Derailleur

Greased to the shoulder

And pulling ¼ inch steel,

I am flexing masculinity in a helmet of sky,

Space monkeying my way out of tramautic

Groundswells at the baseball diamond, colored

by dropped snowcones red and blue,

the Baltimore orioles’ coach with a thick mustache

staring me down hours after his son had told me

I was going to hell, with a smile.

This is a form of prayer,

Breathing over a glass of high alcohol,

Shirt stripped, shoulders pumping

Against a machine I do not understand

With knees in the creek straining

 its way across the living room.

I have tenitis.

And the house is changing, room by room,

Floorboards giving way. aching as they have been

I thought I would be the first to go

Out of this improvised temple.

Gorgeously sad, this world

Has smoke pouring out of paul’s lungs

Who said he would never smoke again,

Graying the competitively rainbowed photographs

Along the walls to the dismal shading his former lover

And my former lover and nearly all who desire a shortcut

To power without power these days create of their

Politics of heresy and restraint.

The fork is bent, but has been for years.

Pitched me off into the concrete on

Some foreign street at a drunken 2am closing.

My chest throbbed for weeks then,

Every other day under the weight of a breakup

From years past, under weight of the bar.

But god, what pain! Thank you again.

My skin sloughs and folds,

Is wet and rots, frizzles, is thumbed away.

The chain that held the spiral is broken.

No longer suspended, I am

Thinking about the future with joy and hope

For the first time in years, I am

Bursting with life to create and weapons

Against smallness.

This is a form of prayer,

The nervous tearing between my toes

On the nights when sleep has decided to be a dream.

The knowledge of the gap between what is good

And what combats the feeling, the pictures acid morphing

Along the walls breathing large and twisting against

The ever imaginative night. Staying here, not running,

Being this too muchness, is a form of prayer.

In the first spring of cloud castle

I spread myself along the roof, though it was

Still wet with rain, and danced Eileen myles and

The new york poet fireplace into my new house

Through the open window. I imagined what it would

Mean to grow lovely again like a zebra tomato

Rather than revolutionary against everything.

Jung cries of mechanical stages like

The stink of old laundry, inevitable and shared.

He is right I think, though we are larger --

Much like the suggestion in the shape of a mug.

Not everything set is a setting sun.

Codex playing as we drive over the hill, the parents who will later turn theological, continuing the sarcasm of the generation they raised, who will later run for the high swamps of the Europeanized everglades always taking the L, codex is playing incessantly the hum and explosion of the pistons in the engine caught before being sent into space like some ship with highly human persons running from some things exploring others trusting in themselves to deal with whatever comes and I remember this sitting in bed with a ghost of my arm around her weight leaning into me as we drive by the metal structures of consumption lining the path between our homes and begin to cry as we sing songs whose words we cannot know whose words we cannot unknow and everything is happening too quickly the story wrapping artfully about itself like a sunning snake written about in some poem flowering and flopping and lifting gradually at a run off of the runway, the air of everything holding it up as if on promise, the promise of the huge world the great opening of soul and still reconnecting with and connecting with and living into the cavern of ocean. I am going to hell for this sex and poetry, for the men I have gotten fired and all of the worlds I have made without saving for their higher education. I am going to hell on a high speed rail for the lies I have told and all the people I have never been and the way through all of this rain I have loved it all and cherish its scars.