Wrist Deep

I

Sticks, bric-a-brac, cigarette butts,
things I’ve picked up along the way;
but most of all the pebble, the gum
that held it, stuck to my shoe
since when? The Brooklyn Flea?
The Bronx? California?

At every corner I scrape it, try
to pull the bits of whatever I remember
off (I must have spent hours
walking down the alley to your house,
between the fixed electric poles buzzing,
spitting booze and drinking wildly;

I always wanted to be drunk before
I arrived. One night we gathered wood,
took my truck into the night like ghosts
and stole trash like the trash stealers did,
turned it into a hobby. I must have rode
around with that wood in my truck

for months; the weight of it baring down
on my shocks until the breaks gave.
Do you remember that? The panic?
The awe of coming to a halt? The stop?
Weeks were spent coming to terms
with who we were after that, as if

the earth had be hit, had stopped
spinning, had sent us into hurling,
spry, limbs akimbo, phosphorescent
into the sky. Do you remember being alive?
Do you remember having something to prove?
Because I don’t.) I scrape another pebble from my shoe.

II

I read somewhere that when you die
you go to heaven, and that heaven is a place
where everything you could have ever wanted
just happens. So I pictured filth, pictured rats,
cockroaches in the seams of buildings,

between dishes, hiding in everything (
and growing in the space within pasta
and water was a place for bacteria, growing,
red as red lights at traffic signals, green
as stagnant algae pools, a place for going.

I do not blame you because I delved into
those deep waters too, felt the warmth
of being held by life, however small,
knowing that I was loved by parasites.
And have you ever been loved more
than by those that fed off you? I rile

and rive at the thought. I split into two.
I think of the space between two rooms.
There is silence like we have never known
in space, like the day I never walked in
on you having sex with this girl or that;
the day I put six beers in a bowl of ice

and walked quietly into my room
so as not to hear; the day I walked
less gently, passed the piano my aunt gave me,
“white as a ghost” you later said, which
made me snicker, curt, as I made my move
toward Cortlandt.) I scrape another pebble from my shoe.

III

It must have been coming with me
for some time, because I felt a lump
under my sole, like a lump in a throat,
like a feeling that a tracker must have
when he’s realized he’s retraced his steps
(like that time we took those girls down

Broadway in shopping carts, ripping
through the dark like men in the eighties
ripped through dresses, because they
didn’t know what rape meant.
Do you remember doing cartwheels
in the street? Do you remember

scraped wrists? Showing up to work
hung-over to all hell and waiting
for five o’clock to come around again
to do it all over. The man in the corner,
forty years older than us, drinking
a Budwiser, wanting only to be us,

young, him telling stories of how
he saw Bukowski stand on this table
or that; piss on Ferlinghetti or whoever.
The day he fought a girl in the street
because he knew that we were okay,
had become part of the pavement,

had spread ourselves so thin
we barely recognized ourselves.
The nights we walked home alone,
together, thinking only of each other,
into, but not against, the wind’s coo)
I scrape, slow, another pebble from my shoe.