#11 [slaughter ball]

            I promised him
an ode, “Jared
stubble in parfumerie”

_________

            enjoy the bumps
obstructing cognition—

_________

            two or three
roses beautiful because
they are separate from
each other—separated
roses are more beautiful
than joined roses

_________

            she’d never
heard of sugar snap
peas—I explained
sugar snap peas in detail

_________

imbibe straight male
narcissism, see how
it tastes and sounds

_________

             Elaine
Stritch died yesterday,
89—see mother once more
before she turns 84

_________

hooked on Cheops

_________

my hand lit up and
crammed into you

_________

             or Schoenberg’s
waxed bikini line
redux, trilling like Romeo

_________

             nonstop
Otello storm clouds,
his fat unshaved
chops sucking storied
lollipop

_________

             nose of
96-year-old blind
mother of anyone,
a face moving
into early dementia

_________

dementia at
96 isn’t early

_________

I like the word “stipple”
I say at lunch

_________

common for sons
to be sued for defamation
of character—I have
thrice been tried

_________

aunt whose last shame
before death is witnessing
the mayo bologna fight

_________

no pee coming from Fed Ex
man at urinal, I linger
by sink and allow silence
to blossom so his pee-
shyness can grow audible—

_________

maybe upper-middle-
class dad will smother
the baby—

_________

            your near-
death experience
involved a wall
of grape hyacinths

_________

identification with crying
baby but also a wild
wish to stop the crying
by stopping the baby’s
existence

_________

vielleicht the baby
is a future war
criminal

_________

her name is Aurore
Clément—she
plays the mother in
Chabrol’s Bridesmaid—

_________

I added Venetian
red which is really
brown to create an
illusion of ground
beneath a car

_________

added ultramarine blue
above the car and
accidentally effaced
purple coneflower stems

_________

            then dragged
a pencil through
pink to retrieve
lost lines of two
figures coitally embroiled

_________

            and now I
see a rhubarb-colored
dodge ball (slaughter ball?)
balanced between two
mustard lines—

_________

skillfulness abides in
seemingly random and
unthought decisions—

_________

            deliberation,
if it occurs, must
itself be spontaneous—

_________

            I won’t
ask him to pose—
asking involves
a level of abjection
even I am incapable
of descending to—

_________

            though
deciding I won’t ask
fills me with teen
despair—father’s
fullness reigning
over me with titanic
indomitability—

_________

             my recourse
to code situates
me as Satan, not
major-domo Satan but
Satan’s little helper
with an apron and
thimble and food
processor for slicing
carrots on the bias—

_________

            Josep
Pla’s anti-Semitic description
of Jewish necks—

_________

caught having sex with a
guy at 17, pants opened,
dicks out, taunted for
a year

_________

            an edible
crawling tortoise
we ran over and couldn’t
eat the murdered meat

_________

wanton destructiveness
toward my private
property—

_________

            a problem
for five decades, these
objective unlyrical statements

_________

maybe gradually caress
his arm to receive
touch backward

_________

scarf by Vera a status
symbol in Coral Gables
or towns that yearn
to be Coral Gables

_________

cross out a big area
with bilge and then
write on top of the bilge

_________

             headed
toward hell, saying
please to hell as I approach
its ambiguous gate—
or is hell a river?

_________

            in the Hill
Korwa tribe’s drawings,
an alphabet wordlessly
emerges

_________

a non-gay-seeming
man was holding hands
with a gay-seeming man near
the ragtag pharmacy

#16 [a pear blue green slivered near brown]

the death books I haven’t read

_________

my trumpet teacher is dead and I
don’t want a lesson from his son,
a cougher

_________

“we are so alike”
my grandfather said
in his erotic inscription

_________

            a recorded
clinical voice like silent
Nazimova’s Salomé

_________

             saying “data”
with a Frank O’Hara accent

_________

            the painting
has a frog in its throat

_________

in the elevator mirror my
jaw looked swollen

_________

            at 13 she
sang in Cavalleria Rusticana—
debut dreamt or real?

_________

I almost fainted
from imprudent diet pills

_________

draw the grapes on his
arm—I want hair
to compose a proposal

_________

begin to see any pelvis
as a covered wagon

_________

and start to wonder how
genitals discern destination—
why each groin seems
to contain two genders

_________

             to write in
the midst of a sexy demon-
stration on the subway

_________

            wondering why the
man’s knees are crossed,
legs and hands forming
a triangle like elongated Bruckner
phrase if Lenny Bernstein
were wearing a nightie

_________

                        we caress
on the street and I say
to the horse I am an
exhibitionist, not the black
glasses of Roman Polanski

_________

             mouth of
a man who resembles
John Coplans

_________

            perceiving
myself as a body by dis-
covering how to unearth
outlines beneath gesso,
digging a B pencil into
wet surfaces—

_________

he recommends a blending
brush, Richter’s secret

_________

the year argyle
(sweater, socks)
tried to change
my life and failed

_________

            he is praying,
not stroking himself—
the two activities in civic
space interchangeable

_________

clad legs signal the return
to a depressed world-view

_________

oil paint feels better when
it lands on top of oil paint
like brother-brother incest,
randy pallbearers

_________

Gandhi, Pavlova, Pavel
Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus,
Bellini, which Bellini,
both Bellinis, the abstract
coven

_________

            Jewish coven of
meddlesome Castevets
in Rosemary’s Baby, seen
from Mia’s paranoid
or perspicacious vantage

_________

to close my eyes and then
discover purple shoes
Hieronymus Bosch painted

_________

sickle moon a pear blue
green slivered near brown—

 

_________

            adjectival
slot is where lust
can roost

_________

the world at 7:30 is
trepanned dusk
mitigated by pink

_________

lozenge pointillism, penis-ism
vs. pointillism—your points
are sticks or rods, like
saffron threads in plastic box
or like a sapphire
needle and the foam bed
the stylus rests its unworthy
napping head upon

Wayne Koestenbaum has published eighteen books of poetry, criticism, and fiction, including Notes on Glaze, The Pink Trance Notebooks, My 1980s & Other Essays, Humiliation, Hotel Theory, Best-Selling Jewish Porn Films, Andy Warhol, Jackie Under
My Skin, and The Queen’s Throat (a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist). His next book of poems, Camp Marmalade, will be published in March 2018.  He has had solo exhibitions of his paintings at White Columns (New York), 356 Mission (L.A.), and the University of Kentucky Art Museum. His first piano/vocal record, Lounge Act, was issued
by Ugly Duckling Presse Records in 2017.  He is a Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature, and French at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City.

Published January 2018.