Why are we tempted (and why do I ally
myself with “we” when I can only mean
myself with certainty … while certainty

At the bay’s edge and day’s end, we comb
the shore for beach glass, clouded grains
of clarity among the ground-down,

Archaeologist of the aesthetic, perception’s rhapsode;
perpetual bachelor, father by default leaving heirs
but no offspring; elliptical ascetic sideswept by eros,

Today’s subject is an architecture of cards,
laminate, cool, telling no fortunes. It’s
the world reduced to a series of integers

Already Judah Street awaits the rain
of streetcar-whine down avenues of rain—
the snap of black umbrellas, the falling coin.

Although I’m twenty-five, and in my prime,
you will not meet me for a second date.
Nothing will make you fuck me one more time.

Blue is the evidence of what I do,
the lies I’ll leave behind, no more, no less.
This is the past, and so it must be true.

Jealousy. Whispered weather reports.
The lure of the land so strong it prompts
gossip: we chatter like small birds