When you move, dark bits of your life

are shaken into light. A Polaroid, receipts

from a place you’ve “never been,” a marble—

the midnight attic of your choices.

Such labels sink me like a stone

so I drive away with you

to “work on our relationship”

as naked as the law allows.

‍

Still, the spiral narrows deeper in

flaying me of adjectives.

Being not myself confers strange powers,

only a couple of which

I ever discern.

But I can see at night. That’s one.

All that is created

can be barely understood.

They say the big bang happened

when the devil told God to go fuck Himself.

‍

Be that as it may,

I need to find a fiction

we can agree on.

‍

This bridge,

this lonely crossing that I build for us.

‍

You can’t leave home

unless you have one.

And if your home is assembled poorly,

you will be defined

by what clings to you in your worst moments:

your anger your anchor.

‍

It’s freezing on the Avenue of the Giants.

The lightness

I thought would free me does no such thing.

Only desire returns me to a semblance,

only desire, like a tab of ecstasy,

stamps a smiley face on oblivion.

I worry your skin like a rosary.

Momentarily,

even the seals make sense and are in tune.

They sing: “As you learn, you teach.”

The past suddenly seems

rife with possibility. In the future,

I shall let my wordless heart

do all the talking.

‍

On the drive home,

I record the new names—

Arcadia, Eureka, Ukiah, and I remember

riding the LIRR when I was a kid,

hearing the magical spells chanted by the conductor—

Montauk, Patchogue, Massapequa—

‍

And when the train sometimes slowed,

I imagined jumping off unseen between

stations and walking into these strange towns,

leaving my parents behind,

a ten-year-old city boy

knocking on a Long Island door, saying,

“I am a citizen of the world, take me, rename me;

I’ll mow the lawn, do the dishes, wear the hand-me-downs,

whatever.”

‍

As each second passed, geography

would change my fate.

Every moment brought new towns, new families.

New lives.

Those were the days.

But I never did step off.

No, I don’t think I ever did.

Since you said you’d stay a month,

and stayed three hours;

I’ve not been entirely committed. Just

my heart

went on the lam, a soft fugitive,

hanging so low

in the Starbucks parking lot,

saying he’s at the office, a decaffeinated criminal,

my heart stole a muffin, bums change with a hard luck sign

at Hollywood and Vine, dials long-extinct 212 numbers,

shoots foul shots alone, compares notes with no one,

my heart

watches porn at the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel,

beats over fast,

gets disgusted with itself and overeats,

sips tequila through a vein he calls a straw;

kid’s stuff, victimless crimes in a tepid time,

but enough for the Authority

to take note.

‍

So—they want to commit my heart upstate

for observation. Who’s zooming who,

you may rightly ask. But they’re looking for

my heart

with a cute little Jarvik straightjacket.

My heart

in a fist-sized trench coat, smoking a cigarette like an artery,

on a nostalgic trip, watching carefree kids at a local

schoolyard,

a sad small man,

trying to find the beat that she skipped to,

then skipped like a broken record,

then skipped like a stone

on the water out of town.

‍

There, with his left ventricle pressed

against the fence unbored, watching infinite games

of rock paper scissors shoot, the Authority finds my heart

and places him under cardiac arrest,

shipping him asap upstate in a valentine’s-shaped ice chest—

where he is committed entirely, takes pills with meals,

bpm within target range, writes me in crayon

from a mandatory art class, requesting

his black and blue cardigan,

misses me, misses her,

writes poems halfway through,

and dedicates them to cities he’s never been to,

my heart

plotting his return to a world diminished

by her ineradicable presence.

‍

You dreamt you wrote something so good,

so ambivalent and destructive, so creative,

so lacking in morals or decency, or instruction,

so sad and so funny,

so useless and old,

so familiar and new,

so full of theft and power

‍

that they had to name a god after it.

‍

When you woke,

the page of your mind was bare

and the world was changed.

‍

The hole in my heart is emptied out.

He is gone for good,

the one who left so long ago.

Whom I chased through women and success,

lounging like a roman à clef

above this restlessness,

collecting attributes like dried leaves,

phone calls, sugar-covered memories—

it is not the hole that hurts,

but what you put in it, how you fill it,

the grade-school grammar of your loss.

And what is left is a whiff

of emptiness, past tense, italicized,

as irrelevant as that old man on a plane

back to gay Paris. As I, too,

become beside the point to myself, free,

doomed to start again, playing chicken

with oncoming identities,

learning lines, scratching lines to try to make sense

of unmarked ground.

‍

What I want to know is

what idiot

gave that fucking blind kid

a bow and arrow?

‍

A sound (what is that?) reminds me

of (what? I don’t know). These days

there is so much familiarity with something

I have no experience of. Like the internets or

whatever. As if—

I passed you on 77th and Broadway

decades ago, and you smiled at me

for no (every) reason, laughed even,

then nothing (nothing?)

till now.

Et tu?

The future perfect,

insinuating into our momentarily

narrowed quotidian-like heavenly rust,

or a dumb hunch,

some beautiful-ass nonsense,

or the starting up again

of what has never been.

‍

Thank you for the hole in my heart,

I spackled in the cracks with art.

Thank you for the needle in my arm,

I gilded it with childish charm.

Thank you for the pillow by my head,

for which I stole the down from strangers’ beds.

A bullet in a pearl-chambered gun,

the honeyed fuck you that is me,

any mother’s son.