Was what I saw
sitting in encounter

you in Tampa
between bird cries: wheels of

broken big wheels – hair silly
string and sad string?

Was what I saw
sitting in Kenosha.

north bound children
with no hope for encounter?

*

Through milk dishes, fishing line
and generous summer storms

Tampa rains over
trash: space we generously called

a garden.

*

while passive driveways are plowed
in Kenosha

and strange American boys sweat
American

*

their father’s sift the sea
for women

and “good sea women”
for drinks

for Charlie

I.

Candy Cones experienced a brief renaissance in Candy Land
an oddity of architectural taste: finicky and old-cat guarded

Cones eye-dotted by the predicable phases of a comfortable moon
or garden position: curved back proximity to generous crop yields

ascetics put to council by the wise: gingerbread
men, lolly girls, dark skinned chocolate that defied
definition; a choice to live without a map – who
does and does not possess a
milky white center

to working class bungalow men who mistake genius for candy corn
to hippy dippy dots who want art to point at the sky

and children who were taught to turn away from all things round
to age - suspicious of cyclical nonsense

because mocking the earth shapes is just a manly way of saying
you’re so sweet!

still these cones are everywhere and they’re not going anywhere
and you used to drive the midnight like it was the face of the moon

used to champion freedom songs to the girls curled up in back seats
skin-stuck to the sweat of black leather

singing:
when we were young!

Charlie, we were young!

II.

Anyway, I’m eating dinner and
Benson’s wasting my time with the Easter Sack
saying, “bundle of joy, bundle of dirty joy.”
as I try to choke down this consommé to be polite

and our conversation tends towards-
the cum slips on an otherwise hushed Easter Island, a falling in Quito,
Dade County pick pocketing with two bad hands in your pants

he defines art as-
5 different ways to say

1. the world is hard like a …
2. the shape of the world makes you hard as a…
3. we’re stuck between a…
4. oh what’s become of this landing…
5. in cold rooms of artificially pumped heat where you…

back and forth transcribe his face on the dry-wall of your stuffed heart,
beat out instinctive rhythms learned in Modern University:
a bog-side cabin abandoned for fishing holidays, abandoned
for the pursuit of minutiae, abandoned because (is it father?)
holy or domestic

I have seen Charlie O in Lake Lackawanna huddling under unknown shades
I have seen Charlie O in Naples resisting the Old Italian ways
I have seen Charlie eat shit for our Republic in Easter suits of muted grays

Art is transformative – Death is in finite
in Charlie O’s case

now he is Death Idea –
now floats to the surface like spring lilies:
Million Star gypsophila: white on bog water,
dressings to cover the murk

art is to pluck small flowers from gack! wretch!
fingertips: as deep as one wills one’s self to go

playing it safe until you recognize Charlie O under your fingernails
until you realize the smell is indescribable

And anyway, I’m eating dinner and
Benson’s asking me to wash my hands
saying “bundle of nerves, twenty-eight death-cusp bundle of nerves”

and he reminds me that life mimics-
Charlie O in moon boots:
boyish conquer of ancient Maine, twist inventor
of go-on forever endings, the resurrection of cool

landings upon landings
Charlie O’s statue studied by the boys left behind: the go-overboards
Hag psychics tuning radios for comfortable Spring sounds:

the sound of the moderate sun
the sound of a levelheaded breeze
the sound of friendship off mute

Charlie O as forever painting of Chucky Osmond
who (if you believe a stand-up guy like Benson)
skulled-screwed death’s brains out

hate fucked for fertile eggs
lost in woods of sightless crickets and
just the ground

just the quiet simple ground they give you
in songs of old-fashioned faith
reverent bed-warm covering of mildew
buoyant naps of Christian Grace

III.

...so I finally looked at Charlie O
through rain on top of Stanhope lakes
both seed and sky to mute again
these charcoal plains, this gravel wind

where Charlie fished on Ketamine
and lust now hushed in muscle give
not long for boy - for boyish risk
of half-drunk mourning's half-drunk sick

-because when you died Chucky, Chris and I did this silly thing: this thing where we let all your fish out into Lake Musconetcong - which seemed to be a good idea at the time; seemed to be especially poetic for two college kids who were, for fuck sake, 22. just like you - remember? - but they were saltwater fish you asshole - and you didn’t tell us cause why would we ever need to know? – isn’t that right? what possible reason would we ever have to know such things…

It''s how I remember "sleeping like a teenager"

on beds of Astroturf, piss

and handball

whistling good morning sunshine,

attending brunch,

worthwhile getting up

And our friends still see us on Mt. Olympus

bolt between fat knuckles

three drinks into thirty years later

Except I don’t call anyone anymore

and when I do I put Alex on the phone

When they told me I had cancer

I was overwhelmed by a sense of things needing to be done

or done again, done better

I went to the archives and pulled everything

The novel that never got beyond the first few pages

Short stories that stalled after a promising first paragraph

Numerous notes towards essays never written

Flawed scripts to unmade films

Partial lyrics to unrecorded songs

Going through it all turned my stomach

The incompleteness of everything sickened me

I wandered for hours through a maze of unfinished rooms

littered with dead-end concepts

strewn with the bones of bad ideas and good ones

A chaotic necropolis of experiments that failed

or were abandoned from lack of conviction

by earlier versions of myself, now also extinct

Finally the ghosts of my dreams

began to whisper of another write-off

How could I hope to put this half built charnel house in order?

Where would I even start?

I start with the poems, the early ones

A long body of work laid out in a cardboard coffin

tragic juvenilia

stiff with self-consciousness and pale with literary influence

I flush out the affectation, slice off the bad lines

Amazingly, instantly, the poems switch on

Their toes twitch

They come alive and move

the way they were intended to but never quite did

I wonder what's happened

Why I can do this now

It can't be emotion recollected in tranquillity

I haven't acquired that yet

Maybe I've just got the knack

at last

Perhaps it rode in on the back of my test results

for reasons too ironic to contemplate

When I had the time I didn't have the ability

Now I have the ability I may not have the time

But let's not be negative

They caught it early

It hasn't spread

This time for the first time

I may have both the ability and the time

If I can't fix the past

and I can't fix the present

at least I can fix the archives

While they're doctoring me

I'm doctoring the record

and just for the record

both procedures appear to be working