We hold hands in the mirror
     since we cannot in the street,
     our fear a more potent force
     than love, since what we had once
     is denied all comfort, when
     love so reviled is often
     relegated to silence,
     soft silver tongues chattering
     of glass shattering under
     the costly march overhead
     of aerial renegades

thundering, raiding airspace
     our redacted thoughts had coughed
     up to escape, blackened just
     to be, we entrusted our
     hearts to this place where art and
     crime meet: an underground street
     sheets soaked through with shit and blood
     fleeing conformity seep
     into, this deepest basement
     apartment crypt that undoes
     justice as we undo our

pants, fucking up any chance
     we have, just in case our love’s
     expression can outrace god’s
     lab-rat path, for it must be
     god—the fluorescent heat
     ejaculating from up
     above blankness down onto
     us, what light keeps us crawling
     like roaches through rough trenches
     coated all with a final
     solution our vile bodies

wade through, fucked if we do not,
     and burned off if we do, our
     love a stain two men make when
     too illumined, we who need
     such dusk to be removed from
     heaven’s sight, for it must be
     god’s boots goose-stepping in grape-
     crushing grooves to some divine
     music our kind cannot drink
     or delight in, a life not
     in lost years but in moving

moments proving aggressive,
     the passion becomes tensed when
     bent past its occasion, stressed
     as indifference inflects
     our grief’s tightening embrace,
     the mirror our stage as we
     hold hands, taking on cracked masks
     as we degenerates dance
     our last, live audiences
     of dead captions livid with
     impatient sentences we

make haste to comprehend, each
     imposing deep watermarks
     upon our tenement hearts,
     squalid homes the electric-
     eyed city composed that we
     perform, penning to death words
     hurled to make our greatness less,
     sentenced as we are to fuck
     without pity in a place
     beneath the majority
     of a world whose made up face

incarcerates our painful
     existence, chains painting those
     fools’ mercurial glances
     aglow with afterthoughts we
     will never know, reflections
     imprisoning what is so
     mistaken, since it is our
     gestapo grace holding us
     back, our washed out bravado
     painting over love in what
     we never let our Selves show.