la desnudez es la materia del desborde

de tu boca llena de pájaros

pueblo despojado decir pueblo es ponerse en peligro

una navaja en la lengua

You are that same boil of a man from my friend’s 7th birthday party who found me hiding under a table and pinched my chin between your hot ham fingers. I have learned since that there are many of you. At la frutería, I am moving quickly to get away from one who is following me.

(tantas tercas palabras que repito y repito)

A tenor de todas estas soledades acumulativas
¿qué ámbitos aducen, qué argumentan
tantas tercas palabras que repito y repito?

a Mayra que me hizo llorar con su poema

Más mar el mar
y más muerte la muerte desde sus orillas
20 Ulises
y una misma añoranza que estalla bajo el agua
20 claveles rojos

Consecuencia del decir es el decir

a pesar de la redundancia Sancho

que hay situaciones que sólo las puede crear el lenguaje

yo te puedo decir ahora por ejemplo

Turns out I looked all wrong. That little hill is a process
where routine trees happen. They’re obvious

without their leaves but go with a certainty
that can only be called

I can
shoot a coin
fixed to a tree

with sap, restrain
a pig by the corner
of its eye socket,

We pass a joint to one another under the cover

of hoodies & hairnets, our bodies perched on

Popeye’s porch who’s on the corner cracking jokes,

clinking bottles w/other boys in baggy black clothes

una mujer de grandes recursos, yo

maraca que sacude sus semillas secas en esquinas

de guetos y cafetines fetiches desfigurando el alfabeto

porque no me queda otra vía para llegar

En esta casa sin hombres no conocemos los privilegios del libre albedrío. Las tareas se dividen democráticamente en el calendario. No hay espacio para cambios ni discusiones; a todas nos toca sudar la supervivencia.

When I’m doing it right, this life

is sweeter and more lethal

than I could ever have imagined.

It's good to know how to be hated

It’s my birthday and I don’t want to go anywhere

with you. Two years ago

someone proposed to me on this day, saying

In my dreams

yours is the whitest thigh

whiter still in August

against your bulk

your tanning brawn

1

The old jazz man at the Crawford Grill sits

at the back of the club; three o’clock

in the day, just killing time. He spits

on the sun-cooked concrete. “Hell,”

he says, “Look at that.” He points

The slums flood this morning,

pandan, typhus, & what collapses DNA

overwhelming the barricades.

Under his tree, tools in rough orbit,

I remember the warp of

trees on the windshields

of cars passing through

the masculine cemetery.

From Book 2 of The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood)

Barnabas Collins steps through a secret
panel in the wall of Josette’s bedroom:

proof for me in 1968 that a vampire
lived inside the walls of my own house;

Love, I’ve thought up how we should die.

Consider the ancient froghoppers

just unearthed in fossil form, winged,

doubled, held in stone for as many years

Dying is such an irresponsible thing for a father to do.

People do not laugh at our dead dad jokes.

Dying is easy, but comedy is hard. ­­

You make art about elision and absence,

the unsayable and the image erased.

What else is there to offer, god, but the body

and everything in it? What’s mine’s

for mining. The wooden cages do not warn one another

of danger. I’m burning means I’m burning