g o o d   l o v e r   c o m i n g   g o i n g

b y    R o b e r t   B o h m

Years ago J. told me at the docking slip I should go,
but I didn't, walking away from the freighter, scared
of what I didn't know.

A year later when Mickey arrived, he showed me
how to make a black-eyed-Susan groan.
He also let me see, in

Bryant Park, what a grassblade's orifices
looked like and what it meant to pity
old men in piss-soaked pants.

Normal things didn't mean crap after that. Riding
the subway from Harlem to who knows where,
I said goodbye for the first time.

I used my knife when I had to, and my eyes.
When the cops arrested me and punched me
in the gut, I vomited

in the toilet bowl at the end of every thought
I ever had. A few months afterwards
when I got out

I placed a chain leash around a woman's neck,
yanked it hard and fucked her from behind
while she knelt before a crucifix held

by a statue of Cato the Slave dancing in Gethsemane.
In this light of old meanings, I also watched
the frontier disappear

as a gang of Sioux hooligans galloped
at sense's edge through miles of little bluestem, killing
every white man in their way.

A gentle traitor who inflicts suffering for a living,
I met you by accident. Now my job
is to make you scream in pain.

"Crawl back to where you came from!" poets yell at us
as you smear cum on your face and tits in the gutter
under the bluest sky we've ever seen.

When you remove the chain and leash me with it, then smash
my face against cement, I bleed
stanzas simple enough for all sweet kiddies to read.

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