Song of a Reformed Headhunter

They behaved just like their names. Mr. Happy was always happy despite the cloud in the story. Mr. Tickle learned when not to tickle but tickled every other time. And when friends righted him, Mr. Topsy- Turvy turned wrong side up again. Chinese names, unlike Mr. Worry's , aim too high. Yang Yang plays for glorious glory. Swallow Peace, my sister, loses patience. And mine raises the stakes: Jee Leong shoots for (don't laugh) universal goodness. What disappointments Chinese children are! What a hoot to find out adults are like old cartoons. There slinks Mrs. Divorce. Here comes Mr. Knife- in-the-back smiling. And at her father's funeral, radiant Miss Sun dries her eyes on the flowers.

for Jason Believing good friends should not live with ghosts, though ghosts warm up a wintry student dorm, bewail a good man’s fall in wedding toasts, and wonder at coincidence and form, I came to play the guest to your good hosts, to your love nest at Squirrel Hill, your home away from the home dreamed, New York City, and from Dunkirk of childhood memory. The ghosts would not leave us alone. Seduced by spirits, round the table, poems we read spoke: Wendi spilled a past life, wife abused for bearing a son not resembling dad; you wrote of foreign women who refused to bend under the trash but in the yard danced and danced in the direction of light; I read my “Payday Loans.” Called it a night. Next day, we drove to Dunkirk where your mum welcomed us three and showed me her Elvis memorabilia in a back room: posters, snow globes, baseball caps, ashtrays, head portrait in red wool, clock pendulum rocking both quadrant legs and arc pelvis. Only that room, the brightest, played music since you...

The bus to Pittsburgh rushes down the tunnel and so I start to time how long it takes to come up on the other side of the Hudson. On my right, a boy, of college age, is reading Genet's Funeral Rites . The book holds him quite still, his body carved to hold the book, just as my watch, a lover's gift, holds me eyeing its hand wiping its white face. When he turns a page, the bus sees day again. It is not what you think. I have not been resurrected through this fair freshman and his encounter with a deathless art, but this young man has touched eternity because in the unheated Greyhound bus, the day before Thanksgiving, I have taken time.

Lying down beside the man I love, I think of you, your late night call that woke my body's heat and blood. I think of you, your tiny hairs curled tight against your head, your strong back matted like a burlap sack, your sex rubbing between my legs. I think love is dreaming while desire's wide awake.

The men I slept with were good with electronic devices. Troy jiggled the wire antenna before he came to bed, and my radio clock sang. Ren downloaded the latest virus protection program to my laptop while massaging my anus. After Nick climaxed, he showed me how to text- message and shook his head, laughing over my primitive cellphone. So when I message some man whose eyes sang last night while I jiggled him, I think of Nick and his tremendous laugh, and thank in my heart these handy men.

The river breeds the humped black fly which stitches in the broken skin the worms that slip-swim to the eye, bear tinier worms which in turn die, loose from its fin the pathogen. The cornea clouds up like the sky. To stop from going totally blind, you modify your hosting body, drug your mind, or kill the fly, or climb upslope and leave behind the river, eye.

A happy package greeted me last evening when I returned home: two copies of the fall/winter issue of Crab Orchard Review , published by Southern Illinois University Carbondale. My modified villanelle, "What's Left," appears in the issue, alongside poems by Neil Aiken , Jeffrey McDaniel, Jon Pineda, and Cathy Song. The review is only $10, so get it if only to make me happy! The review is inviting submissions for its next issue, and for its first poetry book contest.

Don't ask me more than I can give. Don't ask for more, for more I cannot give. So let us live and promise no more. Don't ask me for my heart my heart has eaten to the core. Don't ask me for the teeth-marked part. Don't ask me any more. Don't ask me for a steady arm for rowing to the shore. A broken oar will do more harm than settling for no more. Don't ask me for my voice my voice echoes in encore, until it's hard to tell my voice from yours asking for more.