Dear Captain, I Now Believe in Swimming

I

“Word becomes flesh when I think of you – dreaming every night
You dragged along a bright white, unresponsive hand
To carry the plight of the world’s youngest king
We would force ourselves onto locations that we knew would have no meaning
Locking arms to simulate that textbook feeling –
I could even strangle my thoughts of you taking the candy
From a heterosexual baby.

You have no power over me…
And I hate you for waking every morning – cold –
Expensive shoes waiting to be filled with your decadent paws –
Those filthy paws that I unearthed when my kiss seemed like a joke
I never wanted to walk towards you; I’m not a pretty horizon
While we were sedative at moonrise
The clock always beat the shit out of us at the clarion hum
Of a new black day and my mother awake.

Goodnight, baby.”

I awoke to the sound of that spinning through a cortex,
Of now-closed-door events and apple-chunk-spitting chortles,
With tape recording devices taped to the sides of my head,
Spitting feeds of indiscernible pink noise through
The body on my bed,
And I thought on several notions for an hour and a half,
As I reverted back to the arced position I’d take
On my right palm and left calf,
To finish off a weird ritual we shouldn’t have been performing together.

I will clock everything from now on,
Turning violet every November 16th doesn’t help anyone out,
As I cry onto a clear zipped bag of useless, collected memorabilia,
My English brethren patting me on the back ‘til they see the water turn silver,
And lay me down, sweetly, painting in black onto the calendar box,
Gin dripped from my lip and was shoved into the closet.

How cheap it’d be to rhyme here,
On a landscape we’re traveling through together to really get somewhere,
I swear you’re getting somewhere while I’m still caught up in blue-green eyes,
Which don’t seem to age, but get older, you know?
They grow every day that I’m not there to keep them rolling with my immaturities,
Doing everything they can to see sites as big as cities as I try to jam them closed,
“I love you, and I want you to be happy,”
“I love you, so be happy,”
This concept with me grows.

II

Bloody, weekday evenings were enraptured
By the coldest, harpsichord strokes of the tide-tyrannous moon –
Octaves lower, even,
Than that Iowan noose’s croon
(Wrung damp of its blood, it wept, second best)…

And if Venus will only appear over the grandest invasion/alien fluctuation we call California or England as a brittle, white dot, over some plaything sadomasochist’s plot of land (sure, go ahead – include the shitty apartment you have), then I will fly a crop plane so gallantly over these Midwestern stretches, and project from my tears the undying, undying, undying, undying, undying light of that Venus Kallipygos of whom
I will always call home.

I’m the nervous passenger again, your weight at my hip,
To drag me down continually with this grossly faulty ship,
Puking the last of the jazz standards onto sinking, marble steps…

Dear Captain,
I now believe in swimming.