Original subtitles

I turned death towards me

like an enormous sunflower.

I was wandering the streets very downtrodden looking for hats,

These Days spilled onto the sidewalk as it did into my headphones

all that autumn he suicided,

the waves of Nico's horse-pulped voice

as smooth as the dark lake he choked on:

These days, she sang, as all Thanksgiving he drowned in the gravy of despair

No one could begrudge or temper;

as in the song I went out walking.

Anniversary of the nacho...

I stopped at a bar,

unsuccessfully:

Watch out for Charley's girl, chided the stereo.

Ligature your etceteras.

These days

I have been adjusting the space between us.

I have been regretting the complications.

I go on the internet,

read about mets,

read about Mets;

read the boxscores & the cancer journals;

stare at photos of first teeth,

funeral selfies, lives miscarried.

No wonder there's a shorthand for I love you,

the bloodred lumpen hearts.

We need a glossary of GIFs to cover all this pain

without losing too much plasma.

A girl on Broadway under Prince went

really cute pregnant belly.

A girl at Broadway and Bleecker went

So are we like done with SoHo?

The shriveling egg sac of her bucket list,

silky smile. Warm air

sang from the grates into my teeth:

I'd fight anyone,

it's common knowledge.

I'm available.

Don't Forget Me, Air,

Trouble Man:

amid the playlists I find a place I like.

and then I leave;

I get on a bus,

I get on a bus.

I don't know what I'm doing.

Burn.

I tell a waitress named Virginia

no one ever had such a beautiful name.

I tell her all my friends will name their kids Virginia,

I swear.

I refuse to speak to the children of my friends.

I go out walking:

the city's ooze produces

this aging teen hope singing Maroon 5 on the C train.

He hits the high note of future imperative love,

emphasis on the will.

Subjunctive love's is just a dream

from another time, imperfect,

in which I was.

Last night I had to wash with some Irish Thing

and that shit had me itching like a motherfucker

goes some lady at St. Nicholas and 139th Street all itching into the phone

so you know it's true.

Everything happens on the C train.

I stay in other people's houses while they watch TV:

woman screams to an endless hitparade of golden oldies / Carmina Burana.

Laughter,

net-flecked.

I cut out for somewhere else on a bus and all there is

is bus people watching TV.

The women won't stop

screaming;

still I love the sight of daylight out a Greyhound window,

the sunshine scared shitless,

spires of Buffalo. Dawn strikes in motion, potholing south,

Port Byron Plaza, an allcaps of a place a whisper, no nothing purgatory:

a flock of sky over misty green field;

and the black birds splitting in silhouette

into a trajectory of morning.

Me on bus to LaGuardia: [emanating light.]

Me on bus to Rochester:

Hello world.

Me on bus:

O Jesus when will it

end.

You tell me

Every once in a while

I have this half notion

No one knows I'm me

so what am I worried about?

Like I'm hauling around this body like a costume.

The Harlem Sun spinning hiphop hits of the nineties—

I in my winding sheet of summerlost,

despair's free rein,

short leash, limned in sweat as round you the light leaks in;

on the impromptu sidewalk stoop say I want to know

how many days I have left.

I do,

I don't,

and the nightly crickets here sound like police cars through wet

polyester and the wail of One Thing Leads to Another,

the plaster cracks.

Your sweet body is a costume.

A bird is trying to fuck my shoe

you wrote me once w/ photo attached;

& my sympathies lay with the bird.

And this man at bar says Dubrovnik was a ghost town

with the breathtaking finality of a sunset—

but I am a congenital overreactor,

and my breath is always coming back again, like a speed bag

or blush of blackflies, sucker for human warmth.

You are hailing this body, every day, like a taxi,

and every day it passes.

I leave you and end up in the mouth of the night—

you know where the night takes people like me:

a hundred free everything

and seven hours later the guys at the bar like

What's the difference between jackals and hyenas?

It's like a cradle

the world holds you in,

I think.

To myself,

the you.

These incidental men,

their dawn split conjecturing. Their jackal laughter,

my unabating aniseed amertume:

the origin story has become loss:

the tough spent seed of it.

And on the E train southbound my thoughts forment into a lacuna:

thoughts of—. And I think, [ ]. Full stop

I think, a shiner of it. Mash my head in.

And the dryvoiced wind wheezing tide is high,

the tide is high, like the men at the bar still singing.

One evening

Garret stood me enough Campari to float a toy freighter

and showed me where the Art Deco proletarian brick Western Union

behaves in sunset like a maquette of itself

and you—

by which I mean you—

should have seen

the pearly cumulonimbus over glittering Hudson yards in the distance

I'm saying, really it dazzled & bedaubed

& By the way I asked why's Chinatown warmer than anywhere else in this town

and found out that sometimes the dragons of East Broadway

breathe an iron fisted fury that disperses the island's western weathersystems

so you know,

remember this place is an island.

Sometimes its weather

is human flesh on fire.

Feel its fog and feel the tide of yer own miscellaneous ineptitudes

wash cheekbone-high like the futile fruitless blush unrequited.

But then these fireflies in Tribeca Park,

just this little triangle of green and glow high lit by Garret's fingertip

and I could hear someone singing Funky funky Broadway.

I thought Maybe I hate this Hollywood shit, but.

I thought

if it's not one thing

it's another damn thing.

Salt amplifying my face and dumb

I walked through the fireflies

seared and breathless as though I, too were aflame.

As though I had never heard of anything so miraculous.

That minute, I hadn't,

the air knit with comets failing.

Next minute, on the sidewalk,

passing:

That shit was the first time I drank beer, man...

She had like, severe depression ..

...you get seizures when it's too hot out.

Lies, lies, lies.

Everybody lies in this heat:

I'm walking behind a guy going

That's why you're not supposed to wear flip flops with your kind of feet

at his suitcase luggin girl.

The sun on Adam Clayton Powell's bronze face,

the low rise yellow breath of it;

the deli: suspiciousness and sportstalk

and coldcuts and Salt'n'Pepa.

Inexplicably, a fisherman galoshing past on Malcolm X,

shouldered rod and tackle box.

Ducking back into the end of summer rain like barreling home from work four a.m.

thru skunks & blossoms

the wrenching scent of it.

Thinking of you and of the rain

after Finn's wedding, that girl at Dundas West station

slumped on the bus lane kerb noise of the deluge and her contrapuntal complaint:

They called me the next day and said he was charged

and I'm all nothing to brag

and kids are jumping turnstiles

and I figure

Bet she started it. Trust no one, heard or over—

like out of my coffee cup that doomed afternoon

when I said,

When you touch me.

And you laughed.

Oh.

And my clarity went.

I walk eighty blocks

through palsied film sets and smartphone pilons,

deadeyed google mapsters and felicitous firemen and some lady

who quit giving out to this other guy for five seconds to tell me

Looking foxy!

I see a car reared on its hind legs like a horse that died

in battle, towing north. The actors stewing within

like a tropical disease.

I trip on my own toes, nose in a book.

I order a pastis. I cloud.

I walk and walk, tire of wanting, remember:

my brother has no memories of me. Says I don't exist anywhere but now

a fallacy so staggering verily I stagger.

And on I carry,

ever so merrily,

sackcloth rat in no one's clothing.

Remember I roll with the speedball punches, existing and not like a time-sagged

fluorescent tube like a neon light that's broke, blinking

was I wasn't was.

Remember November's stark

effigies, failed armistice

My brother thinks we could possibly have a future and I'm like

Who are you?

Futureless I go on eavesdropping every stupid cunt on the sidewalk:

I need a support system.

(Woman at 8th Street and 6th.) Her gasleak certainty—

I consider offering my services.

I lived in a house once built on nothing; below that house the hack

hack swampy spores of its settler disease.

like the future of anything without foundation,

rotten air.

Oh, my mother watches teevee only I don't watch it

I just put it on for her and watch for two seconds and walk away

says man on a street named unsweet Jane.

I fall asleep and wake again

before dawn to the late Rothko skyline, its inky promise,

conifer tips abrading the sky like pointed remarks.

Again I wake.

And then the lush city moring: petunias,

begonias, plummeting humidity a decaffeinated moan

the octopus traffic, reaching.

The sad tidings flickering on the screen of this portable device

like the laxative seep of Jay-Z or the Eagles from a truck window:

stuttered shades of despair, discharging,

milking the color from our conversations—

how saltwater chokes upon tampered sky

how the bad news drips from the stars how the wind whips our hair

into a mustache or a burqa.

How our faces collapse

so beautifully in the unsnappable dark.

Overlaid, the distant hints of birds;

their degenerative road trip refrain:

Will we ever get there?

Please, no.

Please stop the memorial buffet.

Let's talk about never.

I'll never give up my superlatives,

bad attitude, state secrets.

You cannot make me, though due to you

I am unmade like a hotel bed or decomposing paramour

left here to my own devices, lying

in my constituent parts.

The same part of me that begs you Never leave

hopes partially, that you stay out

once you're gone.

The failed heart loves inertia, like muck in motion, caked on a boot

Bootless, my heart fails like the light, gathering itself into tomorrow, unrelenting

and impermanent deaths, ducks in a row.

The light again cracks the sky like a deejay scratched record,

tugging the faithful to its capricious jitters.

Watch me sway among the fallen.

Watch me shimmer.

Play me that song, Sunday.

I've been asking all night long.