“Teenage boys, goaded by their surging hormones,
run in packs like the primal horde.”
— Camille Paglia (Caribbean coast of Mexico)

The mermaids swing their bodies beach
to beach—like skipping stones that never sink;
they don’t suspect how far the rip tides reach
or how the sea is seething as they drink.
The Marquis purrs when hipbones slap the waves—
a gasp, a jolt, a laugh that could seduce;
Camus would note a stranger learns to crave
the shine of sweat that justifies abuse.
The boys—like oiled gods in mirrored shades—
strike statues in the surf, each sweaty boast:
a promise made of flesh the sun remakes;
Dionysus leaps and hammers down the post.
Those hips, that heat, that final feral act:
a scholar licks the salt off every fact.

“Civilization is an artificial order imposed on nature.”
—Camille Paglia (Camino Real, Cancún)

Rain salts the glass, the channels hiss and bloom—
a game show mouth, a prophet selling knives.
I watch the gods dissolve in polyester gloom,
each myth reduced to fire sales and lives
half-lived on points. The minibar blinks red.
A dolphin keychain grins from plastic racks;
sunset postcards, laminated for the dead,
repeat the same three clouds in tidy stacks.
I circle by the indoor pool—no Polycletian
torsos, no pure arithmetic of thigh—
but soda-bellied boys in chlorine skin,
their mothers drifting past with vacant eyes.
A towel snaps shut the pagan in my blood.
They rinse my bronze delirium to mud.

“Hemingway is the example of the man who has no imagination.”
— Wallace Stevens (Casa Marina, 1935)

Oh! Blessed rage for order—pale Ramón!
Papa is a friend of Dionysus,
as are we—let us tip our hats to him,
as well our cups: to the Bull of Minos
on this isle of bones, who sloshes about
its shallow reefs! I give this humble toast
to dull his roar beyond our pink redoubt
which mists the trawlers idling on the coast
and drapes their empty decks with silver foam.
Let us conspire to lure him with a string
of hyacinths beside his water hole,
that stretch from our veranda to the sea.
I’ll don my mask, you tune your pithy lyre:
the Maenads fan their cocktails by the fire.

“By God, I wish I had that Hemingway here right now!
I’d knock him out with a single punch!”
— Wallace Stevens (Key West, 1935)

Rain all evening—satin rain upon the shore,
rain on lantern-glass, the loosened tie:
the palms keep time. Your sister loosed my
boastful words to you, which opened like a door
to crosswinds, shaking now the sycamore,
hat brims folding, spectacles awry—
a seaman’s moon brimming in your salted eye,
and every puddle widened to a floor
of shining risk. We closed—not quite embrace,
not yet refusal—angling into mud
that took the crease from linen, name from face,
and made one sentence of our breath and blood.
You laughed, then hauled me up. Rain stitched the rove
of night back whole. I drank—and learned to love.

or Pre-Profundis

“Those whom the gods love grow young.”
— Oscar Wilde (Cadogan Hotel, April 5, 1895)

How I hate that unfathomable boy,
who pretended to love me in the guise
of a man! He has robbed me of all joy,
my good name, and my fortune with his lies.
And yet, he was a celestial body
devouring light, bending me to his will:
I was wittingly drawn to the dark rings
of that moon, the circumference of my hell.
Now gilded snakes pervade my dreams; they slip
with cool abandon down my bed to sleep
and brush the trembling reaches of my lips.
Nysaeans—why have you forsaken me?
For Apollo kissed that indolent youth,
then flayed my skin for blowing on a flute.

or Post-Profundis

“You made me waste the flower of my life.”
— Oscar Wilde, (Reading Gaol, 1897)

It rains—my birthday, too—and what is love
but weather with a pedigree for coughs?
The panes run down; the gutters learn to move
like gossip shaken from the laurel boughs.
You had a shifting genius for the soul—
that polished sigh, the entrance, and a certain
penchant for the wounded wing. I was foul
enough to call it depth. Now hear the rain:
it needles through the yard; the chapel height
goes vague as doctrine. I shan’t tear
my name to spare your legend—all the weight
fell here; I learned, at least, how best to bear.
Still, if you write, write plainly. I won’t read
the madrigals of scoundrels in their hour of need.

“I wept for him as for a wife.”
—Gilgamesh (Shiduri’s By the Sea, Shin-eq-unninni)

The sloe sits warm—a brackish purple bruise
that will not heal. I taste the cedar still,
sap-sweet and bitter; how we split its boughs
and made a doorway in the mountain’s will.
Enkidu laughed, the wind inside his hair
was wild as goats along the shale-scarred seam;
we wrestled dusk to ground. I felt him there,
hard flank to flank—more oath than any dream.
We felled Humbaba, yes, his resin breath
rose like altar-smoke smoke about our thighs;
the axes rang—twin pulses out of death,
two shadows locked beneath the gutted skies.
Shiduri pours. I drink what cannot stay.
His name returns, as salt on lips of clay.

“Beside the sea she lives, the woman of the vine, the maker of wine.”
— Shin-eqi-unninni (the Waters of Death, beyond the Mashu region)

My tavern is exclusive and discreet,
the customers irregular at times;
some drink from flasks of lapis lazuli
while others tip bejeweled carafes of wine.
Above the bar I dedicate a frame
to every famous patron I have served—
that’s Ea on the left, a tortured mage,
who drowned his sorrows when he drowned the Earth.
The Stone Men used to come on Saturday
to numb their week of service on the ship—
they were a stoic lot, but always paid
until one client smashed them all to bits.
He said his name was Gilgamesh, I think—
he crushed the pink umbrella in his drink.

“A straw hat on, my eyes flushed, might I resemble the former
preacher who painted a pool table and then maimed himself?”
— Rush Rankin (Descanso Beach Club)

The seaweed bends with the ocean, a field of women
kneeling, then standing row upon row, as if to offer
a benediction to the shore. Already I forget I am
floating in this frigid Catalina water,
not some ghost surveying southern France—
nor an ominous crow or a half-mad painter
scanning a landscape after a pint of absinthe—
A boat circles above me, the black chain from its anchor
stretches like an umbilical cord to the blanched florets
of coral below. The motor hums. A large woman peers
over the side as I ascend, her distorted contours
growing in and out of focus—and I am free,
more so than Van Gogh waking in Saint Rémy,
a dark habit caressing his cheek.

“Je voudrai mettre dans le tableau mon appréciation, mon amour que j’ai pour lui.”
— Vincent Van Gogh, to Theo (Arles, The Yellow House)

I want to paint a friend whose hair grows wild
like grain that leans toward thunder: days
half-spent the way a nightingale must blaze
with song because the night itself is riled
inside its chest. He will be golden-haired —
a harvest sheared and gathered from the bone,
and I shall press into the oils my own
dark gratitude, the love I never spared.
But love is color breaking discipline, burned
from yellow ochre into molten light —
to orange that cracks the ebbing noon in two,
to chrome and spinning citron forced to turn
like suns around his brow. I strike from sight
the petty room — and daub infinities of blue.