A Confessor

Sits here mirroring himself in the bright pool of four alien bulbs
Praying the bugs are confined to the heating
Sucking the floor for more chipped dust off nude walls
Scouring the blankets for small movers with mandibles
Locking the panes down with cool, black glass
Feeling the pangs of yogurt hunger

Understanding that his love for yogurt will be the end of him
and his faux-Sephardic beauty
his hair an effort that countless deaths remember
the deaths of those frozen in the wake of his runnings away
from boys, their fedoras, their St. Mark pretend pretension
the deaths of failed skin in pages
like Rexroth, Levertov, and William Carlos Williams
or the way the museum closes on Mondays (they all do [even the Frick])

The crickets here are bigger, redder, and the wasteland
drips in from your hole to Brooklyn
filled with cheap locks--the vexation of the landlord's lesions
he has stolen so much from the world's Targets
and its directors, programmers, guitar players and pretzel sellers
the sin of the tickle critic
the passion of the wiggler
who will come to know passion as "evening signals nudities"
near the grave of his dumbest loves

Alarum and then to arms again
another sick parade of water-beetles tears down his anti-home
the bricks condescending youthfulness
and his horrible, horrible language
The way books are stacked and loved as taxidermied furniture
the old best-friends who's claws tear at eternal carpets
that writhe with the eggs of what you once considered genius
and now understand to be a one-man-hoax on a one-man-world