Often I got stuck to the bottom of someone’s shoe.
You’ve got a wad of toilet paper on your shoe,
his friends might observe. Well what do you know
about that? he’d say. But let’s see how far this goes.
His turn. He felt a tickle in the back of his throat.
My turn. I went down easy as a good line of coke.
And so it went. He stripped me down
like a stick of good poplar used as a switch.
I got quite a bit done in those meetings.
Ten minutes here, ten minutes there …
You might use the mouth as you use the lavatory.
Now, that’s industrious. In that case, go ahead.
Our love was lonely as a handjob and as frequent.
I’d try to tell him that in a better way if I could.
Usually not.
Those cigarettes will kill you man, he’d say.
And maybe they will. Come to think of it,
maybe they will. That’s the way we talked.
We lived in an age of adolescence and irony.
Unless I’m thinking of another dude. That happens a lot.
How could you have anything but a vague memory
of a guy whose savoirfaire was delivered in the form of
I already told you that I think you’re hot?
Well suddenly the present arrives, and it’s a autopsy.
Maybe not that dramatic. How about the nerves
eroding. Slowly, the levee gives way.
Or maybe there’s just a bad bout of hail.
A surprising amount of hail, considering
it usually won’t hail here. Wind catches you off-guard.
Upending lawn furnishings. Overwhelming the poultry.
Yardbird’s called a yard bird, you see,
on account of it don’t fly.
When I see the flattened box of an out building
lying in a rusty rhombus on the ground,
I think of so-and-so. Or whojamadoojy.
That’s where I met him, the man who was it for now.
The Luke who was my mark.
The Matt who was my john.
So many acts. xx