Retrospectives

Smoke-eyed lover, mouth
smeared with irresistible fruit, hair
bleached to the bone,
patched traveler
in yoke,
in underwear bearing
the skidmarks of my rectal disasters,
I have pissed into the tin hole
of the book of women
in a hundred sordid towns.
There, in graffiti,
in words barred
and soldered together
like second-hand headboards of Hollywood beds,
I hear my name repeated: kid, poet, pig, my best…

One struggle is finished:
we are prone
to be the bodies of ourselves, rising
on struggling frogkicks
in the light of God,

beamed up,

gigged!

So, but for this quaintly ribbed flesh, puffed
organs of oozing brown
and spitting
purple, residue-makers, under the sail of skin,
this transporter of riches, plasma
and odors, belly-hold of shitloads
from the world’s markets,

and intricate Arabian urinary
pipeline
laid inobtrusively in
along the dazzling, hot folds,

we would be two mating boneheaps, mantis-
fossil in the tall dying grass,
bone on bone on
bone in the evaporating rock.