(from “Xoeteox: the infinite word object” Wave Books)

Allen Ginsberg, I have worn you on my back

in cafe's, on the flatlands, in a threesome

with a half-stranger, whose pregnant pause stretched out

across the microcosmic corn flake of America's crooked twaddle,

your fellatious weight wigged on the temporary

munch-stains of mop-headed troubadours,

Alan Ginsberg, I wore your t-shirt with your poem

for a week in the Mediterranean heat, I was on vacation

my luggage had been stolen, I was left wearing you on my back

unshowered, unshaved, I walked your stink

up and down those pueblo streets, looking for a remnant

of magna-cathartic putrefaction in the gutless odor of my

other t-shirts, I never washed you, too

embarrassed to reveal my scarecrow's chest

to the letters forming your exuberantly Hellenic rupture,

knowing you would have enjoyed any nipple within rim shot of

avalanche or underarm...with due respect...I endured

the sweaty lung of your mass mugged by lonely verbs, each wrinkle

a soiled verse, Allan Ginsberg, I have already written a poem, years ago,

about you, our first encounter, a peacock's tail, all sainthood sanctified

in musk and love, arising through oxidation within the cloth of our unwashed souls,

you on my back, trailing the shadow of a colorless mirror-faction by clinging

to a skinny watery funk of Puerto Rican material, far from home I exorcised

the gypsy brilliance out of your hippy-dyed tongue, earthly toad, and lay bleeding,

the green fusion of our unrequited bromance at the hooves of the peasant paparazzi,

Allan Ginsberg, I wore you for one week, and never felt your tincture

on the seemingly ghosted episode, of our mutual longing for circular oneness,

emerged in the copulating dissolution, of your entrailed alchemy < hudda hudda

bow bow hatsa cuoq hatsa cuoq tantric autocomaaaaaaa > a groped cigarette

smoked, from the tenements of Eisenhower's hairless nubbin

to Whitman's follicular sway of mercuric synergy, head for tail, night

for day, dogged in dualistic wet spot, moving with erectable awe

over the pigsters of your shocking grey pubis,

Allan Ginsberg I have worn you on my back and never felt

the galactic peck of your molten po prick the rear

of America's Telemundo bypass, nor the equation of your

empatheticized mound, rip out malls and ipods from the foreign press

while wrapping your umbilical offerings across a Nintendo's worth

of whack jobs, as they beat the spores of industry into one more foreskin to cut you free,

it has now been one week of your grime, ripening down my flesh, my huge potential

immersed in the bowels of your delicate reminders, transforming meditation

from man to monk, with the iridescent wean of your burning red vibra-toot

< consciousness liquidator borealis calibrator inbreath inbreath inbreath wasabiiiiii >

Allan Ginsberg your stitch count was higher, I threw away my Emily Dickinson

bed sheets, my Christian Bök umlauts and my Jack Kerouac fishnets, the day

they put my mug on Facebook and told me who I was, but I kept you because

you were made better, Allan Ginsberg t-shirt you stood the test of time, a week's worth

of my vagrant meandering, cloaked in mandalas of sweat, in the confusion

of my tattered wolves, in a mass of unformed unicorns, and always you remained

a size too large to shrink.

Edwin Torres' books include; "Ameriscopia" (University of Arizona Press) and most recently, "Xoeteox: the infinite word object" (Wave Books). He is also editor of, "The Body In Language: An Anthology," forthcoming from Counterpath Press.