Carnival in Louis Armstrong park

This feels like perhaps it

Should be significant or

Could be or

The jazz wheel in

The treme

Is something literary

God am I fucking

Inadequate

This maybe is what

It's like to lose one's mind

To speak in the royal we

Like you're a surrogate

Or a petri dish

I'm so terrified

Of the trappings of

Precision

I don't know if I'm

Laughing or crying or

Why I can't be the Cardinal

Why I can rent horses

On Macinac or why

It's so perturbing to be

Grandiose and all

My problems find their

Solution here with

Your head in my lap

Looking out across

The marbled bricks

Raindrops fall like

Dappled slugs I am

Reaching for excuses to use

The treme

A place on television

If someone found me

I hope they'd stage my death

As holding more intrigue

They'd hang me up

Like strange fruit

And pluck me

For some strange purpose

All I can think about is you

All I can think about is being

You

Dixieland.

black bottom spoon
and powder on the table
come too late
come too soon
bubbling black venom
on a black bottom spoon

on my 24th birthday
i find myself a miner
for small pleasures
an author of small
fictions a lover of
small women and
it's no small wonder
that the world seems
smaller today than
it ever has or ever will

the subatomic makeup
of a man's heartspace
years of study and all
it means is that we
get better and better
at parsing the signifiers
of those with the courage
to give and receive love
throwing caulk and spare
thumbs into the holes
we find in the rough hewn
and ponderous levees
of our dearest friends
whom we collect
like pondstones

it is true also that some men
dedicate their lives to the
taxonomy of certain rocks

ships in the night
who are we on the days when
the beauty does not flow from us
organically and the drugs wear off
and we are left with
our friends who stand in
for all the things we wish
we were and were not
encapsulated neatly like
benzodiazepines or
Russian dolls

i do sometimes wish we
were pumped full of blacke humour
like Galen supposed and life were
a hydraulic system of
leeching and letting
absorption and osmotic learning

and i love like madam
curie loved radium or
burroughs loved the needle
clawing for selective destruction
and stasis when freedom
curls up with a
soliciting purr beside
the fleshy thighs and
dimpled cheeks of
my covetous
neighbors

i remember when
being in love with
you was so important

when it didn't matter
if my cigarettes grew
soggy on my lips

i had fewer tattoos
and i was someone of
which my mother

may have approved
when life had a
design with you

at the center like
a fleschy peach
and i've learned

the solemn pleasure
of stern apogees
and residual flavor

why it seems vapid to
be widely read
i don't know why i made
that connection

oh my saccharine black
america i can never
be yours i must
die young i can't

imagine outlasting this one
immeasurable moment
would this small poem
mean more if i quoted

baudelaire i understand
the deep envy of sickness
24 hour sports networks
and the junkie sweetness

of suspended living but
i have always had a romance
with crowded marketplaces
and urban churchyards

i've yet to define an ideal



but how women lust for uncertainty

the problem with points
is that you can see them
miles away

and watching you stumble
like a clumsy child
to get there

makes me sick
why don't you just
set a balsa wood

merengue puppy dog
afire in the sierra nevadas
and they'd love you

because they couldn't
understand your goals
you always win

when no one else
knows how to play
but everyone wants to