Hitchhiker
for PL

For two days I ride with the lesbians along daffodil highways,
curled up in their backseat as the Midwest passes in a blur.
At twilight we check into suicide motels—I spend hours
reclined on the floor, listening to them whisper and coo
in the television glow. At sunrise they awaken, faces like
burnished steel. On the third morning, they drop me on I-88
outside Schenectady. I make it the rest of the way to Albany,
then New York, finally to a ghostly southern town where I
sidestep death’s shadow on a dirt road of decades. I have
this colleague I see at office parties and holiday shindigs
who says that our lives constantly vector in infinite directions,
each moment rendering countless and concurrent permutations,
and it occurs to me now, thirty-plus years later, that in some
alternate cosmos those women and I might be together still
or again, in a room beside a notorious interstate, walls dashed
with streetlight and static. I’m lying between them in a vibrating,
heart-shaped bed, my mouth and nipples and cock throbbing like a
newborn’s lungs. And then they take me in, really take me in.

**

Birth of Evil

At first, autonomy was encouraged. That changed
after the rift, when He banished his eldest. A sarcasm
circulated, that He would have blamed Lucifer’s mother
had that been possible, but clearly we were all immaculate
extensions of Him, knew what we were afraid to say,
that He couldn’t stand to see that part of Lucifer so like
Himself and so chose to oust him. Many wanted to gibe,
Glanced in a mirror lately? but of course we refrained.
Those with the nerve to dissent joined the exodus.
Who can blame Lucifer for what’s ensued? Rejection
is hatred’s fodder. Banishment breeds pathology. Splinters
were buried in the immortal psyche. I hardly see Him
anymore. I can’t remember the last time we spoke.
A somberness hovers in the gilded chambers, flattens
the soaring choruses—raw disapproval that’s festered
for eons, hypocrisy we don’t talk of, that what we dub
evil was hatched here, the glint in a killer’s eye sparked,
stoked in this refuge we still presume to call Heaven.

**

Curse
for BNS

In every photo, my mother seems haunted, spine
buckling beneath some invisible weight. My uncle
says she died from chronic repression, enmeshment
with their parents she was never able to transcend.
I’ve always regarded karma as simply the facts
of one’s existence, families as karma pools, and I
commenced taking inventory—suicides, addictions,
some distant cousin’s lobotomy in the 1950s—how
for at least three generations we’ve become masters
at burying trauma inside our own bodies, brokenness
we have no language and lack the resolve to voice.
I’ve dredged my psyche, put my genes beneath the microscope,
but still I sense something I never quite track or salve,
a feral ghost stamping in my core, dissonance turning
malignant in the fleshy gloom, that I too might perish
at the patient hands of what I can’t transcend, something
visited upon my bloodline, long before I was born.

**

Salient Matters
“In the black forest of my mind’s exile
The hunting horns of Memory begin…”
—Charles Baudelaire, “The Swan”

i.
I remember the sharp screams at dawn,
my mother on her knees in the kitchen.
Then sirens, a white sheet over a still body,
men in uniforms whispering to my father.
We rode in a plane, then a black car
to a field where people wept over a box.
A man with a white collar drawled in a monotone,
jargon I couldn’t understand. I teetered
in the cul de sac. My father waved, smiled
through the windshield as my grandmother
tightened her grip on my arm. Every evening,
I scoured the house, checking locks, window
latches, terrified of the loud southern night.

ii.
I heard the sighing of seasons, the blaze
and sputter of time. Fear continued to claim
my body’s empty spaces. Evil hands rummaged
as I pretended to sleep. Over moons, the dirt
bled and bled, leaves became knives. I confronted
the blindness of men, thusly imagined the ether:
God was an impotent bureaucrat, face buried
in a paper, hands arthritic, feet nailed to the floor.
I grew fangs, poured salt in the principal’s tank.
My virginity was a sock lost in the laundry.
The bottle replaced the cross. Electric guitars.
Hallucinogens. Trans Am belly-up in a ditch.
Graduation day: I came to, blood on my groin.

iii.
What I left behind I took with me. Somehow
I stoked the embers I pissed on, fattened what I
intended to starve. Amputated hands continued to probe.
The voices and vitriol I fled echoed in my ear.
The city was eldritch and alien, a dragon I avoided.
I daydreamed on overpasses, mumbling to myself
as autumn sprawled. College was a letter I never wrote,
a fly buzzing in a window; my libido was serrated.
I courted mirrors, every encounter an audition,
cast friends and lovers as foils. Months passed,
a tornado of indiscretions. I found myself suddenly
before a magistrate—married, quickly divorced.
All women had one moniker: Yin the Terrible.

iv.
Illumination is rarely the product of reason, is more
like levitation or alchemy, a mysterious initiation
the fortunate are permitted to undergo, untraceable
gift they must then turn their wills towards tending.
Be it divine intervention, random fortune, commingling
of circumstance and constitution: defeat plows the heart’s tundra,
readies it for the sowing of miracles. Liberation often
arrives suddenly, like a vision or the lifting of amnesia.
But discipline must follow. Integration is gradual,
like teething or the healing of burns: the demon
in my groin vacated. I met a woman named Mary—
magnolia-spirit, dervish. We talked of war and angels,
planted willows and cacti, traded secrets by thunder-song.

v.
I returned to my hometown, my grandmother’s house
leveled, lagoons where I fished and swam now ravaged
by bulldozer and crane. Developments sprawled like
profanity, decimation of the land where I was raised.
I visited the graves of my tormentors, addressed them
by their christened names; shattering spells, I attained
a gratitude for my own karma—destined apprenticeship
in a familial Hades. I saw a hawk in a redbud, forgave
my forebears their legacies of ash and hemlock, crimes
of commission and omission. I visited my high school,
now a factory, picked peaches from an abandoned orchard.
I burned my birth certificate on a stump at the county line—
drove away like a man leaving a job on amiable terms.

vi.
I took Mary to New Orleans a couple of months before
Katrina descended. The Mississippi gasped in the background;
summer was gaining stamina, heat swelling like a revival,
brimming in the vernal air. Jazz swarmed in the alleyways.
In Broussard’s on Conti Street, I asked Mary to marry me.
Presence renders the self incidental: I delivered what had
already been mandated in the eternal now of the cosmos.
Her yes was the echo of a yes created when the word began.
We returned to the hotel through haunted streets, carting
armfuls of roses. The horizon was still darkening, faint stars
hovering over Jackson Square—palm readers, fortune tellers—
St. Louis Cathedral hulking like an ageless ark. Love turns
the world’s head: even the cynic finds respite from his story.

vii.
There are moments, sometimes before dawn while silence
cradles the house, when I reflect upon my days as one would
a bizarre but masterful abstract, when I know that at least
a few of the strokes were rendered by my own steady hand.
At times I still wander Gethsemane, cursing at specters,
dashing grails to the ground, hurling stones at the Judas within.
But who I am has little to do with the names I give myself.
I will remain a disciple to the me I have yet to encounter.
Standing on the edge of a round world, I collaborate with Eros,
Thanatos, anima, animus, this stubborn loam, savor the indigestible:
bless this hunger, jagged and divine. Let me follow a thread
towards what has already transpired, climb into the life I have
already chosen. Let me become what is written in the sky.