The Third Man
for Bernadette Mayer
How much would it take
to discourage the heights
I want to burrow through
naiveté as unannounced
stop after the last stop
on my underground
teleology? The shared
pull of a pull on a
blackmarket cigarette
So trained in the binaries
its hard to not be thrown
from the convulsive beauty
of a triangle — like a fence
I know by the Danube whose
claims to move even the
hottest lifted goods are
derailed not by inability
but a third thing like pity
or a radiator cap you
loosened to drive deeper
into the desert that the
desert told you was paradise
It’s hard to be a medium
right? The very isolation
breath requires to carry
an idea from mouth to ear
If I told you my real name
would you act like you had
a choice but to use it as
the last chair in an almost
trashed hotel room
or would you remember
it like Vienna with its Strauss
glamour and easy charm
gone before even thought of
Only Invisible Worthy of Invocation
Heroes resolved in the permanent
grace of tension never reveal
themselves as the condition of
their heroism I worship only
what I can never know exists
to be worshipped like sweat
on a Central Park horse without
the horse or cancer minus the cell
With no points of reference stillness
can be faster than light if you want
My legs tremble a little in the genome
knowing your genome’s almost
identical and likely to tremble
back or that you might break
