Month: June 2010

When all methods have been tried, all highways travelled,
all sentences written, all messages sent
To get a handgun from somewhere and just do it
That’d be my method of choice

Practise on a target first to get the feel
Put on my long black coat and boots
Listen to one more song, sing one more dream
Paint my nail one last time

Have one more shot of whiskey
Read one more poem
Have one last orgasm, one final useless fantasy
Then just load it and shut my mouth

Shut my mouth around the barrel
Point it at this brain behind its dense bone wall
Steady it with both these      wasted      hands
Think again

Think again of that thing I just can’t seem to get
Think again of that thing I just can’t seem to get
Think again of that place I just can’t seem to stay
Can’t seem to stay

Think again of that place I just can’t seem to stay
Think again of that place I just can’t seem to stay
Think again of that thing I just can’t seem to      give
And just click the trigger back

Make a mess on the wall that I won’t have to clean up
Go join all the other dead poets at their eternal reading
Go drink their eternal wine and      take up smoking at last

Sit with me under my kind of trees
as dusk falls and lights come on
and the band warms up
under my kind of trees
Sit with me

Sit with me under my kind of trees
as dusk falls and lights come on
and the band warms up
under my kind of trees
Sit with me

Sit with me under my kind of trees
as the night goes on and on and on
and on and on and on…
Sit with me

Sit with me under my kind of trees
as the night goes on and on and on
and on and on and on…
Sit with me

She says
She says these wounds and scars
She says these wounds and scars will make you a strong wise woman
and she should know

Meet my eyes and say my name
as that darkness melts and the dawn declaims
and the sun makes light of the two of us
Say my name

The women give me photographs and poems named after mine
and beautiful cloth-bound notebooks

When we sat on the stage steps
you with your camera
me with my silence
and leaned on each other
I played with your irresistible hair
and I thought
people will think we are lovers
But I didn’t edit my actions
Being true to oneself, even in the light, is more important
than anything people might think

I like white boys
I like them
translucent

the black t-shirt sleeve-edge, white bicep
curve
the cool nape, tide-touch
hairline
the black sock, thin sparse-haired
ankle
the Cleopatra-milk-bath hands, stark knuckles
and nails

the diffident fingerprints
he puts on me

the fierce streak of
black
inside him

(First published on Fringe Gallery’s blog)

His piss in the toilet,
his siren sweat in the air:
gone, in the light.

In the sink, a glass, his lick
dried on it
somewhere.

In the open bin, on the tissues and plastic,
two knotted condoms, 3am, 4am.
He wouldn’t stay till morning, add a third.
He wouldn’t sleep
beside me.

Naked in my purple bathrobe
I kneel on the vinyl beside the bin,
pick out the condoms, hold
them in my fingers, his come,
no longer white, now cloudy-clear and thin,
his sperm dying.

He was so hot.
From the drawer by the sink
I get the big scissors and, not knowing
what will happen, make a small cut
near the end of one condom. His come rushes
onto my hand, cool, amniotic,
albumen-clingy, thin, slightly
distasteful. I wouldn’t lick it,
now.

The kitchen is chill, silent, scentless.
I raise my skin, inhale:
clean cut grass and musk
tainted with latex.
I can’t smell him, only
an abstraction.

The danger I couldn’t touch
runs over my hand into the bin.

Before I can do anything
I have to wash it off me.