i.

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In San Diego at the bottom of the stairs
with the powerline flashing red green wings,
in a house prettier than any house I’ll own, old and loved,
in the second floor apartment, at the window. Now San Francisco.
Tacoma. Tucson. On the highway
somewhere between Ross and Redding, in the parking lot
of the Safeway after prom, on the bus, in the woods -
I am resolved to be better when it happens this time,
to be a different person this time, or the next. On the street
a few blocks away from the powerline and the parrots on it,
on the night before, even before I knew the winding arm
of another. In the kitchen, my kitchen, for however long it stays that way
          already it’s a kitchen tiptoeing towards the past,
it won’t happen again, not there - back again in a bar four blocks away,
in front of the karaoke stage back again in the bar, beneath the Foster’s sign,
again in LA, in Greensboro, future cities even, future towns,
future rivers, future bars. Not in Boulder, or in Boise,
or Glendora, or Queen Creek. But please I want the strange world
where it happens over and over again, in Columbus, in a forest clearing,
beneath a canopy - the strange world saguaro’d and camas’d,
the strange world wrestled and delighted, the strange world on the wing.
And again the apartment, the circled chair, the low table,
the head thrown back
and lights dancing on the wall.

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ii.

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The recognition - have you not answered this slowly before?
The recompense, the response, the electrostatic shock.
That like loves like - that like is not alike at all, that it is hungry
and so disturbed. That like loves like, that alike is made solid here,
ephemerally so, memory at once and also fingers and flesh.
Suddenness is central, light and lingering. Dress all covered
in citrus, arm in bright tattoos, hand-me-down Carhartt jeans,
dark hair, red, inscriptions - the tease, the gentle touch, the shove,
the aching muscles - consider this, consider again that it could be confused
this time, and that it could have been confused the time before,
and that the confusion is desired too, where it overlaps,
and consider the red, bright red, and neon. Consider the arm
in bed, on pillow, on comforter, on thigh. Consider whatever pressure,
whatever velocity, whatever force acting back on the exerted force,
whatever is supposed to be equal and at equilibrium
and then at entropy, the equivalency decayed. That like loves alike,
that this is not alike at all, that this is likeness distilling into the dissimilar
into the deliberate or not, that that remains to be discovered,
consider that the hand feels equivalent to a kiss,
one-sided and brazen and demure. This all will have to be computed too,
although it can’t, and the place where it happens will emerge
again and again and again in the fading light of the dream.

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