KEVIN KILLIAN

E-Z STREET / IN THE DARK /
HOW CAN YOU SAY NO? / SECOND THOUGHTS

E-Z STREET

On E-Z Street, the poet coating my garbage can,
in his vomit,
finds his throat ripped out, his windpipe a shaggy mess

Syllable leaking

He’s taken his freedom and made mockery
of my rights as a fag

On E-Z Street towering cranes shock the shit out of
poet who sits there, buzz bomb slightly up his ass

just in reach, I can feel it in his underwear

He doesn’t do anything for me, that’s a
problem if you want to be him

You’ll be walking, haltingly, the buzzing
in your butt a threat you then turn
around and live with

Beware Eastern flight back to Boston
Masked internal security men reach you, their palms
on your biceps, murmur, excuse me sir
is that an explosive device tenting your Lee jeans
Oh no, I only plan
to park my car in Harvard Yard

Show some respect,.you’re like Richard Yates,
the gayest novelist America ever produced.

—And maybe I was too harsh (later) but
as I told Jeffrey Jullich,
“I don’t forgive and I don’t forget”

[reverse]

IN THE DARK

Am I missing the point? You’ve got Western rubber,
cinnamon, you’re trading in Aden,
you’re lonely, even the sun seems to disappear all

at once, over a line in the sand that’s glowing, for a minute,
violet and blue, then orange and pink, then brownish-black
then you’re in the dark, your goods clutched and

telling the family, “Mathilde must not marry a Catholic
from Chamonix.” All these Tintin names in a mercantile world
that float into one’s head lying on the pillow,

glimpsed from afar, from above, he’s got sandy blond hair
and cheekbones only a bit less severe than
Maria Shriver’s, digging into the lace, his eyes, closed

still throb with dreams. He’s drooling maybe a few mg
every ninety seconds and I guess his head, this austere head,
connects with his neck, throat, so on, I don’t know

it’s dark

Mother on the phone, “Your father collapsed in Rome
or Assisi, in front of the magnificence of the Last Supper,
I never knew how big Michelangelo’s David is.”

He shines like a man in the dark, his hands large as
linebacker’s, oversized, out of proportion

I’m not feeling that great myself,
it’s a big country, with lots of little flowerpots and I
want you all to myself

spread out on the eiderdown. Winter’s coming, the quacks
freeze up in the registry, see them frosted like
Philip Guston drawings, “Quack” here,

“Quack” there. I’m talking to you like you’re
here, I’ve never been good
about judging when you’ve left, when importance has
left the room, abandoned me for heaven.

Tonight I’m in the dark, reading Rimbaud’s letters and thinking,
he wasn’t a slave trader, perhaps that lightens
the grim inescapable. He only asked for two boy slaves.


[reverse]

HOW CAN YOU SAY NO?

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle,
here played by Kylie and Dannii
Minogue, one beautiful, the
other a know-it-all, fashioned by
sage as emblems of, “Things
said to be opposites that aren’t quite.”

Arise, Shadows, bid me go out on strike
And strike another till time catch;
Dannii in the corner, strumpet-like,
Eyes like she the French call “Vache.”
Things said to be opposites
that aren’t quite: cf. Angel and Spike,
lemon peel and cherry pits,
In that old Georgian mansion bike,
old pictures of some random batch.

How can you say no to things
said to be opposites, really the same?
Hearts with no strings catch fire
Longer than the day without name,
In the pearly CD chamber, earrings
fall from the Minogue sisters, flame
leaps up from the heaped potlatch,
Bataille in empyrean he hell spits
in raving autumn, yearning for the tame,
both beautiful, one a quasi-dyke.

[reverse]

SECOND THOUGHTS

(about the so-called opposites)

Fire on the one hand
Earth on the other

“On the one hand” itself a kind of death wish.
wizened fingers fumbling for the catch

“On the other hand,” like a school of pigeons
pecking for crumbs, rush alight when they see your shoes.

Shoes for style
Gloves, Cockney rhyming slang for style

As in “Wotcher, Bill, got any gloves?”
Second thoughts about letting you walk away

long legs storming off toward
Stork Club, fire in your one hand

(lit cigarette on chilly balcony, condo
windows squares of light across the lane)

and in the other, earth, i.e. hand filled with
my sperm, furtively wiping off on the white wall

of my apartment, later someone will sniff and say,
Oh, my, Kevin’s been a busy boy today

Me finishing what I’m doing, sending it
to Paolo Javier

who’s got gloves for days, in Websters’
you see his picture next to style entry

as down forty stairs the iron door
slams to say, Busy no more.

[reverse]