give me a title

Echoed through a shell, the ocean, how I miss you.  I muse on my self, abated on the back shelf of my mind.  I remember walking at night through the thinning trees to Boulder River; I kept thinking of old renditions of the woods as being sinister, mystical, and the thought of it excited me.  Skinny dipping, we three youths, our pale places glowing in the moonlight reveal our whiteness, our tender drawn blinders, yearning quietly inside, the shivering bow string, waxed to a sheen.  I mean to step intentionally, with reverence for the rhythm, the water’s brim non-existent, and I step on eroded rocks still vacant in the bed, entrenched in the death of it—this recollection that we do not ultimately know what will happen, that place in which we exist before our conception.  Are we an afterthought and a stale condom?  Dried out like human jerky, a man in Joppatowne confessed to eating his roommate’s heart and brain and we make jokes about the zombie apocalypse.  This moment is reserved for Latter Dei saints and child Jesus’ mischief: bee stripes are the rings in His eyes, golden glimmering harpoon blues over navy night of Nazareth.  Each city chooses its own form of humanity: children dancing in the spurting splash of open fire hydrants, laughing, clapping as airplanes crash into twin babies born a minute ago.  Israeli bomb-sniffing dogs and forgotten goldfish—you will be my lucky goldfish.  My memory is stored in the cellars of the Shakespeare Theatre in Paris; all anyone can talk about there is the bed bugs.  How can you say all that in so short a time?  Such partings are indicative of our top hats, our telescopes aimed in the wrong meter, stressed syllables, unrealistic as Hosni Mubarak.  The body language, the interaction unspoken between Obama and Putin, human rights violation, misuse of misappropriated funds and managerial discomfort trying to appease us, replicate us into coffee filters, stacked together neatly fit inside the last one so that sometimes, accidentally, they take two or three of us.  Slips of paper, birthdates drawn from a bingo basket by a disembodied hand, unholy placed on a TV screen—your friend just died.  I am sick of the lies but I am guilty too.  I have my brother’s blood cupped in my hands, settled on my brain.  In the cornfield behind our house I used to chase cats and meow at them.  We had whole conversations while we were naked in the woods, ribs sticking out in angles of our tightened skin, our first son born on a Tuesday—it’s always on a Tuesday.  On Sunday mornings, instead of church, we have sex shouting holy fuck me get the Devil out of me, he’s swimming in my head, knotting leather threads to my bed post, making me French toast and green tea in bed while he shows me tintypes of Edith Wharton.  The archive of my memory runs thin and weary but ready to take on more sand bags, sand bags, stack the sand bags—the levy breaks and Robert Plant yows at me for stealing his songs, writing him into my poem.  This is not a poem, he says, it’s words on a page, where’s the rhythm?  Riverside gamboling about the tide, the rising energy welled up in my bosom, my country tis of thee, everyday you shit on me.  I spit in your general direction and I thank you from the bottom of my rhizome, rising from the center of the Earth to ground a tree in never mastered cadence of my own damn language.  Here I am: hanging from the ceiling fan with a belt around my neck and a cigarette in my left hand, revolving random word choice and juxtaposition of my own thought process with what is going on around me: a woman’s brown flip-flops stretched into my periphery, feet jittering plainly as a silent film, a man at a typewriter alone in a room above the city.  An overture: a Rembrandt woman, yellow soft intoned. Fitzeraldian youths, reclining by the river, classic nude rendition of beautiful privilege, to come of age.  It was 2012 and we were on the brink of existence.