Kevin Killian, p.2
BAD BLOOD
When two people lives in squalor
the dictator among us grins
His snigger subtle as gnome's fingerfuck
Rotting cicada,
imitation rolex worn at the elbow, like his aqualung
worn at the lung
like cough, reflexive cough of Allen Barnett
He's interesting for a year
then you tire of his what.
Did you ever think you'd be seeing him humbled
Not quite there, and even that is sad! Where's the party?
Always thought that maybe, if only, I'd turn on the lights
on the one boy, in the shape of melty copper, his fresh
underwear grinning at his waist in the window--
And now, in the afterlife of Nijinsky, a
mess of pottage I gave up my birthright to anagram:
He is the victor, defeated, spanked.
On the deck he naps, his sorry ass slung in my deck chair
Poetry Princess
from the civil tsi-tsieh of Kim Ki-Young detached as dainty Rotweiler
Well, Sam, it took me ten years to
think of a way to return you from the grave
All bets are off now, we're sailing in an hour
Turn over his Rolex to its backside read its inscription from
Sam to Kevin 1988
and say it's not stolen, stripped from the bony arms drooping off the
gray metal table--
I can read, can't I? I can be this kind of--
reading person--
KizZool cuz skiZool iz out ÷
It's cool ÷ cuz
school is out ÷
WOW did you ever see even in a museum
such a collection of boddisatvahs ÷ the way
the way they have to sit above the rubber
Or that one was, inside his pants, the Yiddish poet
a vegetarian. Or another--all in his mouth--a snarl
of the Sources. The one I loved most, who once,
once only, let go the pain, the night he got drunk,
and I put him to bed, and he said, Bad Blood.÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷
When two people lives in squalor
the dictator among us grins
His snigger subtle as gnome's fingerfuck
Rotting cicada,
imitation rolex worn at the elbow, like his aqualung
worn at the lung
like cough, reflexive cough of Allen Barnett
He's interesting for a year
then you tire of his what.
Did you ever think you'd be seeing him humbled
Not quite there, and even that is sad! Where's the party?
Always thought that maybe, if only, I'd turn on the lights
on the one boy, in the shape of melty copper, his fresh
underwear grinning at his waist in the window--
And now, in the afterlife of Nijinsky, a
mess of pottage I gave up my birthright to anagram:
He is the victor, defeated, spanked.
On the deck he naps, his sorry ass slung in my deck chair
Poetry Princess
from the civil tsi-tsieh of Kim Ki-Young detached as dainty Rotweiler
Well, Sam, it took me ten years to
think of a way to return you from the grave
All bets are off now, we're sailing in an hour
Turn over his Rolex to its backside read its inscription from
Sam to Kevin 1988
and say it's not stolen, stripped from the bony arms drooping off the
gray metal table--
I can read, can't I? I can be this kind of--
reading person--
KizZool cuz skiZool iz out ÷
It's cool ÷ cuz
school is out ÷
WOW did you ever see even in a museum
such a collection of boddisatvahs ÷ the way
the way they have to sit above the rubber
Or that one was, inside his pants, the Yiddish poet
a vegetarian. Or another--all in his mouth--a snarl
of the Sources. The one I loved most, who once,
once only, let go the pain, the night he got drunk,
and I put him to bed, and he said, Bad Blood.÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷
after Charles Olson