The country looks at them just once: the dogs (notice iron rings

                                                                     in their droopy ears) soiled and shaved

                                                                                on the immobile palm of deep

        breathing           without exit door.        The word PATHLESS rolls sideward

                                                                          and then hits what

                                                                     probably is a wall made up of water.

                                                                As if seconds are for drowning.

                                                          As if eyes are boiled clams that can’t open.

                                                     Say hmn.

                                                 Say human.

                                                          Say subhuman. That seismic circuit

                                                                                       for some life

            wherein the essential parts are ruined, which is to tell

                                  there are two Is in the word EXTINCTION.

                          I’m tired of doing love

                  only in private—that’s the first I,

                                                                  randomly scratching the obscene

                                                        screen of television with motel key.

                 There are many long days when I imagine you

                                                                     murdered in a movie,

   pale and dead and unreal and I can still fuck you—that’s the other I,

                                                        sun-kissed and shirtless just like the first.

                                               (notice XI XXIII MM tattooed along their spine)

They fuck for a long time, they see

                                 you in each other, they have been fucking for a long time,

                 someday no dog of any kind will survive

      in the country and they will still be fucking secretly.

When they were both laid

                            off from work

                                unpaid and saw it in the eyes of Brandon Lee that fucking

                                         in front of a mirror was a ship

                                                above great tides of fire, they fled

                                      to the nearest motel, one after the other,

                                              (notice the table looks

                                          jabbed by its own swallowing

                                   varnish, a world with torn-

                                          rutted cities as its being)

                                 and started the scene in front of a wall mirror.

                                            (notice the plastic fruit basket is a lovely bungalow

                                                 if it is just its shadow)

                                                     One day last June—as every year in June—

                                  gunshots dashed across

                                                     the archipelago to honor its independence.

Does it matter which man remembers the gunshots and wants to be free?

     Does it matter which man is saying I cannot convince my self anymore,

                                              I don’t know why we have to do this;—

                       Because with the mirror: four men sharing the same war

                                          but no one among them is ready to die;—

        That though they duck a story of slight survival, speaking

   of how tragic slow death can be the haunted little life in it remains

                                    shapeless, wretchedly there, more or less there.

     How over the years things they meant have never birthed any surface,

                                                                                                   no light

  in the want for sunshine, no better country in the reflexive word HOME;—

       That they have always seen the word and another roll back, crash,

                                                                                and then immured.

  (notice how the flight of their words is never to take the speaking

                                                                                          anywhere far)

              To apologize to each other, that fantasy of ending in peace

                                            they afford in surrender, and kiss once more—

   and yes, they do so like in a dream,

         but not as quicker as their senses turn into a pure obstacle;—

Does it matter which man knows they cannot help each other

                                                                          by inconsequential fucking?

They sit tired and sweating on the floor for a long time, they have

           been tired and sweating for a long time, they see

             you (notice the old discolored doll that is a crucifix from afar

         shouldn’t be there)

    in each other, but better than any of you

they understand misery in sex.

   When they were lanky boys they met

         another who killed himself with a pen at school during lunch break,

              twenty-some days since his late circumcision; he left

                   no note, which gave the living all the reasons to be uncertain.

      Suspicious.

   Quietly inconsolable.

      To wonder all the time,

          sometimes with a knife

               tucked beneath the belt.

                    Not more than a week

                         after they wrote I will not pull my self out of my life

                                              and laughed for saying it

                                                   is a promise to have a different ending.

                                          When they were younger they didn’t know

                                                    hurt is sometimes felt only in the future.

                                                            And when the future is now in person

                                                 they say what was not written has stayed

                                        true: person is a container for earth and spit,

                                                               I in the execrable excess.