Fever

First, recognition then attachment.
This is how I arrived at infantile love.
Family was there, family smiled, or
smirked. After love came animal intellect
in a backyard of toothed weeds. Some of
it was insight, an embrace of grass and
apricot. A bewitching. Then stupidity.
Every thought detached itself from me,
turned into a stroke of black and dog
along the bent down grasses. Later a
neighbor girl gently touched my
bottom rib, maybe claimed it, saying
how she preferred boys’ skeletons
to boys. That night, in bed, I imagined
my fingers as pliers, drawing out her
tongue to understand its wise machinery.

Milpitas

Younger and older brother rotated,
declined, took form in anger and sphere.
One was weaker, hair tipped with cold flame,
one larger & dancing, thick with lumpen rage.

Both were arctic, apart, parallel to the wind,
Reduced to ashes, then resurrected by television.
The gray-scale electrons washed us out of
ourselves like acid, clean with so much watching.

Tonight I need to remember this more clearly.
There’s a tall green vodka bottle on a table in
Milpitas. My eyes focus on the not yet dead.
Cigarettes pass from monster to monster to me.

Wyoming

A town littered with broken antlers,
my thoughts so far away. Dad, as
always, driving.

A horse fly flew in through a rolled
down window straight into our flesh
and tension.

What I had in my eye was just a tear,
not the clear water of self. Mother
slept but held me on her lap, until she

dreamed I was a snake
and screamed and threw me to the car floor.
Since then one sack of memory rubble

gets dragged behind. A prophet paces the rooms
of his wives-crowded tower. My stitches
come out and leave a vivid scar, snaking.

San Jose

We brothers were paper, cut clean from
the mothering. Grown children, inflated.

His head was onionskin, peeling.
In science fiction he’d have knives for eyes,

but they turned around backwards,
sharp in and of themselves, carving cancer.

I remember the cigarette that Mom slapped
from his lips in dim light patio party limbo.

I can’t stand to see you do that, she said. But
I can’t tear out my own eyes now can I,

she said, then hesitated.