When the goddess Aphrodite put on
her magic belt, everybody loved her.

And that’s what I want. Not deer antlers
and oysters, but a magic belt to hold

up my affable pants. I want the meter
maid to follow me home in her blue

Cushman. I want some waitress to sit
on that graveyard I call my lap.

I want to stroll past our condemned
hotel, have the doors swing open

and see all the bulbs in the shabby
ballroom get so hot they explode.

Studio heads are polite, but I make them
nervous. Not long ago at a working lunch,
I asked X if he thought my soul was concentrated
effluvia from all my borrowed parts or merely
electricity and, if the latter, to whom do I pray
when it's dark and I'm afraid. He just guzzled
Croatian Youth Water. None of them realize
I'm a metaphor. None understand how they see
in me all the ideas they ever stitched together
then shoved stumbling toward the triplex theaters
of the South.

A couple of weeks later, X Squared said that
since they've about exhausted that low S.A.T.
down by the windmill bit, they're thinking
about a romantic comedy. "Just picture some
cutie sitting on your lap trying to dial in a rock
station with the knobs on your neck." I said that
I favored a cinematic study of the homosexual
impulse that drove the original Dr. F to graft
onto me such a huge membrum virile. “Good
old Frank," X. S. said slapping me on the back.
Looking down on his hair transplants was like
flying over a dying forest.

This morning I was talking to Sheila, a script girl.
"You want to have dinner?" she asked. "After
you get out of your costume?"
"This isn't a costume."
"Oh, wow. Well, I shouldn't fool around, anyway."
She showed me her bracelets. "My boyfriend
stole these for me."
"Mine, too," I said tapping the stitches on my
wrists

 

No one would take her when Ruth passed.
As the survivors assessed some antiques,
I kept hearing, “Put her down. Somebody
should put her down.”

Every night I tell her about the fish who
died for her, the ones in the cheerful
aluminum cans.

She lies on my chest to sleep, rising
and falling, rising and falling like a rowboat
fastened to a battered dock by a string.