I IN THE EXECRABLE EXCESS

By | 1 November 2018

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.

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