Moved In With Matthew and Clyde

Clyde scoots into the corner of Matthew's bed, the flat black of the paint on the wall marred with a fist-sized hole from the last time Matthew punched a wall.  The old house - the old farmhouse the boys grew up in - had spells over it's woodworking to knit magically back together when it was shot or punched or exploded into chips of plaster and splinters by the perils of being an endless god trapped in the disappointing body of a boy.  Gray House doesn't.  Gray House is fire-retardant and proudly scarred.  

Clyde is barefoot and in black jeans, faded and slack at his waist.  The waistband is still rolled where it once was forced to straining under his stomach, but now he's lost 40 pounds and the jeans of the last 10 years all fit the way they were meant to.  They are spattered with either blood or hot sauce, I can't tell.  He scoots to the corner to make room for me to hang above the bed a heavy chain of Matthew's gears on a white ribbon.  

"Took a nap," he explains of himself and Matthew, who is showering in Room 12.  His hair hangs in a heavy curtain over his eyes.  His voice is broken from sleep, and he is upset at having been woken.  

His broad hands cup his knees, and he stares straight ahead, ignoring that I am walking on the bare mattress, and the sound of Matthew re-entering the room.  I know we're encroaching on some sacred post-nap time for him where he is trying to exit his dreams and enter reality, and the more I ignore him, the better he will feel.  

Matthew wipes the insides of his ears with a beige towel, the gap in his front teeth adding shadow to his grin.  

Poem for Dean

Piles of water-damaged scrapbooks, protected only on one side from the flood, the pages fanned and thickened stalks of a wet cornbroom.

The headlights of the car sweep the ceiling, striating the stained plaster through the blinds.

The match flares, the hymnal closes, the door creaks.  The match flares, the hymnal closes, the door creaks.  The match flares, the hymnal closes, the door creaks.

This motel sits by an ocean which is tossed rough in a high wind, and are those even the words, I ask you, and you smile in the quiet car.

Dial tone.

The place I stop, and you begin, like a dotted line on the highway.

The uniform clap of boots to pavement, some sedate machinery trailing off the thoughts we used to hate, and now find necessary.

My mother, crying in the bathroom until she made herself vomit.

Adam's dull and resentful heartbeat.

An echo.

Terrified, I cover my mouth with my hand, and hold my breath in the closet, until my chest aches.

Green moss dancing slow over the rocks at the glassy part of the river.

Panphobia.

You've got mail.

The letter opens with a brutal tearing of the wax seal, like the lips of a virgin.

APPLAUSE.  APPLAUSE.  APPLAUSE.  APPLAUSE.

I would turn away from him, because I'm afraid he thinks I'm ugly.  So I try to stare him down.

The orchid never blooms.

For Brad (6)

Brad,

What we know, that no one else knows, is the romance of the world of a killer. People say chivalry is dead, but I know it only wears a face they no longer care to look at; the face of the lowly, the unholy, and the bitterly forgotten.

Running like smoke through the ringing and newly-electrified Delta blues singers is the murderous loyalty that warms every Southern summer night to sweating, lynches little girls in the cool nightwoods, makes a good man forget himself, and drives him... pretty crazy.

There's no greater romance than that which is found in the twisted heart of an unrequited dockworker, drinking from a flask in the water-reflected light of the passing showboat he'll never be allowed on. See, she's in there.

She's in there, with her skirt around her ears, working for the living a man like you couldn't provide her. It makes you believe in fate in the worst way; a cruel fate which will come to crush you someday, rabid dog to rabid dog. It makes you believe in the devil enough to attempt the sale of your diseased soul to him, the mossy bayou sticking your stinking shirt to your heaving chest.

When she dies, a man like you believes a passage to the underworld to retrieve her is not only possible, but the cross on which he will be nailed should he not attempt it. Do you believe in voodoo because you kill, or do you kill because you believe in voodoo?

Lightnin' would have you believe that love is all biology and blood. The smell of her rank and descending down the shaft of your cock, unwashed in the hellhole your father beat you in, her eyes closed in the afternoon, the long strings of her menstruation dripping hot slick across your thighs and rolling slow the distance of your ass, softens somehow the texture of her skin in your mouth. A killer is just a man who is prepared to do what all men talk of and can't find within themselves.

An acceptance that you'll never be enough, but you can show her how far you'd go to find that out.

This bayou is crawling with knights errant, all skinny white boys in their stained jeans and trucker caps, and you're their king and you will set the tree you tied her to on fire to resurrect the ghost of her perfume.

You're such a poet, Brad. And you're right. Love is all blood and guts.

A killer doesn't understand what's so hard about all this. You're my girl, and if you stop being my girl, I'll spread the viscera of you across the wilderness and live forever tortured by the loss of you. But that blood is mine, and won't cover the skin of another man. IS THAT SO FUCKING HARD?

Because it's all done in service of an idea that there is a perfection. There is a name that goes unsaid in your heart. There is a grave you will slit your wrists on. There is a woman, somewhere, in this horror, who is pure... of fucking... heart.

You laid next to me today and you asked me what I felt between us, and that's my answer.

When we were younger, we stood beside one another and talked about the dream of romance, you and John and I. And holding your hand these last few days, I can feel your pulse in your wrist, and the blood in your palms seeping around the pressure of my nails. I can see something like... where once I shared a passion with you, back to back, with blindfolds on, now I can look at you and see you as the subject of it.

The secret of this romance gets thick between us, all the blood and guts that Lightnin' promised it would be. You always had my blood and my bones, but now I feel it coursing into the body of a love we're making. I etched your name in my skin. I named my knife after you. I'll kill you if you leave me. If you lock the door, I'll shoot the lock off with a stolen shotgun from Clyde.

I saw you get drunk over me. I saw you crash your car. I saw you kill a girl when I made you angry. I saw you spray my perfume on your wife. I want to show you what I think poetry is.

If you stay, we could just sleep. But if you sleep somewhere else, you know what I'll do.

I love you.

-E