HOW TO BE
I don’t like it
when you’re faux-butch
or when you’re faux-femme, but
really since
I won’t know real
until I see it
and maybe not even then,
it’s true that you can’t win.
Let me think.
Perhaps the real
is merely the consistent—
though there’s nothing more
consistent than plastic.
Perhaps the “faux”
is a self-conscious
tic.
*
“Don’t be a child!”
I want to say,
though I am very fond of children.
SAFE
1
All the old stories say Don’t
because we always do.
That’s how we got here
and everywhere.
We just kept going,
cleared things up
and out,
built markers,
built a doppelganger
like the stories said
we’d better not
asked if it
wanted to destroy.
2
Four-petal God,
honey-gold,
bursting from the core
again and again,
getting larger
as if getting closer,
is it safe
to come in?
TOO MUCH
Maybe I want too much
from poems,
more than any poem can give.
“Waking-dream” cerulean
cushions ;
the shade of the sky
when the sun has just set;
the mind right after
the heart stops beating.
Suspended,
above the clouds,
in bronze-age armor,
the gods confer.
Thor: earnest,
“The earth is in peril!”
“What now?’ everyone asks,
faux-credulous.
A “Mirror-TV” remote
hangs
on the bathroom mirror.
Gargoyle cusk eel
close-up,
oddly ethereal
WITHOUT ME
Here and there
make two, if
like an equal sign,
I sit between.
*
The light blinks and
its reflection in blue glass
appears and disappears
like a heartbeat. I extend
from two to many.
*
When nobody’s looking
there is nothing
but collision, explosion,
each one once
forever—
no equation,
no safe passage.
