If the man who called you nigger in Dominick’s parking lot
had only dialed 1-800-882-Mary earlier today,
he may have been a better boyscout. I bet

We’re strange features, ignoring things. Our hero
Separates from a problem in pink, the thought
To be able to thing in the world.

Deirdre was almost ebony. She washed your boxers
and folded them neatly inside your backpack.
When I came home from the Cape, you'd painted our bedroom

Blessings on the hunter and the hunted
whose iconography of rifle and bone
whined and hissed and sparked and charred,

Teukros: . . . in sea-girt island: Cyprus, where it was written
        by Apollo I should live, naming the city Salamis
        to remember my island home

A man unzipping his fly is vulnerable to attack.
Then the zipper got stuck.
An angel flies in the window to unstick it.

This is a different sort of space race.
To the stars through adversity!
A right hook to the jaw, and the planet sees stars!

I don’t read.
I read Rilke and bleed.

I wake each morning
To the sound of awful coughing   
Coming from the street

I move my body meat smell next to yours,
Your spice of Zanzibar. Mine rains, yours pours—
Sex tropics as a way to not be dead.