I’m the original two-hearted brawler.
I gnaw the scrawny heads from prawns,
pummel those mute translucent crustaceans,

I walk into the men’s room at LaGuardia Airport
And the guy standing next to me zipping his fly
Has been dead for thirteen years. I know because
He was one of my professors in graduate school.

The lightest touch
if it is gently giv-
en can yield as much
affection as a deep

While Queen of Colchis, I believe, I made
Available to you my magic aid.
That was the period at which the dread

I read somewhere that every love
has its own government. Or was it
that every love has
the government it deserves?

She’s sixteen, and looks like a full-grown woman,
teen-aged status hinted at by the acne.
I remember infancy’s gold, unblemished

Righted, they would form
a somnambulistic stance in the
stoop-shouldered dark; shuffling
in the absence of skin stretched

Stand in a field long enough, and the sounds
start up again. The crickets, the invisible
toad who claims that change is possible,
And all the other life too small to name.

He gave me a spruce lap desk
for writing in bed that Christmas.
It was rubbed into fragrance with oil of almond

Something to drink helps, of course, and humor must live
even on that dark corner where once
your life was threatened. Something in the voice, in the telling,
must signal I am safe now and am trying