2019
Rickey Laurentiis
I could string him back up the tree, if you’d like. Return his skin’s meaning to an easy distance, coal dust, blaze And Willie Brown him. You Love how the blood muddies the original, The way it makes a stage of my speechifying, this leeching Capital from his dying, Like an activist. I know
I’m not supposed to sing
Of his ringing Penetrability, some hole I open impose On the form—but all I see is bullets, bullets discerning him, As years ago it was rope. I could pull it tighter, finger each bullet deeper, If you’d like, an inch rougher, Far enough to where becomes that second heat, erotic.
I could use the erotic,
If you’d like, So ungarish, baring not too frank A mood, subtle so you need it.— Funny How some dark will move illicit if you close your eyes, The way, say, my black Pleasure is named too explicit for a page, but this menace I put in it is not.
I could yank and knot
The rope, if you’d like, him like a strange fragment In them trees, And the word “again” spelled out about his neck Would be the rope’s predicate till let wild, patterned and Fierce his moan. It is a tragedy. No. It is a sonnet, how I know Already how he ends,
But I could make him
Her, if you’d like, regender them till merely Canvas for your “empathy,” Soup for my mouth. Still, if I could but just get This blunt, Burnt lynched body up From on Out the pocket behind my eye
All trees could be themselves again, all sound.
