Nobody’s Dirty Business                                     

Bimbo, Bozo, Fatso—these the dogs
our father dubbed a Cerberus of dumbest
adoration:
               the last, dead under a fingerpainted slab
and the first two, motherless brother-mutts

buttfucking each other beneath the rope swing’s
hangman and fray.

We had one game, us kids, called Defibrillator.
Sister attached the jumper cable to my earlobes
while Bimbo pawed at such dirt
as hid the first bone.
Everything went dahlias and achtung,
milky or silky absences UFO-ing the sky.

But there was dog for dinner every night, in a salsa of loss and fog.
Father operated and we warmed ourselves
around the bright, beating heart, the brain’s
fatty voltages. He tweezered out

the strings of poisoned tenderness, and then we ate,
and then sister vomited the house back up, our cars and cares and unkempt
              gardens.

A somehow hero, this father was somewhere.
His long, impeccable fingers presided
over the mashed or shot bodies, the light on his forehead
warned away by the worn dark, red as redress.

Back again, I gave the dogs drugs. I gave myself drugs. I was a dog.

The Frequency of the Y-Sound                              

                         I.

Weak lights, fugitive from a love
crime in matter, ventilate

the specimen jar marked The Body’s Needs.

Q: Is your desire more like a cigarette than a fire extinguisher? More like seventy or eighty thousand cigarettes than the storm surges bashing the burning jetty?

A: Sex’s yes, sex’s no, and then everywhere she goes,
ghoulish under the rollercoaster of sun,
muddied running shoes
dangle from the power lines, fat
with contempt for my impoverished interpretation engine.
Teeth as white as woe.

Q: Which of the fathers is dead? Which running barefoot, and fast, across the raised fists of riot?

 A: I am a thing decided, ye dead futurities:

                                                II.

Also there is a good deal of pain in the world,
from which the blandishments of starshine
coax the clubbed soul.  Put that in the form of a question, Jack!

Some marvelously aboutless songs
have been written about this, perfect except for or perhaps because of
the frequency of the y-sound
and the fact that they are nearly unsingable.

The vandals ransack the National Dictionary
rendering friend to fiend to
the old school wrecking crew of end and I and Mr. F.
A good star, millions of years tall, closes the eyelids.

And so the diseases in the data, the distasteful dates, affix
us to the only world left, and the catastrophic
grasses wave in time to an unproveable theorem:
I love by forgetting.
It’s the Fourth of July: Burgers Hiroshima and the war in the weather unwilling.