Welcome to Charleyville

Monochromatic in
                                hi riboflavin
                                B-complex
vitamin
             piss-yellow haze
from the sodium vapor of streetlight

that’s night
on the outskirts of town,
a two-twenty-five
cubic inch inline slant six
supercharged engine,
cast from aluminum, bridling
and loping, impatiently surging and jerking
this Plymouth coupe forward,

I think of how you’d place my hand
around your neck,
my other hand over that hand, look up at me
and smile, admiring yourself in the guarded feral hunger staring back
                                                                                                                           until my weight
lists headlong,
and I fall like the crest down the face of a swell
                                                                                    that’s traversed
fathomless leagues to your angular shore, force of momentum and gravity married and stranding me
wedged in the cleft of your slight, splayed-apart hips.

Your air cut off,
I squeeze.
Your torso heaves
to arch
like the moon bridge in a garden.

Your face dark,
your breath comes in quick rasps,
the low heels
of your blue leather mules
dig for purchase, score and scuff
the parquet floor.

You wrap your legs around me like a lock.
I pull
your stalk
like I’m trying to tear something out,
free
of the abstract geometry woodwork mosaic,

lifting you up
to bring your face closer to mine.

***

We take a break.
I rub my knees, and you
massage your hips and back.

***

Day in and day out
on red-painted concrete

(the floor)
at the foot of the wing chair and end table
(“For business,” you said)
save for a lack of emotional inner resources
with regard to the task
of living with our love that was in me defined.

Outside,
in parched vegetation—
the dark—the dog, a friendly black
Labrador,
rustles and flushes the game
(She lives in the mountains, He lives in the valley);
utters the working dog, Rex,
to Flashlight Hippo: thanks to what atmospheric change
on the horizon will our southwest Basin and Range attraction, from freshly turned
ridge and furrow, to productive farm row,
lose its grip, result in
this refrigerator magnet tableaux breaking?

Dancing in the Streets of Kogane-chō

Our absence insulates
us like this run-down college bar’s Los Angeles,
                                                                                    exhaled nicotine stucco, finished Monterey,
as thick as packing foam
and neatly cut away in squares for us to watch each other through
when the other isn’t looking.

***

                                                 The delicate oval
of your feminine face
                                      rises like
the familiar TV
                          trope of endangered soufflé
and then falls,
                         carried collapsing on churn of foundation, concealer, and blush
like a mudslide of makeup
and skin
               textured corduroy,
swathed by the bristles of red sable brushes and napped
from the blending by sponge—
                                                       Read: facial—
                                                       Read:
cum shot—
As a blond tusk of hair
comes free behind your ear, grazing your jaw:
unhurried smoothness of
line
                                                       disclosing
                                                       the flaw
(somewhere)—Read:
money shot
                    Your expression
like a thing come to rest, features pooled and clustered
claustrophobically together
like the last sip of beer and backwash at the bottom of my pilsner glass.

***

Original pageboy Phil Spector would be proud of either you or me,
except he’s doing time
for shooting a b-movie actress in the face
after she scratched him,
                                           leaving a sliver
of fingernail
the forensic investigators found in skin
sagging like a dowager’s strand of pearls around his neck.
                                                                                                       Spector’s murder trial,
unlike a rash of others that involved the rich and famous,
failed to captivate the nation,
and instead shined depressing light on status and celebrity.
                                                                                                          The public’s voyeuristic appetite
was dulled
by Spector’s sallow skin and lantern-eyes
sunk in hollow darkened sockets, like something forced to live on cave-fish
for too long, a starving frog:
the just deserts of a life-time spent in bondage,
slave to an all-consuming need
for attention,
even unto self-destruction.
                                                No one could be bothered
with the aging music producer’s wig like discharge from a Tesla coil,
or the fine dendritics of a Lichtenberg print.
                                                                            The defendant’s weak chin and gizzard drift
down a black and white photo like a cliff
eroding hollowed-out beneath the overhang, to dissolve in
over-exposed Pacific rocks and spray.

***

Let’s consider your looks a good investment of your father’s spent money.
Or let’s consider your friend sitting next to you:
built for comfort, off-road.
I know I shouldn’t compare your friend to an SUV
but the words ENERGY CRISIS
in chasing lights illuminates the nighttime vacuum of my skull
and I can’t help but feel like that phrase describes the future of our relationship as well.

***

Coming on with the parasitic self-confidence of
your father’s accountant’s
twin sons,
I want to cut precise and assured
but attentive increments through the onion-like layers
of intrapersonal distance between us,
the words and stories we tell ourselves when no one’s around,
cut into the vague outstripping feeling
of never fast enough,
never—
             whatever—enough,
                                               when what resists
                                                                                dissolves
                                               like salted fermented
             bean paste
                                                                                in hot water.

***

                                                                                Haze
threatens.
                                                                               Someone
                 gets threatened.
                                             The end of the message:
                                                                                         telling the person to report to work
                                             the next shift
he
                                             or she’s scheduled
                                             to work.

***

Some have calluses much thicker than ours
we find out shaking hands.
I’m glad we came along together, on
this excursion:
                          ri-ree
                          ri-ree
grad.

***

        In Gold Town,
it’s hard to tell the buyers from the sellers. I guess
everybody’s working.

Quickie II Ti and Fast Food Restaurant

She studied the menu and looked fifteen.
I thought, ‘She looks fifteen.’
                                                  She turned to look
at me,
                                                                                     her face
cutting into the distance between us
like a prow through sea-ice, or an ax splitting wood.

***

She projected from her wheelchair
the aura of an animal
leg-trapped
and struggling to get free from under a boulder
                                                                                   or felled tree,
using the muscular power of shoulders and arms
only,
her lower region, from the waist,
bereft of sensation; bound and constricted for so long,
it had become a haunting impression
                                                                   she was used to
dragging around:
trailing behind her like a wake; in her mind, something like a train.

***

Her presence was like an absence.
I felt more absent with every passing moment.
The more present she came across
the more cut off
I felt.
Although: cut off
from whom or what I couldn’t say.
I wanted to read her
like an instrument panel in the cockpit of a plane
that’s stalled, before it starts to spin:
the dials and gauges were telling me everything,
if I could only understand.

***

To compliment her wheelchair, the equivalent
of pressing my tongue to the icy flagpole outside in the parking lot,
I thought, and then noticed how her sad little hips and back and shoulders didn’t fill
the slung black leather seat embroidered with white thread.

***

I figured she’d continue wanting broken off
bits and pieces of me, until she was sated, until it dawned on me:
like the most exquisitely engrossing houseplants such a state could never exist for her.
I wondered if she had access to this knowledge about herself.
                                                                                                              A family,
if she came with one, was nowhere in sight.

***

The silence caught me off guard, a problem
made worse by the total lack of activity outside the bright,
cold, Sunday morning—floor-to-ceiling glass—
street-side of the restaurant.
                                                  Shattered and weightless, I waited.

***

Next to us the stainless steel counter hummed, warm with
what would never cease to
be metal smeared with color and light, motion and stillness.

***

                                                                                                           Disembodied:
thirsty, labored breathing, tightness of chest,
which is stoned, right?
                                        Wrong…however, many people, getting disembodied,
end up disembodied
while stoned
and relate their experience later
in the context
of getting high one time
and…
whatever….
Not in the context of getting disembodied.
Most likely they’re ashamed.
Most likely they believe the fact of their highness
affects in a way less than optimal the spiritual yield such suffering affords.
                                                                                                                                     Which reminds me:
talking really on the level now: this wasn’t
disembodied.
In fact, it was the exact opposite, except…
really thirsty.

***

                       She wasn’t dressed warmly. In matching electric
turquoise gym shorts,
t-shirt, a lot of skin showing. And of what was showing,
there wasn’t much,
                                 period, muscle or fat, or
much there at all.
                               She showed
no interest in any suggestion I put forth.
                                                                       Worse than not having ideas,
having only the wrong ideas.
                                                  A little over-the-top dishabille,
all I’m getting from her.
                                        And me, so thirsty all my life.
Eighth grade…with a hard-on in the stairwell, I believed I could keep it up
for the next thirty years…
                                             A mistake that by now has been around so long…
If it’s a case of her or me, I won’t be a factor,
even if—some while gone—disposed to entertain what you suggest.
Running away: there’s a dignity to it all its own.

***

                                                                                   We’re both of us stranded.
One of us stranded and with child,
but neither stranded nor with child. The other one,
not in any sense stranded or with child,
and totally, authentically—
in every way you can think of—stranded, with child.
                                                                                          Our situations
both come down to the same thing.
                                                               Therefore:
until such time as this arrangement becomes annoying, if not inconvenient,
and so doing, ceases to be—
this is it.

***

               The wind
here hard and sharp enough
to chisel a prehistoric symbol for “compassion”
on an outcrop of black obsidian
as gently rounded as a cornea atop a knoll:
                                                                             what’s at odds,
what’s working at cross-purposes—
what’s at stake.

***

                           In the end, I’ll live vicariously
through her, both of us here—
our halcyon days—understanding each other
and psychically attuned,
                                          the hero and heroine do…
nothing.

***

               If things
work out for us, maybe
someday,
harried, too close,
I’ll forget myself and slip
through a crack
between hunches and bends,

the only trace of my proximity bright paisley shapes on her retina:
in the moldering ghost between each pulse,
light shape over light shape
obliterates my features etched in whitish lines
on too high of resolution to recognize and separate, and then get lost
in a single color: there’s no such thing.
                                                                    And so on to infinity.
Also known as:
the binary language of computers.

***

                                                            There’s something missing. What’s missing
might be Stephen Vincent Benét.

***

                                                          Every alternative to her
alternative existence more distressing
the closer we get
to a resolution: I can
either sound disingenuous or get committed to
watching
something I can’t control,
and furthermore want nothing to do with.
                                                                         The next
thing
to go missing:
me.
So get some sleep.
We’ve got a long stay ahead
of us.