I Want to Stare at the Sun Until My Eyes Are Ashes by Jay Passer

Because she drives me to hedonistic acts

Because the beach is strewn with rotting porpoises

Because my body won’t process sugar into ethanol

Because my father is a golem captured in a medieval frieze

Because I cannot identify with sports enthusiasts anymore

Because she would rather climb a wall inside a postmodern structure

Because I won’t peel grapes or scrub the bathtub

Because I refuse to pray to alternative deities

Because broken glass is inedible

Because I sleep in a palm tree and shower under arc-welder’s sparks

Because her frontal lobes are as relentless as an adolescent Hypatia

Because my tongue has replaced the wax buildup in my ears

Because it’s getting dark out in Paris and Knossos

Because the earth is passively yielding to militaristic industry

Because suffering in silence is how I feed my black heart

Because she doesn’t need a hitman to come to her rescue

Because light is too incandescent and the dark too bottomless

Because I’ve regained my libido amongst bull elephants in musth

Because spooning dragonfruit into her mouth is akin to feeding a little baby

Because if you cross me I will shove a broomstick in your eyehole

Because I am sick and ought to be committed to a hospital and restrained with a straightjacket

Because our jams include both Erik Satie and Sinatra

Because the end of the street is the cliff and the abyss

Because the stars are made of carbon in flux

Because she is everything I am not

Because I am an idiot savant drooling and toothless with a spoon in one fist and a boner in the other

Because it is not so goddamned righteous being one with the cosmos

Because we still need to fold paper cranes together at a cantina in the semidarkness

Because when I’m just a skeleton she’ll go on to birth a messiah

The poetry and prose of Jay Passer has appeared in print and online periodicals, magazines and anthologies, in subterranean basements and men's room stalls, cave walls and space shuttles, since 1988. He is the author of 15 collections of words, symbols, diatribes, missives, isms, schisms, rain drizzles and blood fizzles. A cook by trade, he's also dabbled in daubs, photo-montage, reverse Feng shui; while failing at mortician's apprentice, news butcher, and criminal savant. Passer's most recent chap, Son of Alcatraz, was released in February of 2024 from Alien Buddha Press, and is available on Amazon.