LITMIR.BIZ

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      over flanks of glass,

      silks so utterly watery

      splashing, as you click along the shine,

      on left shin right shin, but alas

      the chase is a tired

      and tiring metaphor:

      let’s sit. It is

      your Beauty that is omnipotent,

      and I the god its constant

      victim, automatic

      as the keyboard you reach over

      accidentally typing with a breast

      aaaaiiiiyyyyesssss,

      as the copier you press

      with a page and another page

      that lights again and again your face.

      Hear my song:

      I will walk out of the 14th floor

      and into your ear like a wireless call.

II. Ovidian Deposition

      The bull or swan,

      face rippling as it changes,

      speaks, and for a long, long moment,

      you can’t tell luck from disaster.

      He recited his exploits and cutting-edge features,

      all the arts and countries he was lord of.

      He was wasted, I think. He walked on the table.

      He said his voltage was so out of control.

      He said, Relax, what you’re feeling is

       the great experiences are generic:

      when they happen to you they do not happen to you.

      To take the god was to lose the man.

      To take the man was to die of the god.

      Either might turn me into stone.

      I got up For a refill

      from the Heliconian well,

      and texted from the parking structure

       Hadda go…

III. Pygmalion among the Young

      He could tell from their pistol shots of laughter,

      their bucking and surging

      like someone learning to drive stick,

      their pretense and collapse,

      their talking on two cells at once,

      how they down strange solvents,

      their voices sax-raw or helium-high,

      how they take each other harshly,

      grinding together like stones,

      grinding alone like stones, that the young

      have statues in them, tall white statues

      they must dance out, drink to sleep, outspeed.

      Like a finger moving under a line of type—

      O god, slower than that—

      their future comes, the party they’re late for

      where people are saying incredible shit about them

      that they have to get to, and say, and say

      like how it really is, so they pile in and floor it

      till their backs stiffen and their faces change in the wind.

IV. Twilight of a God

      That girl who drank from her hands

      huge wastes of wine,

      and his awe,

      was it? So that he surfaced,

      his head in a little clear spot above the music

      and a good bet was

      that whatever happened next

      wasn’t going to happen to him.

      Suddenly he wasn’t the minor deity,

      coat still on, in the corner booth,

      smiling benevolently upon his children,

      but a guy walking out, head down,

      into the cold of an outer borough,

      the signs unreadable, the age of Changes over.

      Though aren’t those still his angels

      at the gold bar of Heaven

      who lift glass trumpets to their lips?

V. Orpheus at Last Call

      One of those dreams: you struggle and fail

      for years

      to dial a number, read a page, remember

      not to look back…

      (her hand confused in mine, soft struggle of a bird)

      I’ve drunk so much

      it rises in me: something like soft roots

      parts softly

      and my head sweeps down the singing river singing…

VI. Apollo in Age

      Spring,

      I am no good with pain.

      Stop,

      I’ll tell you anything.

Zeus: A Press Conference

      Eons we rule in our tall pale closets

      and all your talk is the few failures of distance

      even a man can read, in Ovid, in a few hours:

      brute swan, tsunami of gold, bull

      sliding the girl shark-swift into open sea.

      The robe drops, the sun widens to half the sky,

      the tachycardic certainty of death…

      So similar the stories, maybe all one.

      Whereas a god, on a million channels,

      is all thoughts always. Once a millennium, maybe,

      in his whited-out daydream he meets dark eyes

      and is rapt into an endless morning after:

      one man, one thought, one cup of coffee

      for what, to a god, feels like a millennium.

      You vultures, if you have to write, write

      this: the humiliation of a human story

      no god, with all Time, has the time to live,

      or even read to the end. No questions.

State-Sponsored

      Oh dear, say the Tyrants, sex

       is naughty and intense

       and might save you.

       Please mistake it

      

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