PILGRIMS’ PROGRESS

In SAFEWAY I heard a whining
Song. Dill filled the air with longing

What was the Twentieth Century
Appetite. I grew up wondering would I

Ever fuck like them, the dead. They left
Behind the lingering sense of an ethos

To discover love, if you could, in your
Own way for your own self, outside the dread

And shame they (the other they)’d installed all around you
Is the asshole closer to death, is shit close to it

And why when some pray do we put our ass
In the air to kiss the ground, the rosebud

Of the dark side of our minds waving in the blue
Sex and death got married and had a baby

I wasn’t there when it happened and nobody exactly
Told me about it. There was a lingering scent on the air

My first years in New York going to the one no two really
Good nightclubs, when the Meatpacking District

Was still full of actual meat and blood and tall whores
In beautiful crowds picking carefully over the cobblestones

In their enormous heels and wigs. Here ends the only
Nostalgia I shall permit myself. I was feeling kind

Of Auschwitzy in a vegan restaurant in Warsaw.
There was an H&M and a multiplex across the street

From the ghetto wall nestled inside an apartment
Complex. I’m alive only because the false identity

My grandmother’s husband bought her before he was killed
Meant she had a job just outside that wall. The malls

Are built all over the world that we might shop our way out
Of oblivion. It was easy to weep at the wall. I put

My forehead on it and said my dead uncles’ names and Tadeusz
Richter the name of the man my grandmother actually loved.

A plague. A genocide. The usage of the world. Lathe
Of all difference. I used to have a nightmare that recurred

A spiral of water draining down a hundred thousand family
Pictures. None of them people I knew, all of them faces

I could love if I had the chance. The idea of loving as a public
Act is something I inherited. The felicity of men who fuck

Like friends is something I admire. The Emma
Goldman brilliancy and courage of the women

Of Gran Fury and Act Up! my living moral referent. But I
Don’t know how to write a poem about AIDS.

I don’t know anybody who died of it. I read Tim
Dlugos to face Warsaw because of a line about his

Father or grandfather speaking Polish. Can everything
Be made to resolve into my originary pain? What drove

My mother insane. And an idea of liberty and elegance
Perfected by gay men in cities: the constellation of my youngest

Desires. I’m on a banquette in Winslow Arizona next...