On this small island that undoes us daily,gently,
It’s hard to take too seriously, too intently
A town whose name means town

Now LeRoy on the kill room floor
Was almost larger than life.
Mondays the green fatigues he wore

What vague dispassion or crisis of hope
entered the artist's head when, leaving off
his study of a woman, he began,

No single excess, nothing jerrybuilt
or squandered in a fit of thriftlessness
accounts for what we've ended with. Despite

When a man threw his fist into a wall next to my eye
I said that was love, that love was rage. 
I was in the habit of loving anyone who laid a cold hand

When I was five, my grandfather took me to the tomb
                of King Suro, lifted me over the stone fences

                and watched me slide down the mound over 

This is you as a boy.
Your back is to the camera.
You are standing above the beach

To spectate
is a verb
that does not

A gauze bandage wraps the land 
and is unwound, stained orange with sulfites. 

as if         you were ever wide-eyed enough to believe in urban legends
as if         these plot elements weren’t the stalest of clichés: the secret lab, the 
        anaerobic chamber, the gloved hand ex machina, the chemical-
        infused fog