He wanted only to live long enough to see the fame,
_            _ and for years he was God of the rhino whips
and studs, God of the anus, cinched like the top of a purse,
_            _ _            _ of the well-timed press release,
gossip carved by the knife-edge of his tongue,

the whole muscled world lounging in the perfume of his gaze,
_            _ the open mouth of his camera lens inhaling
every pose, until he had captured them: the chiseled,
_            _ _            _ the gorgeous, the famously ornery.
Now the fear grows out of him, the way a boy’s dark hair

falls over his face, so that he’s blinded by it,
_            _ so that even when he sleeps
with a light on in his room, he thinks his own breath
_            _ _            _ might extinguish it, his lungs fire-cleaned
and drained, AZT patrolling in his veins, his spine

a whipping post to which the tortured body clings,
_            _ though, for the press, his body is the mess
at a party’s end, the buffet wrecked by a hundred passing
_            _ _            _ appetites, the magazines reporting AIDS
as if it were a fashion trend, he thinks,

though having the clippings read to him, each morning,
_            _ he understands more deeply that dying is his fame,
doctors and flowers always on the way, the heart monitor’s coverage
_            _ _            _ around the clock, loved ones, fans,
the spotlight of their prayers, all of them breathless

as they wait for his soul to step out from behind the stage,
_            _ as if it might shine above him when he dies,
like his own marquee.

 2. 

_            _ _            _ _            _ Or, he knows, some hoping
_            _ _            _ it might come out stained, black
as a furnace door, or the slip-card that concealed

the cover of the magazine he stole, sixteen
_            _ and too ashamed to pay, the blind man
behind the counter chasing him for months inside his dreams,
_            _ _            _ calling Thief! Stop that little fag! In hell,
his mother said, there was a clock that chimed each hour,

you will not get out, you will not get out, though yesterday,
_            _ hobbled by a coughing fit, blacking out,
he felt his body folded into a paper boat and released
_            _ _            _ across a stream. What happens
to all the undeveloped film inside the mind,

to the boxed-up wardrobe of our fantasies, he thinks,
_            _ as he lies with a sketchpad flopped across
his lap, bed-sore, uninspired, one eye blind,
_            _ _            _ the other weak, numbly scribbling
the knotted tie of his signature a hundred times,

“his final odd piece of ego and pornography,” they’ll say,
_            _ “a ball of yarn unrolled from the center
of a narcissistic mind,” though he sees it as that thicket
_            _ _            _ of tangled selves we leave behind
when the soul has picked the body’s locks,

his own body now like a photograph
_            _ torn up in rage, so that everything left behind,
he thinks—memory, art—is left in pieces, like shells
_            _ _            _ abandoned when the tide withdraws,
though already another tide,muscular, enormous,

moves inside the muted room with starlight
_            _ curled inside its breaks, so that he feels not scared
but awestruck, dwarfed, like a small boy hurrying
_            _ _            _ to scrawl his name into the sand
before it is erased by the censoring waves.