24
Pin them beneath truckloads of Scripture’s overburden,
the broken rock and muck they’ve made of mountains
and human hope. All heaven’s day let rats gnaw
their innards’ viscous velvet throbbing, then, like
the vaunted Promethean liver, let their lives grow
back each night, ready to be ripped out on the morrow.
Here’s the Paradise of Desire,
where every man I want
lies down for me. Let the country boys unpeel
their flannel shirts, pull off their cowboy boots, their
inopportune heterosexuality. Let infinity be black goatees,
armpit musk, thick shoulders aswirl with tattoos. Let timelessness
be bourbon-and-biscuit bellies, beefy pecs dark with fur.
Let Chris, stripped to the waist, roped to a corner chair,
cowboy hat cocked over his eyes, sob gratitude around his bit,
rock and struggle, sweat and drool. Let lean and naked Tim,
all night bound and gagged in bed beside me, rub his broad
back against my chest, nipples harden beneath my fingers
as he tightly rides my slide. Let him rouse sunrise
with kidnapped impatience, ass-grinding ache to be taken again,
fingers fumbling my belly hair, insatiate cloth-muffled moans.
Not the question to ask, Christian.
Clearly not the question.
The Tim CD’s over. On the last leg
Of I-75, wind whips off the pamphlet’s
possibilities. Domesticity, justice, desire,
oh, yes, certainly. Here’s all we deserve. Here’s
76, the exit for Berea. Mist lifts off
the mind-hills. The morning glory, toothless
mouth, collapses into itself. Heaven begs
the question: what then is damned?
Living in fragments while seeing in distance
a clearly conceived whole. It smells
like smoke in here, Room 234 of the Holiday Motel.
I stretch out on the bed wide enough for three,
watch this fancied prism in the window dangle
and turn, splintering today’s light into separate selves.