Wayne Koestenbaum

Pointilism

I bumped into Sinatra’s bone
during mother’s Rasputin
phase: lackadaisical interlude.

*

“Dah-cweem”:
baby-talk ice cream.
Permit him a growth spurt.

*

This is a Goya.
This is a sought-after
financial property.

*

Radical faeries offer
forced sterilization
to newts and toads.

*

Spillane is diffident.
Are houris synchronized?
Vamoose, soliloquy.

*

If the urethra is his or hers
the pet monkey effect applies:
fallacy of the monad.

*

Gonad? Now I can’t
remember the hideously
logical Lydian conception.

*

Inarticulateness begets
this whack-off area,
Super Bowl audible.

*

I regress. Circe
is a misty integument.
Browse these cracks.

*

Colt, Titan, doxa,
Ritalin, Elliott Gould,
Saks, Farsi, pharmakon.

*

I regress. Wigglers,
unite! Happy
are we to be nothing.

The Tidbit School of Adult Entertainment

My favorite TV program
is Green Acres.
It has everything I need:

breeze, breast augmentation,
vocabulary, dry cleaning,
Miracle-Gro, positivism.

*

The palace hallways are diseased.
A tube of Tinkertoys
poses as penicillin.

Salome waits near the fire screen.
She wants to tinkle:
not permitted.

*

Whoa! I tell
my father awful things.
As a result, the future

is sick. Two Trovatore arias
become hyper-realistic,
dystopian. One spits upon the other.

*

My brother discovers the horse farm.
I have second fiddle status.
And I’m not even a fiddle.

Four stoats race around my body—
or am I pursuing them?
I’m not even a third fiddle, or a fourth.

*

Sorbet. Primal ooze.
My father erases our last name.
Swinging in summer sun

I’m driven to repeat
the library smell of waiting
for alphabetization to arise.

*

Giddy-up giddy-up.
Expressivity is dead.
So is Red Buttons.

I don’t want to read
about Lebanon or Israel.
That stance backfires.

No, My Talk Is Not About Hannah Arendt

Expeditiousness

Off to service a new marine.
The regime of “thirty things”:

do thirty things in a row,
each small and purposeful.

I get it: copula
is the root of copulation.

Gros manseng, petit manseng:
eccentric grapes. Gripes.

Exhibitionism

The guilt-tripper and I
hug near the strip parlor—

his beard black, retributive.
He drinks my bleach.

Afterward, the turnstile.
His unseeing eyes evade, divert, provide.

I need the noun containment.
Direct quotation.

Pudding

My snack-sized pudding cup
expresses repentance.

The sound of its lid opening
is unfriendly, cosmopolitan.

Pudding sees itself
as brazen. I perceive it

as possessing the odorless, refined
atmosphere of a eunuch evangelist.

Pool

In 76-degree water
Alban Berg watched Liza Minnelli

gently shred goat into oblivion:
“I noticed she was beautiful &

wanted to call on someone
else to acknowledge that she

was in no ordinary way
extra-incandescent.”