10 WAYS TO GET RAY CHARLES AND RONALD REAGAN INTO THE SAME POEM

1.

Begin with the rhythm of chapped hands traversing

the naked hips of a Raelette. Begin with the whispered

boundaries of a gone world. Forced to craft other English,

men stutter with their surfaces, jump when they touch

something raw. At birth, the cottony light of the real grew

faint until music swelled its arcing arms and claimed him.

At the very second of heaven, a history swerved close,

teased, but did not return. He said good-bye to strangers.

2.

What heaven would have him, ashed, so much of hollow,

now irritably whole? Imagine the gasping and gulping, the

sputtered queries at the sight of sunflowers and foil. There’s

a holy niche in hell for these harbingers of hard wisdoms,

men with this strain of jazz in them, men who have seen the

inward of women, heard colors settle, eased shameful things

into their mouths. The Last Rapture is best without his kind,

without his crazed seeing knock splintering the gilded wood.

3.

Which is the kill that repeats: To lose what you have seen, or

never to see what you have already lost? And the ears become

earth drums, huge hands, vessels. They rush to scream him

everything, including dust, cerulean, the moist blinking of a

woman’s hip. Even touch gets loud, shocking his long fingers,

jolting him upright in the damnable dark. His days become

his skin, blank and patient. Even when bellowed, many words,

like today and never, translate to nothing truly seen or known.

4.

Sudden mothers, lying clocks, warm canes. Women are

everywhere. He has buckled beneath their gazing, knowing

how truly they see him, straining erect, eyes bop-do-ditty in

a bobbing head. He allows them their pity strolls across his

map while he moves his palms up and down, flat against their

waiting faces, reading, reading. They stink so good, and he is

amazed at their talent for tangling the recalled. But they talk

too damned much. All those split declaratives deny his eyes.

5.

The politics of smooth and unpuckered, the sounds of a man

reciting what he will never know. What separates the living of

this from the dying of it, it is all that no-color, that hugest of

sound, the din, fingertips swollen from touching everything

twice, the dim wattage of time crawling beyond where it was.

Faces, angle and ghost, rise up to him, dance their mean

little circumstance dance, claim the simplest drifting names.

Slamming all his eyes against them only carves the hard loss.

6.

Promise drips from songs, but the heart can’t see anything.

7.

The body, snide prankster, won’t stop. Tumbling through sheets

leaves a bright sting. The right music ignites even the flattest ass.

Damned toes tap. Anything on the tongue must be swallowed or

expelled. The gut fills, piss trickles. Eyes flap open, even though.

The elbow cranks, the cock stiffens, roots of thirst and addictions

thicken. The sun bakes blank recollection on open skin. Inside him

a wretched world spins, machine unerring, striving for such a silly

perfect. The body doesn’t need moonwash or windows. It just churns.

8.

His pulse has the gall to beat urgently, like it does when one spies

a familiar canvas or a lostago sweet. It’s as if one of his strangers

has dangled life’s pointed, two-pronged instruction just inside the

void: Remember what you have seen. See what you remember. He

spends his days straining toward either or both of these squiggling

concepts, building whole novels on a hint of ginger riding someone’s

breath. In the end, almost buried by his sad collage, he clings to a

single truth: Whenever he asks for water, it arrives. It always arrives.

9.

When a gone man dies, what could possibly be taken away? It must

be the light that leaves, darkening even places it has never touched.

10.

Salvation blesses him with gasping eyes, pinned open and glaring,

and hours that slide like silver over his skin. The first thing he sees

is everything. His whole life hurtles past, paining him with its

scarlets and excess, the pulsing soundtrack a sweet irritant. The

first thing he sees is all of it, the interminable meetings, the mercy

fucks, a sweaty tumbler of ice water, finally his own knees. Eternity

is this looped, unblinking cinema of himself. Paradise is crammed

with the cruelly blessed struck dumb by scenes too loud to live.