My vision has been restored by salmon, caviar, and orgasm while my talking hand exults at new pictures to write and additional stories to paint.
This is the price of loneliness, paid in full, somewhere between being lost in fluorescent alleys and recently-hatched birds' nests.
With stark hills and well-armed children watching me nearby, I remember honeyed wisdom of Nubian queens and know the real value of the silk I wear against the empty rooms I now own.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
The working man's beach sweats in kindergarten drops, where people still fish outside restaurants and the exact contours of the hills blur under the sun's milky dusk.
The wind toils to organize the gulls, who are chased by a lone small dog, treating every proletarian inch of the second class shore as if it were his, and his alone.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
Billy and Al got passports to look for a pharmaceutical Dr. Robert, their corner quack, didn't carry.
From the Andes to the Orinoco they looked and looked, eating every unfamiliar flower, smoking all the strange birds, until their addiction emptied a jungle.
They would have to make do with tangerine virgins and much learned pornography carefully archived by major universities throughout America.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
Inside the hopelessly outdated mid-80's technopop, a graveyard's giggling in between inhalations of cocaine, Kristal, and any degenerate nobody willing to trade the skin of their body for a well-lined whole in their soul.
Every snatched corpse snickers at our tar-framed memorial; every palm tree shakes its coconuts waiting for used Chevys to return; the rest of the campus barrio just grins, knowing a fool when they see one.
You'd think a stolen childhood and a lost adolescence would buy a better visitor's pass than the nanosecond furlough drawn.
You'd think every frostbitten body deserved more than an hour (or two) in the sun.
The problem is, justice depends on basic belief in beings any sane madman wouldn't give a second thought to,
the very moment they stared at the 'Welcome to Arizona' highway sign and found out little Virginia is the one who should have been locked up a long time ago.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
The black is night, the voodoo heart, the ocean without sun. The white moon in black eyes makes tears move like constellations. The skin warms brown and glides copper, black as the sundown, but all are negre. People apart, lady women, boat dwellers, boys who do with boys, all are negre. Negre freedom is the mirror, the chicory reflection seen by mulatto eyes, a second-class image crying, with an ivory smile, 'Negre...I am negre'.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
I bedded on a hard rock, fell asleep, listening to Haydn. Gassy water churned my frame, my pale cuisine. The Metro stopped in my dream. Even homeless immigrants, stars, carried on as proper citizens, comfortable in their arrogant tax-paying. My storm-tossed pillow time gave up to the secret police, seeking a collaborator for inquiry into dark passages they’d been told in a recent sermon ignored by the networks. The dream soon gave way to living daylight but no body rose in the clatter of the nightmare. A store-bought nuclear force, I kept running, disco to disco, smashing open painted windows, letting in fresh diesel exhaust, allowing beer-drenched sweat and mass-marketed smoke respite. Cold neighborhood air invaded the dance floor, staccato electricity circuited into glorious acoustic form, transforming the half naked into proper believers clad in white tuxedos, perfectly applied makeup, galley slaves swathed in sero-negativity; they wept with humble Pei, leaping through glass pyramids onto display of tourist-friendly masterpieces. The cold barrel of a very old profession woke me with a start. My panic left fitfully sleeping puddles on the boutique of far-right barricades, where the rest of gay had been concentrated, unable to correspond with the rest of Europe without handcuffs, plastic gloves, and generic facial masks. An insensitive distance, ruined Lutheran temples and looming Roman Eglise kept egalitarian sympathy over our huddled bodies until one of us fell, at first from exhaustion, then from hunger, finally, from a luridly antiseptic fever, a disease so clinical, so mathematical, democratic, even, in its efficiency, in our death throes, we called it civilized. I pulled a young missionary corpse into my perforated arms, running my face into the mud and rain caking his blond features before using him to shield my unnoticed passing into the side walks of the unborn.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
I see, I see, said the blind man to the deaf dog to the assembled throng of boys that don't belong, of cabbages and kings polar bears and whales places and things bedtime stories and kinky tales, the midnight sun and the Mediterranean dawn the full Biscay moon and faces long gone museums in the morning drizzle crashing waves on the shore, as high as the angels in the Alps alone at home, angry and poor; the night train strangers under the northern lights ill-dressed tourists and carbonated neon brights what a sad sight seen by eyes that don't work right punctured by needles icy cold to travel a broken cobblestone path, so we're told cruising railroad stations for rented meat fine dining and morphine cocktails trying to deny defeat flying alone in a premier class seat mountain air saliva he holds in his lip's heat great towers bathed in whimsy empty Norman beaches to every side wandered by husbands desperate for their brides; interstates and passports postcards and souvenirs laughter and bliss people you can hardly miss sights so beautiful you feel felt up by God and shed an atheist's few tears; I've been to heaven, and it's a lot like Paris.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
Aloof, Voltaire would advise looking for someone less like a character in a book; Goethe agrees, adding, 'Though a little less re-writable, or less so than I.' Genet shouts, 'I want a boyfriend!'. With anxious nod, Forester peeks open his journal writing, "He can look like this... bare, often, warm in the dark, soft to the touch." Myakovsky growls, 'Zapadniks!' and seizes a quill, scrawling, "Short, sweet-smelling hair, fingers to glide over ice, my heart, nipples for erect tongue to caress." Isherwood raises a gloved hand. 'What about, "Lips tight over closed eyes that picture him always, out-of-fashion movies unremarked by the Society page." Hm?' Fugard claps politely. Greene sneers perfidiously. 'Veneration doesn't propel boys into refuge. The wind does. "Let the West Country breeze hide with him in my soul." That sort of thing.' Ludwig und Richard leave the city. Hiding under the buffet, Kundera tosses a note onto Schiller's lap. The German reads it skeptically. "A near-perfect banquet that isn't a black grave." La Rochefoucault pours more wine. Da Ponte and Schikaneder carouse duetically. 'Pulsating with the blood of love, coursing through our exchange, beloved and immortal!' Williams scurries out through the back door. Mishima takes his bread. Goddard scribbles on the tablecloth, "Captured in silver dust, framed in gold, the boy makes the man one." Stone drunk, Fitzgerald approves; Gertrude demurs. Tchaikovsky begins a seventh symphony on the spot, but cannot decide what to call the piece. Balzac, smelling of cognac, proves no help. Marlowe begins to bicker with DeVere. Yevtushenko wins a drinking contest with a bitter Hemingway and takes the floor. 'A man's love is voluminous! Glorious! Victorious!' Seeing Mandelshtam hasn't yet arrived, he weeps.
Copyright (c.) 2009 by Adam Henry Carriere. All Rights Reserved.
