So what would you do as a parish
priest in the 1780s in protest over the salt tax?
A scruffy Jacques Roux bound to himself
dreams of property as an athletic lover
Patrick you dreamt of the CUNY
Graduate Center library
on fire, you dove in to save Stalin’s
copy of Capital
Ruthie arrives to congratulate
you for doing the right thing since,
she says, ‘He likely
never even read it anyway’
then the same week you dreamt of a mass
meeting of the Left, an old-school
gym or auditorium – I’m editorializing
here but I can see this combination general
assembly or Historical Materialism gathering:
white walls, movement egos
everyone’s sitting on the floor in their million debates
David Harvey in his eighties addressing the assembly
says something that sets the factions at war
against each other and especially him
like either he bent the stick too far on
a useful, unfashionable point
or downplayed some real but minor critique –
a chorus of hundreds shouts and exits the dream
but you’d been given a job as his minder
it’s your task to explain the debacle
to the confused and sad Harvey
he doesn’t fully understand why
or how he instigated the split
then you took him back to the house you were renting
together, comforted him and put him to bed
logged onto Grindr and got caught
mid-fuck on the veranda with your app hookup
though not by David himself
I’d pay good money to see the caucus theater,
the burning library, Stalin’s unread Marx
once you starred in a slightly too cinematic
dream I had in which a bearded Trudeau, Jr
arranged in an end of history maneuver
for Ottawa to be secretly populated by robots
he hoped nobody would notice
and maybe nobody would have without,
Patrick, your role in the dream:
you hack the robots such that they stop
moving and start shouting horrible shouts
making such a tremendous
noise they upend the peaceable
and frankly boring capital where nothing
moves except speculation at the speed
of hoisting bitumen out of the ground
now it’s a place of total noise
and chaos, shouting robot shouts
a noise show in a barn somewhere made
public like a social wage
C. had a Merzbow shirt from a show that
‘caused him nerve damage’
when we dated I liked to wear it and pretend
I was the boyfriend, a punching bag for sound
though really I protect my delicate ears
Patrick I’m a sap for pretty shit
Brecht and Artaud make beauty
suspect as it should be
that’s their real point of contact
now my broken doorbell is hissing
at the mouth like a robot in Trudeau
Jr’s house of commons
or that parish priest urging arms over the salt tax
Ottawa has shed its clothes of bureaucratic perfection
in the dream the shouting
robots allowed something to unlock
elsewhere since Ottawa, here and always
a city of squares, was consumed
by its forever droning puppets and nobody died

And nobody died: optimism!
Well I think that’s funny
I’m being dialectical so you don’t have to
I lived with a guy who said: it won’t be
a good revolution if I survive it,
fighting the people’s war in Paterson, NJ
crisis escalated me out of that place
and into the expensive hovel, near the Home
Depot, with the roaches and the infuriating smell
the one long-lasting roommate an aging
beauty and a spy for the landlord
remember how I lived with Stephen and Liam
for a month to avoid her?
Then Stephen towered over my dreams like a nightly
impresario. Here’s one he had about me:
‘I’m at a restaurant with Kay,’ he writes.
‘We join a table where Margaret Mead is sitting.
Kay is like is that Margaret Mead. She starts
going on super Margaret Mead-type rants. She
kind of looks like Joan Didion’ – wait for it –
she starts talking about the last words of W.H.
Auden and transphobia. ‘Nobody’s more
celebratory of the erotic than trans people,’
I said, in Stephen’s dream, at the Margaret
Mead table, or did Margaret say it? Then I told
Margaret about ‘fucking boys’ mouths on day two
of affairs.’ ‘Day two is kind of a Margaret day’:
In Stephen’s write-up of this dream that’s in quotes,
so either I editorialized to Margaret Mead about
dedicating the second, mouth-fucking day
of an affair to her, in quiet contemplation, like
a day in the French Republican calendar dedicated
to cabbage, or she inserted herself into my tawdry
affairs to self-dedicate mouth-fucking to the memory
of Margaret Mead and other Margarets. I thought
she was a Christian Socialist, I mistook her
for Dorothy Day. In the dream Stephen’s holding
me and spooning me, he feels deep Platonic
love and then ‘Kay’s also W.H. Auden and I’m crying
because I love him so much and I can’t speak.’ W.H.
Auden is trans, like poetry is a way
of happening, like Brecht is a strange and useful
megabitch. Patrick says I’m reanimating
his interest in aesthetics, an ‘effete kitten
he’d long since drowned.’ Auden’s last
words are a ‘kind of stuttering monologue
about beauty and gratitude throughout which
he gradually loses coherence.’ There,
Steve, did I get it right?

Image © Tyler Callahan