dear william,

after a hospital elopement, and the placards that proclaimed we were somehow elopers, cosmonauts, russians doubtless, i find myself placing cyrillic in your brow which is a little mine already. a letter to you i could write in russian in stutters and in starts. i would stutter and suture cyrillic for this scratched ring moment. are you my boy? it feels good to be walking fast under this sky. prematurely El Greco before eight on a july evening. light warbles as the dark purpling blue (subaltern? huh?) sky elopes above me, above you, elopes, zoundless.

it feels good to be shopping fast and furious,
half in, half out, of Old English.

take jurassic steps through the candle aisle.

alone even, even alone. this is a TARGET store, you are safe i say to myself, ridiculous as a Biblical explanation for metaphorical expansiveness...slutty pulchritude of whalers circa 1840...there are Japanese nylon recyclable lunch bags with gay purple pandas and green whales, there are a thousand variations on 1957 and 1962 in those vases and those pitchers, look yonder, those cups and chip bowls, those summer slippers of pleasure are melamine...

Melamine is alive and well;
how can you be ailing, truly?

Keats was no more an hourglass than any one dipschutz of us. You are still in love. Keats was not to enjoy the beauty of melamine nor the luna green shade of your t-shirt. i smeared you...was it last night only? you told your lover to sleep and your lover sleeps in the cool room. you are not far. who are still in love. to comment on that shade of blue to strangers as we go to pick up the salmon in the salad, with the little plastic cup of balsamic vinegar and oil the young healthy Italian brothers put in the styrofoam box, isn't it ridiculous miming? what we? you are still there. i am here.

it's good to dip the fish in the balsamic neolithic color liquid. and know every fiber tastes it, especially your brain stem and its ancient reservoir of fear, quiet for now. you realize it is snack time back there, you realize William Premier has no ping pong partner, the boys who comb each other's hair are probably doing it now, listening to this thunder. you have gone and left your little brother who sat with you behind everything. how cruel and sottish. how besotted you are. father william, he hid when you left to avoid hearing your goodbye. a boy you were. it is july 1st. a phone number is a traitorous valentine for such as you or i. incantatory but ribbonless as language between dreams.

there is a love supplication that goes something like...

"mitochondrial dna, may i?...

somehow i knew you would come, or i would come to you. you find yourself no less surprised that you grow more in love with the planet for all the ridiculous stops in the escalator, the unforgiving and impenitent leaves that center you in the florid heart attack of their laughter. william, it was really a glove i felt. you are a boy with a knife and a gun. you put your shoulder against mine and close your eyes and hunt in the woods mentally. you tell me each step. you murder a deer but it is a deer like a poem on rollerskates. i burst out laughing and you are deadly serious. you sat with me three days and held my hand. i did not say goodbye. the fathering is silly and gauche. i might as well tell myself i eat swan as salmon tonight. tonight i say goodnight to everyone. across our city. i wish i could be your son or the reverse of thinking which is somehow not the opposite. yet i believe we have pillowed three days and i send myself to you tonight through the ridiculous wires of this thunderstorm, which is my ruse. I bought a tea machine and candles without flames tonight. men becoming old smile at the grave lines of these bright things. the young have prettier, more flippant ways of exit because it's not that strategy. life is ridiculous and sacrilegious before this other thing, yet it lifts, a wave, and we jump as we take our breath. i put one flameless candle in front of my boddhisattva and realized she was a good man. the fingers i broke in my stupor several years ago, glued there, pointed down to earth.

that lark.

good creature, sleep through me again.

please. return your dream.

i am eighteen years old tonight.

i have paws not hands. i saw off my paws,

put them on spikes in front of my door.

later the moon will shine and you will wake
with your strange brow like a midwife's.

dating you would be like dating mary todd lincoln.

I would prefer to see you at my funeral instead. start slowly,

the way old men do with boys...

i am lavish with bloom and insensible advice

for a man passing between the harlot and the owl speaking CNN shit.


the world is the avoidance of the beautiful question,

that and nothing more,


dear william...