There is a place beyond
meaning where aureate
rays flex like tendons in
the reading room of a male
pectoralis, scrutinizing
catafalques of dead writers
that arrived uncertainly,
alone in the abandoned
bathroom or piled high
in the stacks like kindling,
splintered cords your
angry daddy feeds the
reprisal, rows of devas
piled up in pyres. Three
blocks down, a frat boy
cast his blanket aside
so you could read from
cover to cover, knowing
in that second it was the
story you were writing
inside as you turned and
melted away from denim
ensconced thighs, twin
pillars burning in Lord
Redesdale’s Arabia. Now
withdrawn from circulation.
Falling down the wormhole
that swallowed Audubon’s
birds. In Vedic literature,
a man approaches Lord
Visnu on the shores of the
same milky lake rejecting
which you fled in a torn
rugby shirt, chipped tooth,
dislocated navel. Always it
is the same lake of fire in
your Book of Revelations.
The same Hegelian dialectic.
Three blocks in the other
direction, there is a bridge
from which men fall to
their deaths. There’s also
a bench if you prefer to sit.