Bathhouse, Liverpool Street, September, 2005

I loathed the men in the bathhouse. I kept seeing these old guys--around late 50s, early 60s who were hobbling around, stooped and hairy-backed, lunging for me as I walked past and how sad that looked and these men deceitful in the shadows and coming across as early 20s when really they're 40 and only showing age around the edges of the eyes, calderas, brimstone on their cheeks, old volcanoes, faces like cracked continental drifts. One was very agressive and wherever there was a cock to suck he was in there to suck it. I had to push them off of me. A few times I put my heel in a puddle of jizz and that really disgusted me and made me afraid of what I might be soaking up by way of osmosis...

Pachyderms, lifting the bones of the dead
with their fat, white trunks.
Their time draws night-light in the chinks
of the boarded up windows,
Brazilian letting his feet hang over the rim
into the taxis and cobalt between clients
and splooge mops resting,
breathing heavily in the corners like baleen.

They hear time thundering,
and the older ears, the wide ears that wrap
my lips in the crowns of their hair,
spell a bit,
rain over there,
thudding like a giant foot,
like your hand on a rail
and they come along,
clearing the hall of bones like how a man shaves.