen. Well, even Old Peng gotta eat, Confucius say. Or maybe that was Cassius Clay. In me, folks, a movable object meets a resistible force. I haven’t worked a day since the accident of   birth. Born of  woman, my father the same. Make love then war. I’ll bring round the car. These children that I spit on are immune to my consultations. I’ll have none myself. It isn’t (Write it!) a fiasco. I am small, I contain platitudes.

In Los Angeles airport I sit stunned by the English, letters harsh things with no stories I know. The food smells dead, metal forks and knives set for making war against food. I am undone and done again, broken off from narratives of birth and being, of limits broken by the genius of slaves. I stand here where I was born, and the masks wait for me.