i. Melody & Violence

                    .i

With Daddy’s money and our
ancestors’ bones, silk-sonic break-throughs with
breath of influence thrown plow

                    .ii

down when kick-drumming until blown-in
the closed door, no more
home to go, to saunter

                    .iii

toward, to wander from forever
after, navigating the way of
its murmuration, this bending slouch

                    .iv

into culture, then history, no
more me, only biography, spirit
pressed from flesh against vinyl,

                    .v

an orphan dies, my past
a book I forget as
I live it, my art

                    .vi

the lens through which strangers
read it, journaling is nihilism,
journalism is horror, performative fraud

                    .vii

of the song I choose.

          ii. Rhythm & Bruise

                    .i

Decay and growth within us,
as a past never finishes,
feast on our need to

                    .ii

speak what isn’t true, destroy
as you perceive each world
dying into us, your Me

                    .iii

an illusion unique to You,
in the process killing-off to
become the Self that ever

                    .iv

was but rarely is, and
led, not from but to
this, a need to tell

                    .v

you what I’m not so
you can see who I
am worms through mulch, wants

                    .vi

to be touched, to stain
glass the way sunsetting dusk
does wood warped from libations

                    .vii

dependable as explosive fists testing
reactionary grips against mirroring faces
dropped, beaten table-tops to this

                    .viii

game of changing heating up
with mess of missed love
surfacing for once, in my

                    .ix

mistrust of the stuff coming
to want being wanted by
someone else who doesn’t get

                    .x

how toxic it is to
expect someone you never were
to emerge undeterred when called

                    .xi

by another’s offer of their
unasked-for warmth, its wealth what
unsought affection sings, this hymn

                    .xii

of having enough the peeling
off of bells their brass
until all one hears is

                    .xiii

Death’s nails being pulled by
kisses from shells its knell
shut, how in telling of

                    .xiv

killing by noticing, the coffin’s
box of my thoughts opens
up spilling feelings I never

                    .xv

thought would ring true to
those I assumed were deaf
to my character’s blindness its

                    .xvi

blankness of pages fills with
plot into which knives twist,
questioning if even who I

                    .xvii

wish to be can exist
without the you a renewed
belief in us resurrected, as

                    .xviii

if Jesus needed Lazarus more
than he did Christ to
accomplish his rise from the

                    .xix

grave of a translated page
few truly get the way
those who do accept my

                    .xx

various neuroses as god’s gifts.*

__________
*Notate Bene:
☞ The meanings in English of the poet’s given names—which have Hebrew origins and Biblical precedents—are, for Jonathan (“Yehonatan”), the phrase “YHWH (God) has given,” for David (“Dawid”), “beloved.” Within Scripture (1 Samuel 18:1–5), the two most famous patriarchs bearing these same monikers are doomed homosexual lovers: Jonathan, son of King Saul, and David, slayer of Goliath, who would go on to sire King Solomon and find fame as a poet-king authoring the psalms; which lyrics he composed to accompany music he played on the lyre for Jonathan’s mercurial father whose volatile rages his art soothed and succored.