Eros Thanatos Brutus
Am I sick? And does sobriety mean
this body will walk without knots
while soaking up life’s crassest joke?
Who does that? Again, am I sick?
And will I take to a healthy bed
where I’ll have the courage to act sick
at night and attract neo-kink-isms
fostered by some sister spirit that fists
and fingers a long-misnamed disease?
There is a crime of illness in your mind
that I need to know better and more:
along the way I promise you beauty,
I promise you warmth. But first, desire:
Tell me why are you so hard-headed,
so hard-hearted, so hard-pressed, so hard
that you should have me on repeat:
for here are six or seven me’s hiding
faces and phalluses in the dark.
Mourning the Crown Prince
Grief doesn’t linger. It sticks. It makes the hands
fumble and the throat gunge up. Time doesn’t heal.
Time inserts itself within the pain. The clock
is crueler than the calendar. Eventually the hour
hand lets up. In the almanacs charting the past
20 years, I fear I’ve failed big time from afar.
My record is one of gross inaction. You’re dead.
Dead and buried. A perfect specimen stored
away for some wiser, curiouser version,
of who we’re failing to become at this second,
to find. They’ll unearth you and restore you
to a world better than the one we’ve haphazardly
given and thoroughly botched. You weren’t
cremated yet the loss still burns. It burns,
and lately I alternately reproach myself
and numb myself to avoid fuller recall.
Drew Pisarra is the author of
You're Pretty Gay (2021), a collection of short stories, and Infinity Standing Up
(2019), a collection of sonnets, and
The Strange Case of Nick M. (2021), a radio play commissioned by Imago Theatre. He is also a literary grantee of the Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation (2019)
and Curious Elixirs: Curious Creators (2021).
Am I sick? And does sobriety mean
this body will walk without knots
while soaking up life’s crassest joke?
Who does that? Again, am I sick?
And will I take to a healthy bed
where I’ll have the courage to act sick
at night and attract neo-kink-isms
fostered by some sister spirit that fists
and fingers a long-misnamed disease?
There is a crime of illness in your mind
that I need to know better and more:
along the way I promise you beauty,
I promise you warmth. But first, desire:
Tell me why are you so hard-headed,
so hard-hearted, so hard-pressed, so hard
that you should have me on repeat:
for here are six or seven me’s hiding
faces and phalluses in the dark.
Mourning the Crown Prince
Grief doesn’t linger. It sticks. It makes the hands
fumble and the throat gunge up. Time doesn’t heal.
Time inserts itself within the pain. The clock
is crueler than the calendar. Eventually the hour
hand lets up. In the almanacs charting the past
20 years, I fear I’ve failed big time from afar.
My record is one of gross inaction. You’re dead.
Dead and buried. A perfect specimen stored
away for some wiser, curiouser version,
of who we’re failing to become at this second,
to find. They’ll unearth you and restore you
to a world better than the one we’ve haphazardly
given and thoroughly botched. You weren’t
cremated yet the loss still burns. It burns,
and lately I alternately reproach myself
and numb myself to avoid fuller recall.
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