a sign: deep-fried
crumblettes stashed under the
couch—either dinner
in a bucket, or a fugitive’s harbor.
in syndication
Seinfeld is become
my feedback
loop—now it’s all “nothing” all the time.
next door an empty
lot—our 3 a.m.
drunk bellows
“Linda! Linda! Linda!”
outtakes from my
life with the golem groom; if a honeymoon could
be stuffed and
mounted, I’d have named ours “Lemur, at Impact.”
for yucks, I
brought home the Sunday Times thinking
he’d be good at
terms scatological and Russian authors.
“what’s a
four-letter word for the upper hand? starting with F.”
“flan?” he offers.
I trade my ink pen for pencil.
some day a woman
with my eyes, my parents, my name
will pass me in the
street, uncomprehending. lives
fountain through
this city a strained murky skein. what’s missing
is a soundtrack
where strings come in when the lovers meet cute.
pirate radio needs
real pirates not comic book store malingerers,
pock-faced
crepuscular shoe gazers, out-sized thumb suckers
cosseted in coffee
shops like the one where a shy man once took silent
notice of my open
fly. a blind date cedes a quick exit (her chain-smoking,
his prudent
shoes). the professor, expert in conceits metaphysical,
wonders if the
source of his boyfriend’s indifference might be
gastric. there’s
always hope for the habitually tragic in the
practically
absurd. the loneliest monster is the last of its kind:
our burg’s one
remaining photo booth cries acid tears,
disgorges
self-portraits that seem to gag on their own hearts
coy expressions
annulled by cruddy ochre streaks
and no idea as to
who to ask for a refund
the man from Peru
is out eight quarters
and still he owes
the INS lady his picture.
all hail the
skin—what keeps our secrets strapped
to our thighs, like
flasks packing communion wine.
nightly he shaves
his back and trolls E-bay for
replacement parts
while I lose track of his sodium
levels, which
cholesterol is bad and which merely uninspiring.
and where the hell
is Linda anyway we, too, begin to wonder.
for
verisimilitude’s sake, we drink too much and bawl,
curse her name in a
mad display of appropriated grief.
I worry that our
keel has become too even. I want my
own
sorrow—not this ragamuffin despair stinging of
the DT’s and
rot-gut women. the golem has other ideas,
battens our room
with conspiratorial laughter and a
loose-limbed tale
about my happiness, its cupcake wrappers
and rubicund
cheeks—tucking-in time for dull sublunary
lovers, asleep fast
while in the lot below dandelions
denuded rue the
blowzy pageantry of human longing.
