The poet, to his kamikaze mistress,
                         explaining this craft is one too dangerous
                         for those wanting to go down in history
                              blameless, fame a game anything but painless—

                                                            *

A poet bares his soul for the soulless,
     sharing shards of his wreck with the reckless
     as his heretofore untold crimes of lies
     torn from others’ lives loom together in
          impervious boldness, a flesh-woven
security blanket of a thousand
     threads suturing a single wound they pulse
     and capillary through, catapulting
     into those stark, hourly-rate motel rooms
          of starved minds, his bed—his brand—spread thick with

yielded temptations whispering ancient
     stains of youth misspent, yet beneath its seams
     floats a lone feather quill exiled from what’s
     brought him down, an offering of a tale
          this phoenix-beast believes flightless, a truth
tickling its way through nights of tossed salads
     and sweat-kissed sheets, searching and destroying
     cavities, gaping asses, blank faces
     flushed like truck-stop toilet bowls, mouths opened
          wide to hold and recite scrolls of smutty

stanzas scribbled double-fisted for those
     iconoclassicists moaning, ‘Fuck me!’
     in all their dead languages, forbidden
     texts he sends those bitten-pillow basket-
          cases, soaked through and sopping with kingdoms
come and gone, ‘Come-and-Go’ the one motto
     of poppers kings themselves numbed, reading and
     hedonism sharing the same MO,
     sin weakened after a lost, condomless
          weekend of pretense, “love” laughing at it,

the implausible premise of lasting
     long, unrequited sons succumbing to
     strong succubi rising and lying like
     incubi, topping and bottoming men
          who read into a body of work their
tacit enjoyment of leads to its blunt
     uncovering, a secret providing
     this great discomforter what sole word brings
     his heart’s sore hole its lone comfort: ‘Art!’ roars
          literature’s bête noire, encouraged by

the breadth of his experience among
     shallow beings, that each hurt’s depth is worth
     recording, sounding the blood of wails ink
     and voice swell, a sell-out performing for
          a sold-out book-burning world, verse that runs
like splintered tines of a white plastic take-
     out fork down unrefined spines, chilling to
     ice orgiastic minds no stash of porn
     can warm, he who with all the terror and
          tyranny of a blind tailor writes rhymes.