i. Fast
Words are what we do and making
do with them is the closest we
can come to truth, suicide at
dawn in a third-rate hotel room
borrowed light moves through, hired power
sweating cold vodka, orange ice
shining from sighing pores, the boors
and the bored trying to focus
on the ‘is,’ not the ‘if,’ sliding
from behind the flagrant cloisters
of Heaven’s Door, neon’s nubile
strangers turn to face the wind and
piss through clouds of self-respect down
into the eager throat of the
next morning, foaming at the first
kiss of the mouth, fisting dollars,
hesitant to part with them, men
renting a view of the event
before its undoing proves too
disappointing to film, grab them-
selves and grope for a way or wound
into him, a drooling crowd of
fools, cowardly villains chanting
‘Sodomy‽ Fuck, that’s the devil
inside of me, dropping his wad
without apology!’ having
ii. Forward
each himself been touched by the same
fire, filled up & swallowed entirely
by untamed desire, the same claws
drawing me onto irony’s
smiling pyre, gridironing my
heart, coughing up disadvantage
with all the abandon of an
entire village drowned balls deep in
poverty, sacrificing its
own children to buy cigarettes
instead of groceries & clothing,
now the reviled are hungry and
their men want inside of me, bears
and brutes ravenous as business
devouring politics, blunt tools
colluding in the nude—but not
the (k)now—with their Russian brethren
to roulette my cavern with their
echoes of misfortune & broken
promises, rhetoric that splits
lips & dismantles the order of
my organs as they pretend at
government, calling this assault
progress, this perversion of the
personal I refer to as
a suicide at dawn, myself.