Rockaway

    I live in the sugar and heat-rot

of ten second videos,

         come here ritually

to experience a sense of time loss

turning surreal at

uneven speeds through my own

crackling horizon on the beach,

a sun-spotted vision that though absurd is

Something in which I am

nevertheless complicit

It could be the feast you didn’t care about.

You could deny and walk away into health.

As it stands I buy cubed mangoes

from the Puerto Rican woman’s

shopping cart at magic hour in the park,

guts over back, knowing the dog

still won’t s**t and getting uneasy

at the prospects of the week,

These tense connections in cellular light,

flirtations or wonder, new women to whom

I am briefly preferred as told by lust and regret

intermingled into slang beneath an odd photo,

another neighborhood boy come from

slow and boring country to be taken

aback at their casual lip-swell in bath-light or

the electronic ease of transfer for

a bump in the loft party,

Ukrainian stares, venmo palm tree,

dms the week long, vapor booth, trap hats,

The constant decision of whose apartment,

What to say, what to display.

What this all feels like,

really,

is that the pieces are all here

and the pieces

will never, ever fit.

Which is why all this

overwhelming resonance,

This constant vibrant hook in my back.

Even here park-side in the heavy air the

street noise and the gloaming rub thighs,

I feel abraded by

all that’s happened, I feel drunk

and pleasantly confused as another

arterial city throb tears

Amazingly through the soundnet

And I know I’ve made such

strange decisions,

that I’ve maybe committed myself

to currents not exactly in my nature,

but it has all felt right even against

the unmoving voice of history,

A thing that before the past two years

I’ve always bowed to,

And that has led me into how many

countless small betrayals

and self-dooms and,

yes, my long, long habit of

   loving those who deserve love least.

Even half-crazy across the kitchen table

as the roommates tap at coke

on the backs of hardshell phone-cases

the sense is one of sureness.

A belonging attends my

stupidity here, carries the books and coffee

just behind and outside the nights come strangely big,

The metaldust having duly been breathed

below ground,

the moonscape having been draped on the island

up here

Memory is only a chimera

And anything can happen.

Perhaps the past holds a crown after all