The Mesh Beret

Look at me writing identity poetry like a black girl
We white guys know how to make a thing a thing.

Look into the dark there’s the prettiest word I’ve learned in years
phantomasgoria
so weird and long it gets italicized apart from the rest.

Ph’ntmsgr’s only happened to me once outside this poem
“I’ll never forget”
the blue and red flashes my eyes shot into the dark becoming the tendons of their necks
they wanted something every face does and everywhere I look I put a face.

On the street everyones’ faces talk to Charlie
and Charlie wants to rub them and say yes that! or fuck
off but it’s exhausting so I put my ear buds in.

The sensuous possibilitates anything.
Possiblation breeds contemptemplation,
followed by its handmaiden, Jargyn.

Why isn’t trepidatious a word actually or nauseous or irregardless, listed
in dictionaries as incorrect but there they are anyway

Text Edit is such a Trepidarium. It does not believe in the expansivatory
possiblation of the sensuelle. It does not believe anything at all. I have no patience for machina nihilismo
Trepidatious:
1) in being a place where I write
2) in telling me I don’t know how to spell
3) in having infinite flowing margins

I’ll give Text Edit number 2 but what is text even when it does not correspond to a discrete page. Or when writers can rarely also spell.

Ha I just asked that with some seriousness.

but I demand answers too so maybe I am crazy enough to call myself undiscovered.

Cocks definitely smelled. Almost as much as balls, bent and sour in a way that was kind of femme, a delicate persuasion, the salesman’s foot sliding in between the door and the doorframe. Before his head had been guided into the divet of Stan’s ball sack, he had imagined strong, toxc odors: new cans of tennis balls, diesel gas explosions, road kill on a highway median all the grass stripped away. When he thought about these things, summoned the image of a trucker’s open blue shirt and bound that to Stan’s lily-white hips, it was almost there. Sex was fun if he pretended a lot.

In the growing dark I
play alone here at home I
had your proud face
your fresh hands and shins
you were my king and I
your horse bridled whining when
you were not there.

you clasped at distant cities
like old friends.
Ko-jin in the west,
Ko-kaku-ro
its walls clothed in bright gates
to the north
Shoku
Sanso’s miles of paved road
paths splitting into a poem
Choan divine
set in a ready loneliness

You lay near me when
your mind floated a cloud
to blue mountains, green
rivers wound through flowers
and overflowed
willow trees
you said ere
your departure long
each man
an isle
you said
dust we
come dust
we go
and so on.

Not all go like smoke-bursts
nor fall apart as ice.
Where but here could
you find a better inn
A higher terrace to reach
the far-off sky

at sunset rain steeps the trunks
in streams of white dust
three heron sail out
of the hills; my hand
covers them
blots them out.

I’m pretty sure I’m in New York because I misread Gatsby. Like cool what a fun party.

I had three gin and sodas before stepping into the theater. I bought a large tub of popcorn and a large coca-cola. I sat in the second row and ate everything and every pore was open.

There is no shame in saying I loved it. I also mix blue gatorade with prosecco, and dip my pretzels in ketchup. I’m a militant vulgarian.

There are certain advantages to vulgarity. Like, it let’s you set aside everything you know about The Great Gatsby and watch the fireworks and pretty girls grind into sequins. Pretty. And in being pretty and obscene, to the point of self-parody, knowingly and unwittingly, I think the movie says more about America’s national character and taste than a spare, lyrical novel from 1925.

So I love Baz (Bahz?) because he made blockbuster trash out of my favorite novel, which, looking back on it, wasn’t even that great. I was 16 when I read it the first time. I had basically only read Harry Potter before I had picked it up, and I was like totally wowed. And I was wowed watching the movie, because I think you’re right, I think it is the Gatsby I deserve.

And Leo, Leo, Leo. I believe in the dream of Leonardo DiCaprio, the way he has to be murdered at the end of his films, optimistic and blonde and sinking to the bottom of the sea. It’s better than snuff. The way he looks at me from newstands. I don’t even read magazines but I think about buying one so they’ll keep his face up at the Duane Reade.

A critique of the American Dream as blockbuster commodity? Duhhhh.

My sexual ideal has shifted
to a schlubby and bloated
post-athletic Jew
sort of a Sven laid waste
by cheez-its and, yes
a lot more like my father

that is all
and police lights look pretty
reflect on the tree red
blue blue red yes
the cops shut down my street
again

I had to sit down on the train to write this
because it wanted out now
like a baby being born
like a food baby
plus PEP spins.

I want this inside your head
but never my lips inside your ass
I’ve saved this image of your rosebud like stretches into the rubber bottom of a brown balloon
Shakespeare loved a straight dude
like that
which is weird
because we’re both available.

poem po-em
pohem pome
poam poum