APOTHEOSIS

We are back to the beginning and have gone

inside. The bats have come down, wooden

and sterile, to greet the joints, to rearrange

teeth and thoughts. Faggot was a thought

that snuck inside me, was put inside me,

and all the fields inside me turned Greek,

meaning tragic, meaning its beasts

were hybrid and hard to slay:

a faggot in the nigger, a nigger and a faggot

and though both hollered I couldn’t let them go.

Still this is a faggot’s tale, and he says: tired

of the new prescriptions of the world, I woke

to the bass of a stranger’s Hummer but thought

I remained, still, in my violent dream. He said,

Maybe

there isn’t a thing to keep this blood from draining.

Yet having felt the heat in me shake like a window,

this moment’s an unhinging, a loosened fiber (“pussy

nigga” from the Hummer, “batty bwoy” in the dream)

taking possession of this thinking. So the faggot man said.

It was how the word made dark his every room: faggot

the only definition for faggot, a measured burn

at the edge of sleep. To see in his dream a fire

ant crawl from the eye of a dead crow, to see himself

as the dead crow and not the ant, to know he was

the crow in sleep and when awake—it was the sharp

of the word that sharpened itself, teaching him

how to describe himself, faggot like a new lexicon,

and it entered him, became a childhood

memory: faggot in a house in a cradle full of sticks lit

at their tips like cigarillos: faggot tied to the wheel

of his family’s iris and spun and cudgeled: Faggot where

you going this late at night: faggot where a pit bull

pirouettes another pit bull in its mouth: faggot who faggots

flagrantly his gilded gums with hurrah and haints:

faggot in the fly horde sucking at a corpse-supple wound

stitch by stitch until the fabric pops open:

fabric pops open and the wind moves through: faggot

coming in like the wind: how the wind comes again

when it can but different than it had been: a storm

that was both weapon and shield until already

it had entered where neither—anymore—mattered.