When you’re on that bike in your shorts, panting away
next to a Republican, a lot
of the inhibitions come off. The thought
of opposition warms to ardor as you sway
above the saddle, soaked shirt and gray
tits lumbering up and down, the hot
sweet sweaty scent your widened nostrils caught
wafting through the tropic humid furtive play
of glances, wheezing wet desire for
the philadelphian fondle of the ancient Greeks—
not sex, but something subtler, elder, male:
bonded for battle by the naked training floor—
peddles, rattles, gyrates, coughs and creaks:
hits the showers, back to work to fail.

A flight attendant politely chased me down
at an airport that I will not call O’Hare.
He said it looked like Democrats don’t care
about the boy with cancer. Sad emoji. Frown.
They say that every Congressman’s a clown,
but I am more a barstool liar with a flair
for confabulating social vaporware,
untrue in every verb, conjunction, noun.
There was no Jim, and I was never there,
but the story points to something that is sure:
airplanes and boys exist, are real, and whether
Brioche Dorée or Manchu Wok was where
they met in meaning, they are and mean: be more
rational, & get your act together.

He does not manipulate me. If you think
he does, you have missed my stories. We
are both the sparrow falling and the augury
here at the Times; in distant rooms the clink
of coupes. Someone says “objective.” Drink!
Every citizen, of course, is free
to feel: no ad has any hold on me;
my thoughts? the world beyond? in perfect sync;
self and perception? perfect harmony.
Vested in reporting’s sacristy
and chasubled by my BA degree:
I alone can see what others see
with bias clearly: it isn’t sophistry
to be, alone, what’s true. Or not to be.

A 19-year-old acolyte of E-
lon Musk known online as “Big Balls”
now roams the State Department’s marble halls,
a Tadzio to the Aschenbachian spree
of absurd elders aged past dignity,
hair-plugged, paunched, and jowled, howling at the walls,
whose own grown children rarely take their calls,
desiring feelings once-felt that now flee
across the lovesick waters of a clogged canal—
it does your bidding, but it is a dream—
you cannot re-become a callow youth
by hiring one to bust up the banal
dull business of DC, though it may seem
you can. It’s hot today. You’re long in the tooth.

Nighttime erection data from my 19-
year-old son, and me; his duration
is slightly more than mine, an inspiration
for all those fading fathers who have seen
a belly’s shadow where there once was ween
and who, in some strange Freudian equation
have felt their heartstrings trill toward a relation,
incestuous and weird as Cymbeline.
Immortal pharaohs wed their sisters; we
lie nude, but still apart, in biopods,
like early sitcom couples in their lonely twins,
unsexiest of all perversity,
undead as vampires, infinite as gods.
We mostly want to wear each other’s skin.

Millionaire who wants to live forever
stops taking longevity drug over concerns
it sped up aging. Fewer unhappy returns
in this God-cursed Arcadian endeavor,
sword-barred, Yahweh’s thunder-ordered Never!
Well, every art-collecting attic learns
it: Dorian Gray must turn to Monty Burns,
and what precedes a fall is getting clever
with what is better left to evolution.
Look. At the risk of sounding normative:
you should not use your teenage son for blood.
Vampirism’s not a good solution;
life’s not a vessel; living is sieve,
a fleeting filter in a raged and flashing flood.

The American government runs on Celsius:
a Goop-ified version of Red Bull, with a “Make
America Healthy Again” vibe. Milkshake
Duck in power: he drinks and loves to cuss,
more Triumph of the Will than This Is Us,
a year from frat-frottage at Kansas State,
hungovercaffeinated and often late,
eager to purge the woke, shitlibs, the sus—
his faith is mostly modern alchemy,
powders, proteins, brain pills, beer and weed;
meat-based diet: hasn’t shit in days;
lives in fungal squalor with his three-
to-five feral roommates, avoiding seed
oils—fed on anger, starved of praise.

Having a dense cube communicates
status to women and business relationships;
investors swoon and women wet their lips;
fellas five-at-best bed solid eights;
the Sharks say yes, and QVC awaits;
while other assets have both booms and dips—
one day auto stocks, the next it’s microchips—
a tungsten cube? It just appreciates
you in a way she never understood,
the girl whose dormroom was just down the hall
who football-fanned instead of Call of Duty,
wanted the perfect instead of the perfectly good
you offered. Now she works a kiosk at the mall,
you heard, and you’ve a cube, and she’s a beauty.

Getting into Christianity
because it’s the only way I can quit vaping,
choom mystified like Holy Ghost escaping,
Word made flesh and Dad, humanity.
Quoheleth Jamesified as vanity
had this or that to say about men aping
God instead of meek and modest shaping
of their small lives, thought it was inanity
to pray for pecadilloes lifted by
the hosts of heaven with their hearing aids
turned down; awful angels and the dead
saints and martyrs don’t care, and the Biggest Guy
abscondited already, drew the shades,
and napped. A zealous faith? Try weed instead.

A culture that venerates Cory from “Boy Meets World,”
or Zach & Slater over Screech in “Saved by the Bell,
is washed, broke past fixing, and going to hell.
What kind of culture leaves the nerd un-girled,
his adolescent admirations pearled
into a prom-less sock while all the demoiselles
step out with jocks under the sway and spell
of the electric hearth within the heavy burled
wooden nineties TV cabinet?
What Bel-Air princes left their Carltons,
made virtues out of being cool and “fresh?”
America, your ruined children yet
call out for toys and tech and custom guns!
You need more H1-Bs from Bangladesh.