Ronald Palmer

                  How does it feel to be a problem? –W.E.B. DuBois (The Souls of Black Folk)

Becoming my closet, my own son stood up

whispering over my shoulder: the goofy

faggot the brainy faggot

pretending to be happy

on the cell phone with his father

while driving, I gradually became green ocean

inclining like a supernatural scrim.

I needed to unpack the life that gave calamity,

empty the brawny faggot

and re-gift my body with stories.

The son followed me like a trick

into the candy wrapper catacombs

of Golden Gate Park calling after me: brainy faggot, goofy faggot, brawny faggot.

In order to keep the secret, one must vomit his mother on a whim.

Do you see now this country is a farce that tastes like a crime?

This country burns and it likes

going down on puppet regimes.

Please mother,

Animals also have questions about this impenetrable war:

Say, will each of the dead hand over his skin

and will your dead sons wear

this star pattern of brokenness?

Remember: a child will take chaos

spreading like blood, black as tar

crawling along the ocean floor

and wear it like a phantom shadow

cinematized on a bedroom wall.

Too deep to unbury a big boiling fuck you. How does it feel to know every country

hates you?

Farce is a sponsorship made of pride. Greed is the failed object of economy.

I am at least two souls flung all over the juniper trees

Windblown away from the Golden Gate Bridge.

Like so many starving at the crust of farce

day dreaming I could keep you in my fetish, saying Yes to this dilemma

where the memory camellia I watch from my desk window

instils my pink antiseptic heaven.

A farcical few of you, off with your buds

Smoking cigars at the Eagle, refusing deodorant and eschewing colognes,

For your own pheromones

growing beards to spite

The corpo=cracy. You are my musky heroes!

         (remember hypocrisy, darlings,

         they want our money, not our bearded equality,

not our salvation, not even our clean shaven kisses in the street).

Let dusk annihilate the tiny, fenced garden.

Embalm my exit thoughts

with sky.