Dodo Eraser

“Hell is a place on earth. Heaven is a place in your head.”
—David Wojnarowicz

The party ended. Or it must have ended
since the self-betrayal of your remembrance
floats up in stray incendiary sparks
beside the cark and rattle of old lard cans,
sweetbread, and the lilac bowels scattered
on the Meatpacking’s cobblestones. A message
scratched with too much feedback’d whistling
loops on your voice machine. Sunlight
rummages in dust and rubble. Noon
is fool’s gold where buildings shoulder air rights
and the cloudbreak glisters on the sudsy guff    
which runnels off the gummy, hosed-down stoops.
This gamey taste of so much ruckus; the glyphs 
that flicker in and out, a rapture that’s fucked up;
your days on loop, a laugh-track’s hocus-pocus.
Why do you only trust the tone of things half
broken? You fumble through your pocket
change, then hobble off through chokedamp
tunnels where black canker rankles dank blank maps
the subway walls glance inside your retrospection:
your mind’s long vacuum tube soon incubates
the sublunary ecstasies that flash and scour
this city’s alleyways; the lonesomeness
that drives you stumbling back and back into
the slum’s cash-only leather bars where X-
rays of bones poke through thick clouds of hash.       
An aerialist, lithe and nude, goes tumbling head
-long down a banner through your fugue of day-
tripping, where grace and glamor rain into    
a brain-gashed power surge—now it’s midnight
once again. You stand on a roof. You purge
yourself. The metropolis from here is like
a vigil. Its luster wobbles in your glistered eye.
The local fuzz keeps pacing on his beat while
laughing somnambulists cross buzzing streets
past 24 hr laundromats and mafia hotels.  
Models in fur coats scissor through the park,
clown-faced by stoplights’ withering mascara
amid a vortex of topless limousines. You order
lettuce at a drive-thru’s garbled squawker box
you’ve walked up to. A subway gargles down
dark throatsore grates. Dawn paints fresh blush
onto the gargoyles who eat you up or puke.
You gawk at a man—a five o’clock shadow
of a would-be pickup. Sans introductions,
you beg him for a cigarette. As luck would have it,
he slips you one. He gives a quick-witted kiss
from his stubby cherry. Yours, sub rosa, rubs
aflame. You take a drag and turn a corner. Fuck
quickly in the formless shadows of a stoop.
You unscrew the Astroglide you copped at
Walgreen’s to rub topside and bottom. Sour
candy buried in your jacket melts and hardens.
The dockyards atomize a fish-gut pong.
Old songs, stock phrases edgewise in your skull,
eroding any logic. Childlike, a static luster
novas through your cells. Dusk—an endless dial tone.
An asterisk dangles over everything you say.
thus any talk is its own hucksterism.
You rehearse your explanations just in case
anyone asks what that blot of sticky drizzle is
next day. Such randy images keep rotting
in your noggin. Immaculate estrangement
comes corrupting you. The dreary facts of
earth soon fracture where brief dreams erupt,
and dream-facts usher in air’s bruited vacuum.
Another handsome man stalks off toward
a random street and vanishes in smoke,
another flame-lit tip in this exchange…
He glances back at you; you grasp a scandal.
Complimentary ham sandwiches with extra
mayo get handed out from Jimmy John’s;
the world’s cemented with free condiments
and semen. You are, a stranger, stranded;
each crazy night kaleidoscopes you daily.
Already another sun-blond morning topples,
and light’s thick gravy spills out everything.
The gristle of your memory frazzles; drastic,
busy people go shuffling to work or shopping
past scraps of trash sizzling as if landmines.
You laugh. You stumble. You believe you’re dead.
So, nothing’s real. Or something’s missing (what,
you can’t remember) as you enter a café  
while one frumpy bran-muffin is it, maybe—
with cranberries and roughage?—slumps,
lopsided, saran-wrapped in the day-old basket.

Will Cordeiro is the author of Trap Street (Able Muse, 2021) and Whispering Gallery (DUMBO Press, 2024) as well as coauthor of Experimental Writing: A Writer’s Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury, 2024). Recent or forthcoming work can be found in Boundby, DIAGRAM, Louisville Review, Puerto del Sol, and Wildness. Will coedits Eggtooth Editions and lives in Guadalajara, Mexico.