10/23/2023

Assigned the same signs in sun, moon and mercury,
We agree to trade dreams. (You share Bob’s medieval idea
Of life refracted backward, the dream remembers the future.
Cross-country yearning reminds you of Margery Kempe, and we take the L anyway…)
Before knowing you truly, I dream that you assign me exercises
To copy out the poems of your roommate, then of placidly observing your swimming
Like a lifeguard – but fastening myself to your life, not saving it –
At the Berkeley City Club, I imagine you swim like they do in Arthur Russell songs,
Of a child’s habit, varied strokes, a physical refrain…
More consciously, I dream of you splintering into a dozen words over aperitivo,
Traversing half the world in Lemaire, for seven cameos in five different poems.
Wishing finally for satisfaction, I dream of just holding hands,
Which happens! Debt convertible to future coterie. 
I dream of a rotation of friends passing through (22.3156114, 114.1746653),
A covering on the East Rail Line, with trepidation, to some event or battle;
I fall asleep to Robert Ashley’s Private Parts and imagine two musician friends 
Covering it in a cinema, surrounded by flickering candles;
I dream about ordering at the FTM Hooters, where the clientele
Fawn over the top surgery scars on display. I ask to substitute grilled onions
On my “Flat-Out Flavorful” Burger to which, across the counter, Stephen Ira replies,
“You don’t get it, Brian. The food’s not the point here.” I wither.
At my table I see that he has a new poem published on the Poetry Foundation,
A free verse sonnet that ends in a couplet the form of a LiveJournal status message:
“[ How I’m feeling | Acquiescence ] / [ What I’m Listening to | 🎶 Park that car, 
drop that phone, sleep on the floor, dream about me 🎶 ]”

 Songs write the law, and laws / are bought for just a song;
it pleads the fourth, the fifth / and takes the fall for whom it wrongs.

Borrowing a friend’s joke that, if a person’s lifespan is 75 years,
Middle age begins at 25, and old age at 50,
I offend your friend of twenty years. You say: in middle age
In lieu of fucking your elders, learn to respect them.
My subjectivity, I joke, makes way for becoming your hole, your brute sans doctorate,
a character in your long poem. You joke: you take me as a blank screen against
Which any desire can be projected, for the closet or coming out; a cock that never tires.
We empty into each other, destroy our sleep. I watch The End of the Track (1970), 
An early Taiwanese film banned for “homoerotic themes”, driven by a lusty childhood friendship 
That pits academic potential and class against a responsibility to the memory of said friend
Allowing me to bawl into the phone. 
  

“I envy your scientific education,” says an industrialist 
In Pasolini’s Porcile to another. “Not a scientific one,” the other replies,
“A technical one.”

And when you sleep I do,
In black and white, 
          Palmistry ft. Bladee & Isabella Lovestory blaring again in the other room,
I dream of myself seeing successive iterations of myself
Each five years younger than the last, swimming out;
Each calls out to the last, the words inevitably lost

To depict the liberation
Of work from its ability
In a manner true to its nature
It is logical to first free the ability