I had vomited the night, its sleep and its dead angel citizenry,
its exposed fear of living in the sinus of democracy.
I'm going to forget it all.
It is too soon to tell, y'all.
Have my life come to a screeching halt.
Shrivel to a margin; move out to Queens...
I will...BUDdeeeeeeeeee!

"...the proud can still be proud but find it
a little harder..."

—W.H. Auden,
"In Memory of Sigmund Freud,"
1939

Yet all of my thoughts are with you, Luis de San Angel,
and they have been throughout,
with you and this ghastly Columbian albatross,
neither former shock-relic
nor future Realpolitik,
but constant repress of the present.
My thoughts will sweep upon baroque piano music
with the workplace abandoned, thermostat off,
late Friday, when only those who've lost their loved ones remain,
to tidy their sinecures, to loiter and shelve
their fragments amongst themselves:
for to remember here is to remember plastically,
in fluorescent gesture, in manageable projects,
while they scream at you in constant pet sounds,
up to your ankles in bleats and squalor
shredding yesterday's receipts,
emperor of invoices and cows.
You said that, Zhao—"too soon to tell"—with a hotel
white wrapped around your torso like a cloud,
misting up and down in the televisual lights.
I told you Brian Wilson or Elvis or Rasputin had died.
You turned your towel up, wiped your eyes, and cried.
Master of inversion and surprise.
You were monogamous and fastidious and proud, wearing
a Marriott ultra-absorbent for a shroud, twisting
your hips to let your cloud come down.

And we knew this, on Wyckoff Avenue, in middle-Brooklyn-ville, in shades, watching bicycles get clipped by taxicabs. Watching mascara solve and fade.