The song that I heard
came remote from the tiny radio,
the kind with only one speaker
so that no matter how deep or bright it can go
it still never sounds like stereo;
it was a small and bright song
just small and remote like the radio
itself, a wakeup song, bright
obviously meant to be played aloud
through a one-speaker radio…

…and like any song, it clashes against
the rocks, the cliff-face of
songs in my mind,
songs with notes that never
quite die out, even in silence:

Moonlight Serenade
Rhapsody In Blue
Stairway To Heaven
I Wanna Be Your Dog
Niggas My Height Don’t Fight
I Hate Myself And Want To Die

And this song, like all those songs
plays out against a double harmony
of all the notes that aren’t there
and all the notes ever played before it.

Should I keep it a secret? I had saved it
for the end, but really like a
nervous insane man with a nervous tick
maybe sucking at his lip or squinting his eye or
rubbing his crotch at the worst times possible
like him I am obsessed—
with that eerie green light
green like it is beneath some
tropic ocean, I imagine,
the whole car cabin like that
seemingly under water, it even
gleams, glistens
though that is the blood
of course, blood pitch black
in the drone of the green light.

He blew his mind out in a car
He didn’t notice that the lights…

…and the whole scene is a pieta,
a sacred tableau to the flow
of the world we’re in, the word
that encases us like a giant
glass sky-dome, the word now
but only so much more than now
for it is now and now and now
and tomorrow and forever after
and you can’t escape it, not even
underwater on a busy London street
nor fleeing 90 miles an hour
along a California freeway
except, maybe, if you’re fleeing to desert
or some other timeless place
(there are fewer and fewer these days).

So, this was the song I heard
echoing off the sky
taking its place among the others,
even ones I forgot to mention, like—

Purple Haze, Siegfried’s Death March—

among all those songs that strain the air
that etch themselves into time until one day
for no reason except that God would know
you find yourself humming them.
I think I’ve written about this song before,
about its ending, but like I said, I’m
a crazy man, obsessed, underwater…

I fell into the bed and grazed his cheek
and everything became shadow
underneath the covers—
second motions,
second sensations,
as each flex and quiver
echoed through our skin
down into the muscles…

There is no color in contact,
only the subtle shade and smell
as heat frees the chemistry
trapped between the pores…
…then, the crucible,
the stretched flame
that pierces that dome where you feel like
you’re enclosed within a body…

After the machinery sputters and halts
and the twin factory cools and metal cools
and skin cools beneath the cotton-polyester blend,
the shadows forged in desire-iron
linger, glow, radiate
until the shadow of time
finally steals over the bed
like a giant quenching wave,
a wave only so bold as to pass
through the spent ruins of a moment…

I feel like I could dissolve
into nothing but these shadows
and that trace of heat pregnant in time now passed,
and now that we’re talking of shadows,
and now that we’re talking about a double-part,
and now that over a decade has passed,
in the tide pools of our bedroom,
at what point does the figure recede
into the shadow?

Hiroshima—

where the shadows burned in place
and I could say love is like that
I and would, except,
unlike an American holocaust that sears the sky
love contains grace,
love contains mercy,
love contains a shadow’s subtly, and its shade…

We call it “kisses”
but it’s really a tongue
that probes up into my ear
into my nose
and I swear he can taste snot
and just on the other side of my revulsion
I realize the strange contract
—the lupine ritual—
fulfilled in slow time:
time on my lap,
on the couch, licking his paw
after a walk…

Saliva, germs, intimacy, immediacy, whatever;
kisses mean something different to my chihuahua,
except that they don’t—
behind the lips
behind the teeth
remains the potential of fear
that he could rip my face off
that I could dash him against the wall…

Faces together, born from
the deadliest predators on the planet,
we share our pack—
we define ourselves
in sleek, sharp delineation;
we are “us,” we are friends,
and the rest of the world
will see the teeth and not the tongue—
the rest of the world is meat.