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Aubade
you need not call home nor run from him
honey bum, lie, use him like you used to use me behind the
Tastee Freeze after sculpting your six pack at the free weight
gym in ‘73, listen to southern white boy blues in his Trans-Am
before he drops you around the corner from Hopeful Horizons
(aka: our halfway house), let him light your skull shaped bowl
and call you shorty, and say no let me do it, let him do it to
you fast, don’t make him ask for it, you can ask for it, then go
get 2 a.m. grits and eggs with him at the IHOP off the
interstate where we used to read Jung and of the Golden Dawn and
divine triumphant Tarot all night over vanilla cokes and
shredded hash browns and sampled spoonfuls of fake blackberry
syrup from the table caddie even as neither of us had a clue
about what real blackberry syrup might taste like, go see “Play
Misty For Me” alone to sleep it off at the Regal after leaving
him to wonder if anyone ever before believed your light would
never go out downstairs at dawn, forget I once lived for that
same last light and for you to return before I heard the thud of
the gazette delivered at our cottage door, yet I bid you flop in
this laughably misbranded Hopeful Horizons where Vega and
Capella refuse to shine on everyone but fools for love like us,
crash here with me so I can untangle your unwashed weave in a
rocker beside our lousy cot, please listen with special care to
this final part of my plea for once in your life my little
runaway, I bless what you do with him as I can no longer do with
you because of my advanced state, but do not return to my side
for pity, nor compassion, nor to uncork another bottle of our
secret formula love me not potion, but merely so we can almost
realize what it feels like to get some desperately needed rest
and rise with no need to recall how unlikely our faces once
looked to each other with a spoon as our only mirror.
from a Preface to The
Picture of Dorian Gray
1.
The
there is
of
is
and a
not
the
avenge
art’s analytical
aims.
2.
Gist
opposes
principled
impressions
of
the mirror’s edge
to the precise degree
criticism
of
ugly implication
is rarely the fault
of kerning
Bickham script.
3.
Those
in
these
denotes
the remaining
resurrection
left erect.
4.
Elect autobiography.
Elect whom you frame.
Elect an immoral don.
5.
State Affairs
are all the rage in
the nineteenth century.
The nineteenth century
is all the
rage
in a shot glass.
6.
The
of
of art
can be proved
in
kitchenette
crockery,
but
porcelain saucers
recall
an art
model
That merely
reforms
the
New Criticism.
Must we
aspire to
slip on and
off
your
life histories
This intensely?
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