From “Beautiful Boyfriend”

My skiff is made of spicewood       my oars are Cassia bract

Music flows      from bow to starboard

Early Mozart     cool side of  Coltrane   and miles and miles     of   Miles

Cheap Californian Merlot       and my young boyfriend

If   I could master      the nine doors of my body

And close my heart       to the cries of   suffering

Perhaps     I could love you like no other

Float my mind      toward the other side of   hate

The shanty towns of   Tijuana       sing for you

The slums of   Little Sudan       hold evening prayer

One dead brown boy is a tragedy

     Ten thousand is a statistic

So let’s fuck    my love       until the dogs pass

All beautiful boyfriends are transitory

They have no souls     they’re shiny brown flesh

Tomorrow they’ll turn into      purple festering corpses

Fissured     gored    by a myriad flies

Down the Irrawaddy River       you lay yourself   to sleep

No sun no moon          no coming no going

No causality   no personality

No hunger     no thirst

Malarial deltas      typhoidal cays

Tsunamis don’t judge     Calamity grieves no one

The poor will be submerged     the rich won’t be saved

Purge the innocent     sink the depraved

What do I smell        but the perfume of   transience

Crushed calyxes         rotting phloems

Let’s write     pretty poems        pretty poems      pretty poems

Masque stale pogroms    with a sweet whiff of oblivion