Poems for Tony
HIS PAINS UKNOWN
New York’s ‘Hometown’ Newspaper gave the
fuck-off front page to you this morning
and you look so smug. Tanned, a little of your
porcelain scalp ducks in old bushes.
New York’s ‘Hometown’ Newspaper also gave
mom space to weep:
MOM: HE WAS
LAST PERSON WHO
WOULD KILL SELF
but what’s self?
You were my one bruiser, a little faggy
in your ways
you’d caress me. I was so
self. I was so hand holding heart
images no background but
today I’m like the pixelated checks
they use to stand in for absence.
An image of you is one of
very few things there is of me—
your conversations with Paris
this terrible week,
a blanket affection for every
preparation, forced or authentic,
and a curtain coming down on the bathtub:
fin.
I passed you soap. I reached over
my head with both hands
and you contorted to sniff my blank armpits,
old nuts buoying in that ocean.
Palazzo Dei Congressi
Standing back-to-back in
big white Mussolini room
like kitschy spies, you perform
something secret
Rock dove, stock dove,
wood pigeon, birds of your
cunt-fuck
autopsy
condemned to years
believing sex
the only thing
connecting us to
world, white ropes
over hill and
statue,
it just rolls off the tongue—
Asia and Tony,
Tony and Asia,
how you lap those Little Argentos
from there, make
my life easier to talk to.
I saw you in the Greek Islands
smoking a cigarette,
nothing else to do, then
dead, falling back into place
you holiday somewhere
off-screen, chapped
lips of Asia don’t
come close
to mine, your casual
homophobia, your unwarranted
love for me, Tony,
I accepted it.
But you had to go and
leave me, the promise
you’d be saying hi
to mam for us,
“no final resting place
of the mind,”
jubilant white heat
blitzing over carrion
and these plates
laid out for the both of you.
All-Inclusive
I couldn’t write the poem that
felt like a holiday. I kept watching
mam and you
disappear between
two highrise buildings
and the shadow of your corpses
fall parallel in the pool.
The jibbing of the pumps
like the texture of those brochures
irks an image of you, where
the assemblage of this dream
is enough to circumvent the D word.
My forehead sweats at yours
for hours in REM: only minutes
are wasted. In them I rise.
Breakfast is free, it always is
in Benidorm. The sun-loungers
rowed creaky like teeth
so I understand why you do it,
the deep end O’ing to inhale you
with hundreds inside.
It’s so embarrassing,
in the dream I try to pull you back—
Look, Tony,
above that carnation of wet towels,
your trembling hologram
I’m stilling with this writing.
There’s a lie I can’t hold back
jerking in the inky palm.
I crush it.
Now both of these things
can be true at once.
Cover image: Anthony Bourdain, 2007. Photograph by Neeta Lind. CC BY 2.0.