Hell’s Kitchen

To have my cake and be eaten, too,
     I’ve done what no other poet has—
     tossed silver through fits of abandon,
     through spirals of denial, off cliffs
     down into pink-rimmed oblivion
     where summer’s tongue lies wet and swollen,
     drowning in wild puddles dying glued
     using its swell to shut shells and lips

     too loud to wait out its crimson truth:
     that what I sought impoverishes
     the movement, the mind’s revolution
     furiously disproving kisses
     offer any solace to a man
     broken under the wheel of soft porn,
     believing love only can and should
     be hard, that friction’s its own purpose.

Hitting home heartache’s wail using tools
     Pilate and Hitler used to nail up
     Jesus, Jews, and “degenerates” on
     walls built on sand, not on evidence,
     how civilization’s foundation
     quakes so quickly when I lie upon
     its sunken bed the way ghost ships do,
     fucking up “anything with a pulse,”

     grinding down “any damned soul that moves,”
     down to its dark salt often enough
     to know light is a substance no one
     trusts to cure themselves of diseases
     mining their driest wit from within,
     taking their bleak time to kill off men
     who write of it, those impatient fools
     chewing on their hearts’ sweetest pieces.

Among them I moved, opened too soon
     mouths and buttocks I cruised like beaches,
     splitting them like peaches, like oven
     doors torn down, like gentlemen’s breeches
     removed from oiled canvases hanging
     by threads of dignity time had spun
     but called in like debts long overdue—
     in Hell’s Kitchen, thirst feeds phoenixes.