I try to reach you by calling you “honey”
because I feel responsible for your decay. We are a select club of two
planning the end of the world in steps like jigsaw pieces
crawling toward a perfectly evil tableau montage picture
at the end.

I put your soft flesh in my mouth, coax you to rapture
make you a sandwich. Legs, fingers break off
who to fuck, who to eat. Cattle walk down the hall
oblivious to this religious movement we’ve started
in secret, you tell me you feel the weight of Armageddon
in the grooves in the floor, and every time the record needle skips.

pieces of God keep getting stuck in my hair
I keep trying to reach you through the grooves in the floor
wear a short skirt  at lunch.  There are too many mental checklists
to make, too many things to remember—
angels snap outside the window
bay like chained dogs
time is running out.

It’s easy for you to go home without me. It’s easy
for you to take my hand and say no, like I’m
some sort of wounded bird that wants to follow you to bed
white wings spread as if I really could go if I wanted to
but really, still struggling to deal with
so much impending solitude.

for days now, for weeks, there is no other place
that will have me. My heartache grows fainter
as we talk of my freedom, the places I should go
now that we’re through. There are people out there
just waiting for someone like me

you say, as I try to picture my white wings spread
carrying me to rooftop nests in Holland
fields of wild grain in Italy.

I am withering
under the burden of memory,
distract myself by trying to maintain
my fuckable parts.

I have forgiven the tiny guests
that left my body a disaster
but still send flowers
on my birthday, sometimes call.

Sometimes, when I’m sad,
I can feel their tiny hands on my skin
those ghost fingers that clutched at me
for more, always more
specters I miss more
than I can stand to admit.

Inside a nightmare of cold sweats and invisible centipedes
just like the first time we kicked together, watched Pat Buchanan on TV, mumbled
about how we were going to change the world as soon as we could
get up.

On another channel, we watched her body bent over, cruciform
I thought I remembered the girl from high school, I think I
sat behind her in some class or another. I think she was the one who first
introduced me to heroin, I say, wanting to impress you
with my elbow-rubbing, my important connections.
She took the cock in her mouth through the fuzzy waves of cable TV interference
and I could swear it was Pat Buchanan on the receiving end of that blowjob.

Heroin me, protection against the onslaught of millipedes, the sound bites
blasting eternal, shopping carts of ant and roach killer
I opened my heart to you. Woke to find this place empty of everything
and nothing, the words “junkie” and “nigger” scrawled across one wall. Small wounds
already closed cruciform on my arm, I thought I told you I didn’t like
to watch the news when I was high.

In my own way, I calm my personal desires in an ever-so-familiar pattern
minus intelligible thought, I am just another hole in the wall
with dirty fingernails.  If I knew sign language, we carry on
a surgeon-precise conversation.

Hypnotic stupor reflecting on my embarrassment you
were just being friendly and I am always curious and lonely. I climax
too quickly for most people, I explain, it’s tied to my insecurity, imagined
recriminations, the constant drip of the bathroom tap.

There is a hand between my legs, and self-doubt thick in the air
swollen to gargantuan proportions like a tampon ripe with gangrene
I don’t understand our relationship at all and I
can’t stand the way you look at me these days.