I Love To Be Your Witness by Nicholas Wong


 
 
How thirst does the work, then the eyes

How the whipped cream of a Frappuccino stands without lickable legs

How my eyes witness a straw behead the cream

How the cut is crude, but neat. And cutting casts pleasure hard to resist

How a beggar pleads outside

How his head lowers

How humility is landward

How my gaze rides on his back of eczema

How my gaze translates sleaze into pity, pity into power

How his becomes mine

How I need the power to feel good because I don’t often

How my gaze returns to the other, so I won’t be full of myself

How he keeps begging simple

How a cardboard says he’ll bring coins to Mars to debug me

How I will become less infected

How I can avoid the night and its weird-if-not-fucked-up sense of ratio and definition of skinniness

How victims are created to decorate peace

How I should say no to gamma rays

How I should botox existence until it blossoms

How sickles hammer and hammers hum

How not every note from a saxophone jazzes

How the reverse of white is return

How nations run out of colors for flags

How hope is six inches long and often needs replacement

How I should have loud speakers to see and feel the vibration of sounds

How saving accounts don’t spatially exist though banks do

How my vision doubles without a cornea transplant

How me | him, separated by a madness hinge

How a hand ghosts, steadies within this me-him

How his sexuality is knife-ready

How he slices his sexuality, puts it into a blender and drinks it like coffee every morning

How every morning is not new

How the act of waking up is a techno beat thrown away but comes back

 

 

Nicholas Wong’s next poetry collection is coming out from Kaya Press. He is an assistant poetry editor for Drunken Boat.