“One Future That Binds Us.”
for HT, AA, and the rest of y'all

In the fat October, all we needed were kitchen staples: soap and ash, mostly. Then flour, back bacon, butter and eggs. We were hopeful. We wore gray wigs. We played pool and practiced signing our names with feathered pins on fancy sheepskins. We were onto something big. Next stop—the place they keep the buffalo. Those grazing lands look nice. We were carried here by men with heavy wings.

*

A pile of shit (a “fortunate mistake” of a book of verses) and a thin brown-haired, flat-chested girl sustained me through my banquet years and gave me reams and sheaves of freshly-printed, ink-still-wet, smelling-like-a-good-book material for my puritan fantasies—you ease my troubles, that’s what you do. I sent eleven photographs; you didn’t respond. The pond is widening, Max’s is closed, your letters have mildewed in the eaves.

*

Pushed in as far as it would go and hit something—bump—it’s okay, it’s only a gopher. Always one with the image. The bedroom smelled of lilacs and cheap incense. Girlwatching but only one girl to watch and the pillow stained with cigarette smoke. When I was ten the Secretary of the Interior crushed puppies and flowers. Pillows looked like yr teeth & there’s a reason the round vowels went missing. Pick up your clothes, take the back door out.

*

Smoking with you. Whiskey in a Mason jar. Why are all your friends gay? What’s the matter with me. Why does your cat piss on the art print wedding presents? Is it because we’re too high, too high to give up our frequent flier miles to the citizenry less competent? In the country, they’re called Pagans. Here we just say, “faggots.” Let not be torn asunder that which hath been hastily glued together and covered with pretty glitter.

*

I’m becoming experimental all over your back. I’ve done it twice. Sulfur lamps are keeping me up all night. Green banker’s lamps lend an avocado pallor to my naked thigh. There’s a rush and a thrush. A bird and a directive. The circles under my eyes make me look Lebanese. I’m fixing to defect, my satchel filled with stones.

*

A primer, a hornbook. A schoolmarm get-up pasted next to a German paper doll. When the man dressed as the harem attendant eunuched his way up the walk, I could only think of America’s magical heartland. Chicken fried steak and mashed taters. Ropes tightly coiled, swinging like children in dresses and saddle shoes.

*

Banishing me will do no good. As children, we’d scream “I’m a banshee!” and it meant something shameful. Something we’ll never do again. (We cast black stones and white stones.) When we kissed we meant it, just not for very long. When we promised, we meant, “I’ll be seeing you.”

*

All this pornography is giving me a collarbone. The color of hamhocks and the best American pies. A travel pamphlet up the wazoo. A ride to the top of the arch. Bicyclists pedaling through Iowa prefer breakfast burritos and loose meats. I’m verily trouncing my own regulations, yea. What I meant was, you can’t do it.

*

It’s unconscionable, this outcome. It’s all over the floor. It’s looser than a breadbox. It’s taking the jobs with it. It’s taking the Latinos with it. It’s escaping out the door with a shoebox full of lost blue bullets. It’s rising like hot air, like a child with too many balloons. Red and blue and young and proud and covered with some stockbroker’s Happy Ending.