(Written in response to Ghosted.)

A coffee table, glass-cored, yesterday’s
Shoes latch-locked with the pop
Of bubble-wrap &
Weeks ago. Or, anything but toes.
Broken heels, as in ghost heels, as in
Loafers & other shoes
That were never meant
For faggot. Minor air animals,
Like pistons untrained to pull back
& acknowledge
What’s left behind. A coffee table
Littered with hanging feet.
Knuckles lingering on doorknobs, unable
To unclothe its luster. 20 years. 20 years.

Matthew, today
I watched the MORTIFIED GUIDE TO GROWING UP GAY,
Laughed & didn’t blink when they said

They all survived. Found an article, read
SIGNIFICANT ACTS OF VIOLENCE AGAINST LGBT PEOPLE
& I lost your name. My wrists had never felt so bare.

Embittered citrus fists juice opacity
Quicker than arteries. I tried. I proved
Nothing warms hands like old blood.

Is it true that you would have died
Anyway? That gravity is to inevitable
As socket is to voltage? That tragedy

Is a negative measure, taken in drips of tungsten
& minutes one spends not giving way to rivers?

 
So my mother asked me to make a mental list of the consequences of coming out.

So the orchids never stopped blooming. So the queer body

Is the one that makes room for orchids & other organic shapes & other pheromones

Indicating the moment between ends & beginnings. So the queer body

Simmers cells in transit even, especially when it isn’t bleeding. So the queer body

Defines bleeding as a sojourn in any direction, defines illness

As animals with incidental petals, unwanted or not, defines itself as or not, defines itself

As an illness unrecognized by cochleas giving & receiving whispers, not to mention

Any major institute of knowledge. So my mother asked me why

I mass produce vowels, why my feet turn outward

And sound only tumbles towards me because it’s cornered, no other place to go.

My mother didn’t ask for a list of the benefits. The reliefs, the infinites. If the queer body

Is addicted to red or the straight body is addicted to scarlet.

Which one I lather azure to coax my lungs into blue torpor.

Matthew, let me say a benediction,
Let my memoriam be a prayer though my throat rejects them,
Because my throat scorns their orderly bones.
Let new marble not remind us
That questions are commodities, & handled cold, & cast in bronze.
That this is a cowardly way of saying
That the body is a commodity,
All binary, all radium, and we coded for isotope,
We coded for no. Let us not recall
That our only light comes from the ribcage,
Ungracious bombardment of ions, vainglorious
Radioluminescence. Remember no diagram
For endurance in bodies not made to manufacture hope.
Remember that. Endurance. Mumble our one definition.

Oh exclamations of grief! Oh conclusion,
I’ve already made your bed. I try

To bitter, I try to bite the blossom
Away from fertile neurons, I only

Leak sepia. Brownstones & children & wallpaper
With flowers, turgid with orthodox geometry.

Another boy to casket & widow & daffodil.
Another day weaving weeks. Another week

Weaving back to my old language, gaudy rabble
Of treble, not quite ignorance. Forgetfulness, maybe.

Oh but Matthew how you are not
Another boy. How are you not another boy?

I’ve been filling these last two lines with the shells
Of dubious crustaceans, empty. Skeletons without voices.

Directions for opening details
And finding crumbs to live on:

Respool the flesh, furl the blood back
to dutiless coils. Don’t forget

Time is the universal unit. Do not forget
How to measure with your hands:

Two footages, the screen relegated to now
Divergent with skin’s inability to vacillate,

Unable to speak with crease upon crease.
Now’s dialysis is a faulty science, unable

To catch aftermath and its numerous cavities.
Unable to keep from lysing healthy cells.

Directions for compressing the unspeakable:
Leave your veins their autonomy. Swallow. Swallow again.

Matthew, the 21st century.
A week ago, scientists
Voted to change the kilogram.
(Jamey Rodemeyer hung himself.
Verb tenses changed
& stayed the same.
Tyler Clementi’s feet betrayed him.
And the George Washington Bridge.
And the Wikipedia article
Beginning with suicide)
Le Grand K, as it’s called,
A platinum weight defining the metric unit,
Will be forgotten, mired in history
Like honey, too viscid to keep.