CORRESPONDENCES

Something I meant to do…something unnatural.
Squeeze a pill between my tonsils. See what the
tonsure does to my temples? Makes my brain look bigger?
I see you looking at me—familiar and observant.

There’s a noise that saturates Oakland. I’m confident
it saturates the helium deposits pilloried
in the nitrate-rich boneyard of the bay.
I know! That sound stirred me too

from the orgiastic perfume of a delightful dream
in which I munched the profundity of not one,
not two…but like five children,
their lives and their flaky attention

cool as the skin of leftover plums.
Sorry to make Charles Baudelaire a cannibal.
It was hard enough to be him. Sorry
to suggest this gastrophagous bent consumed
him and that remarkable ascot.

Oh fine, be incensed. For a minute, on the train, I saw
you loving its sound. Its spirit. Its essence.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CORRESPONDENCES

La la la

I sing into the air which today
feels gray as an abandoned condom
brimming with yesterday’s semen…
isn’t that image so Charles Baudelaire?

Really, everything feels fine, familiar:
the longing that confounds my lines
just the tenebrous, profound unity
of a given workday under given conditions.
In the new Taylor Swift song she
crashes a wedding and steals the groom. It’s not
her best work, perhaps, but still a sort
of triumph of the other!

And the brazen expansion of her genius
a pabulum I will gnaw as musk,
as unenlivened odor. I’m not going
to eat kids. And yet I am going
to. On a fucking magic carpet!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CORRESPONDENCES

Oh God the “natural.” Spare
me. Elaborate routinization of genetic entropy
so guys passing by give me those salty looks
(Lawry’s). The seats of Ferraris feel familiar,

like the caress of a sibling in prehistory.
Fossilized cum fondues,
dense as old cake, profound as Modernism;
vast cum fondue which I duly, you know, buy online.

Perfume is colorless my dudes
just like my siblings. We’re hot, we’re related,
we emerge in the prairies like a twist
on the chalupa. Wet the wrapper if you want

it to stick. If you want to be rich,
if you want to be triumphant. Make it clap
the pods of you, but don’t start lecturing
me about “the natural.”

I just told a barista that I have
a twin brother. And yet I wasn’t
even so much “born” as set-down-
adjacent-to-these-other-things.