APOTHEOSIS BY SNOWLIGHT, PARIS

I find you at La Perle again,

high on arrival,

looking good in this light,

twelve days into the new year

the trees stay lit, and it seems impossible

to be sad tonight, though the storm

comes thickly now, and we are in it—

when the bar closes we go to the other bar,

we are always the last man standing,

we stick around like January trees,

way past closing time, that’s loyalty,

the wildjoy of reeling through this city with you

as the blizzard obliterates us like some sybaritic baptism.

How long can we keep on like this,

like children coming at the world headlong and late?

You asked me to put your name in this poem

but you know it’s you without my saying it here

and to the casual reader, and yes,

I love your swagger and kindness

and though together we aren’t always so together

I love our friendship, it’s juice, and when you’re not

(grrr!) making me crazy you’re giving

boundless antic love and when, years from now

or next year, gorged and broken, we die,

we will die like this, alive.

 

---

 

KEROSENE DAYS

In a trance we drift up La Cienega to the cinema.

I am serious about the movies. I am serious about raisinets

and decadence in the afternoon, how it smooths over everything.

When the lights go down it’s like a door opening & we escape

the yellow air & insignificant parking lot, leaning back obliviously.

I am humble before the screen like everyone. I submit

to it without complaint—a pleasurable tyranny,

an alternative, an enigmatic and riveting not-now.

At the movies it is an episode,

like remembering the sound of the sound of laughter.

A meta-moment, away from the chamber of actual sky.

When we leave the theater we’re standing taller and talking sharper,

and for a minute nothing’s sinister in the rapturous light

& we walk out into it—apocalyptic sun contaminating the canyons,

red velvet flames, the Pacific in the distance, glittering and cruel.

Play me a dirty trick Los Angeles, you do it to everyone—

city for getting laid in, city for getting buried in,

some city, some excess, for most everyone unreal.

A blank skylife rapt and weightless—

everyone staring at everyone, everyone liquider

with meds, everyone looking out of their eyeholes

lulled along in the kerosene day.

 

---

 

AND SO THE DAYS. AND SO THE NIGHTS.

In the languid blue we walk along the old stone wall on Charlemagne, the pressure between us like a punishment lifting. Uncertainty a sedative. Narcotic light of midsummer. Five drinks and three hours later we make it to his door. He punches the code in all clumsy. Manhandles me up the stairs. What a mouth you have, he says, making frank use of it. There’s no way back now. And then I am all things to him, his ruffian clay. And he makes a bell of me, a rough take, don’t mention it. The miracle of no hesitation between want & want. Some divinely filthy intervention. Rather a mess but an exquisite one. And went on like that, indecently making use of the premises, getting all crucial in the corner, dousing our sparring in liquor, debauched anon on the sofa, everything torn and rendered, everything smothered in dirty prayer, a fucked-up dare of what could be. There’s nothing pianissimo about him, nothing andante—only largo, forte, crescendo, as we float on the boat of his bed all afternoon. I kiss him as an alternative to crying. I fuck him to make him mine. May the goddess of disgruntle lay her head down among these jeweled hours and dream.