Carnival
on his bumble way to town/ they are all always on their bumble way to town/ this one was hitch-hiking/ through the dust and sweat/ he climbs in my pickup truck/ i let him know i was going to the carnival/ me, too, he says/ his wet shirt had stuck itself dimestore-thin against his gifted breast, patrolled by lymphocytes, we were by law required to be six feet apart/ we were the dead and local drudgery although i had never seen him and i knew everyone and most of the melancholy balls in the county/ his eyes were smudgefires, and this was a farmboy with discernible skills you can’t be a farmboy without them/ he was a traveling warrior of the light i would wallow my face in his ass if i could/ has anyone eaten out your ass, I asked/ he looked away, the windows of my truck were all beaten and pitted by dirt road rocks/ not a whisper from him/ he refused to meet my eyes, and then he speaks quietly as if to someone who was not there/ we were all supposed to be inside the house, and quarantined, but the carnival was a delinquent boy who could taste the bitter dust of summer on the desire of largesse that was his tongue/ such religious virgins were not unlike a variety of gentle beasts, they wanted it, but they did not know how to articulate what they wanted in any language that they might know or not know/ i enjoyed fucking around with them pushing them and pushing them because their skill at language always existed way down deep in the silence that was the snow and those encrusted animal tracks that lead usually nowhere with or without a gun while inside his bowels stirred like beer in his gut and night’s rectitude and consequential probity/ i had bud in a paper bag and weed in the glove compartment/ i parked on the grass at the carnival which was filled with carnival music, the smell of cotton candy, shoulders and cowboy boots, and the red dirt road that was his pink hotel/ all right there in the cab of the truck/ cocksucking with the window down/ you could hardly see the web of stars eaten by the neon of the carnival as if the universe itself and its surrounding distance was stalled in orbit just for you just for him just for you just for him if he could only climb up one flight of stairs/ i wondered what he dreamed of in spring/ sheep and lambs, i fucked him tight and caught and not too composed in the shadows of a tractor-trailer big-rig Kenworth T680 the kind that slithers on the road/ we were not six feet apart or apart at all it was open the floodgates to the kind of risk people take at the carnival that is life with at least one, maybe two scramblers where he screamed when it began to rain/ i kissed him fully on his farmboy lips as he was my only hope/ everyone ran for cover when the rain soaked the lot of us in the pale heartbeats of all the viral deaths who had gripped our memories with/
stars/