Pig Ears - 20161230

Nights before new years

Smear like dripped paint under toes

Noticed after the wall is painted

The room is cohesive color except for this patch of carpet

Muddled in the remnant of unnoticed motion

Inertia of focus in the brand of claustrophobic insular Americanism

Making rooms great again

That possessed the landlord to slather the sheetrock in white

To attract the best possible tenant like an Israeli settlement realtor’s yard sign

Trying to swallow speeches about who friends are

Palestinian poet talks about not losing hope

Like a man of recycled internments

Of inches and margin spacing of what gets to fit on the page

Friend of mine, we decide to go do something conventionally American

The Knickerbockers are in New Orleans and so his Queens

Orange and blue Metropolitans affinity bounces towards Poydras Street

Stubhub and nosebleeds, seats seven and eight to ogle the comfortable

To not feel like an ass-hat pricing one’s vantage for big men

Thinking of atheist sauna Christmas and my grandmother saying how not-insert family name

My father’s sons are for not hunting, basically an octogenarian called me a pussy  

My grandmother and I played poker at her table

She salted the cabbage like gargling for a sore throat

Gave me a Mary Catholic calendar for 2017

As I thought about talking to the woman I was almost engaged years ago

Past three a.m. last week and holding her feet in my hands like tiny cups

Drinking time’s dirt off in the red pressure geometry of women’s footwear

And just the way she walks in and over and exits flipping light switches

The smell of chocolate martini’s and Sam Cooke songs

Sucked into a vortex of sofa pillows and holidays

My friend thinks about how his grandmothers passed away by the time he was hatched

His engaged prematurely leaving this Earth in angelic tragedy

That bouncing ball of faith to see Jerusalem without weeping

The levee bonfires of Persian Phd cultural anthropologists painting canvases in his head

Confronting coffee baristas like a gangster for sequestering beans and shutting down speech

For a private party he is not invited

Baby fat liquid courage middle fingers and millimeters between fists through glass

Bursting sand like an AK47 in a Palestinian car trunk  

MSNBC Trump squawking Israel is a victim treated unfairly

Stomach in bends churning the cheeks of a goat head

To swallow every morsel from a carcass’ face at a P.L.O. campfire

Assemble, clean, and reassemble a rifle: testicle verification

Looking forward to a basketball game and fandom

Crossing from the west bank of the Mississippi not the Jordan

Ready to scream at tall men for dominating or failing to dominate

Other tall men while some dude who dropped out of Ball State

After one semester riding the bench for forty minutes

Makes more money than I do in a year

For clapping and standing up to congratulate players

That make him their bitch in practice every Tuesday

Shuffling through Ochsner healthcare bills on my desk, doorbell, game time

Parking next to Regions Bank

My friend sees French tapestries hung on the wall through a glass window

Herd down Poydras to the arena

Remember where my grandfather would walk us through

The Hyatt to go to Saints games in the Superdome

Katrina, renovation and that path ain’t der no more

Stairs and scooching ass in front of face in narrow mountaineer rows

Shoot the shit about Kristaps Porzingis Latvian giant 7 foot 3 and 21 years

Gets compared to other white dudes because the privileges of supremacy

Dissipate in an egalitarian acquisition of athletic prowess darkening the NBA’s color lines

So my friend’s brother and St. John’s and Chris Mullin and Dirk Nowitzki come up

Me living in Dallas post Katrina and a woman named Shyla we will meet later

Rings in my head of opportunities and windows in life of half spoken out of sequence

Contemplations squished between Anthony Davis’ unibrow

As a bomb goes off in a Baghdad market as Germans prost blah blah, words, numbers

Halftime four points up, beer run, yogi leg I step to the row below, let two black guys sit

Bar line and two blond Spanish guys, one with an HSBC credit card

Allow a third to cut in front of my friend and me

Escalate to commit the New Orleans sin of not knowing what the fuck you want to drink

When occupying the attention of the tender mulling thirteen minutes and sixty-three dollars

Into this trio of six-foot-four muddling Mediterranean’s and my Napoleon complex

Is soaked in the setting, of finally getting two Abita Ambers on draft, a twenty-dollar bill

Keep the change and return to something sacred in second half of fervently cursing

With a buddy about sports, international politics, war, and poetry

As grown men dribble for our entertainment and he says something about bread and circuses

Rome Juvenal 100 A.D., inauguration January 20, 2017

Final buzzer, lanes into stairwell, enjoy walking in the street when I can

Johnny Sanchez Mexican food on Poydras, think of work and menu prices

Magic jalapenos into pig ear chilaquiles with salsa and yard egg

Conchinita Pibil enchiladas with the other end of the Yucatan pig

Take my fake temporary teeth out and cover in a napkin sipping tequila and hibiscus

Day of the Dead Mural for Madre Maria and my friend thinks of his mother

And we share the swine’s hearing appendages slow roasted in spices

He says he misses the aftertaste

Shyla comes to and fro; in between I mention reading the Qur’an

For research for the book I’m writing; watching the Last Temptation of Christ

With William Defoe and my friend remembering when the movie came out

And his parent’s thinking about blasphemy and I say,

“What Jesus is never supposed to get any pussy.”    

Whiskey and Shyla makes my friend a tote bag as past eleven p.m.

Closing time and she stops to talk in the emptied restaurant, living in Dallas, Houston

Rolls her r’s about ancestry D.N.A. tests of being raised in a small Texas border town

First generation American with French parents and Paris is a city

Moving to New Orleans she thought it would feel like a city

But an apartment in the Quarter and it doesn’t, it feels intimate

A place where you can feel the dead around you

We flirt and I do not realize in that box-not-checked life I have held on for this year

Of thinking of car wrecks, job loss, daughter gone AWOL

Teeth still in a napkin and words of asking for a number

Do not come out and I feel that what if I want to be alone and I don’t get to be

And the mud of pig’s feet and smeared steps of yard eggs and painted walls

Dripping in the dance of the coming year

Of more surgeries and feeling like my body is a caterpillar eyeing his wings

In a painted spring or this, this moment right here in subtle brush stroke

To know the sunlight approaching midnight in alcohol and brunet locks

Of what men choose to say and when

Feel wanting to be in one’s body

That when a woman makes a point to startle the scene to tell you her name

Touch your hand and you revisit leaving a note inside the credit card receipt jacket

On the extra slip afforded to make up for muteness you start with half a sentence

Then you slip it in your jacket pocket

Tongue mouthing the gap between your canines

The quartet of incisors and the first time you ever kissed a girl