Saturday, February 18, 2012

The Senate Apartments II



The Senate Apartments II
—for Coleman Dowell
__________________

Male memory—Undid me, did me in Did me down and dirty Assuredly it led me—To the edge of poetic Profluent precipices

Violet gent quills—Foreskin fountain fondue Making up for lost-time The first time I met you—A sudden warmth a thaw Unrestrained deformity love Like murder held back—By an upstream blocked The sin submerges itself

A prolonged stillness—Approximating death even then Before the car crash What are the chances—That words just fall outta Thin air into our laps? Why are some of us—Receptive to full-blown Seen and syntax? What are the chances—That language is just a Perpetual-motion mobile?

A string of words—Smoothing out the motions That seem to make things move? I’m temped to Say—That I make the Selections Of work on a page But it’s more like—Pretending to know what’s On the other side of the moon The smell of your clothes—your tough lean jerky body Sleeping late in bed

Your svelte carnality—Streamline moderne male beauty At the Senate Apartments Your intuitive recognition—And instinctive rejection Of my queer art deco eye Your later car crash—Thus making you a young sailor Home from the Land of the Dead The Senate as a Sinking Ship—A harbor of ferries Coming home

Freighters unloading themselves The only enemy being—Winter and rough weather Icy streets and highways A patch work of quilts—Around us palms, pyramids Art deco Egypto zigzags Watery Beginnings—Surrounded by Nile deserts Heat mirages of Sphinxes

A warm reeky kitchen—Steeped in pork, coffee, yeast smells For a hungry night prowler like me The care with which the architects—In the lathe and plaster and glass blocks Joining genders, jewelry, style Morphing the morbid past—Streamlining the moon’s high tide Amatory to Aphrodite again

A mysterious effeminizing—The night squeezing the Wisteria Billy the Kid into young King Tut A dread troubling ambuscading—A fear of losing it within the walls A gentle moth’s sewing room Only youths and soft heartaches—Give tenacity to the illusion that That power of the poem could become Visible at will

The Senate sometimes a Ship—Cartouche with storm, other times Hanging suspended like a wax carving A secret door to Pharaoh’s tomb—Sometimes feeling Magician’s stillness Pulse of young students in bed The Senate lays suspended—Within the glassy globe of time Fused eternity of land and sea

Floating like a life raft—Off the coast of Wherever In the Great Sea of Tranquility À trois with bulky buboes—The size of lovers groins and axilla Enjoying Saturday night nuances Was it your distillate darkness—Strength of night’s untapped source That corrupted me so much with love?

Gone my Beatrice boyfriend?—All these years without you A long drawn out no-return trip to Elba I search for you in the past again—The corridors of language thru the spectrum Of worms and words and maimed tattoos I’ve struggled with your tongue—Halfway down my throat all the way Down to my curled toes

I saved you and yet you did me in—Your words, your smile, delivered in The heat of the moment by moonlight I became witness to reborn love—The simple days after your car crash Nursing your ass back to consciousness The specter of the oldest murder—Hanging in the air around me much
More than just literary hearsay

It was more like “hidden bait”—The love of Cain for his brother Abel East of Eden tasting the Forbidden Fruit The Biblicist past restoring distrust once again—Devoting myself to bringing you back to life Only to indulge in forbidden Love once again? Our bodies knit together with the same—

Sperm and slime tainted all over again My lips gemmed with pearls of your cum The only anecdote to—The irreversibility of history—The faculty of forgiveness this time around This time around Coughenour’s tragic Abel—To my simpering cloying Cain envy and East of Eden serpentine sexual jealousy Hardly pearls of wisdom even before swine—Spouting these pretentious and demeaning Snotty tidbits of Slimy Supposed Scholarship—sitting here alone in the Senate penthouse tonight

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