From “Beautiful Boyfriend”

My skiff is made of spicewood my oars are Cassia bract

Music flows from bow to starboard

Early Mozart cool side of  Coltrane and miles and miles of   Miles

Cheap Californian Merlot and my young boyfriend

•

If   I could master the nine doors of my body

And close my heart to the cries of   suffering

Perhaps I could love you like no other

Float my mind toward the other side of   hate

•

The shanty towns of   Tijuana sing for you

The slums of   Little Sudan hold evening prayer

One dead brown boy is a tragedy

Ten thousand is a statistic

So let’s fuck my love until the dogs pass

•

All beautiful boyfriends are transitory

They have no souls they’re shiny brown flesh

Tomorrow they’ll turn into purple festering corpses

Fissured gored by a myriad flies

•

Down the Irrawaddy River you lay yourself   to sleep

No sun no moon no coming no going

No causality no personality

No hunger no thirst

•

Malarial deltas typhoidal cays

Tsunamis don’t judge Calamity grieves no one

The poor will be submerged the rich won’t be saved

Purge the innocent sink the depraved

•

What do I smell but the perfume of   transience

Crushed calyxes rotting phloems

Let’s write pretty poems pretty poems pretty poems

Masque stale pogroms with a sweet whiff of oblivion