sparked by the love of my own teeth
i smile even when i’m hardly ready
to show a face someone might like to touch

i’m thinking bite and sharp and blood
and torn armskin while it looks to all
like I’m echo of sunshine and good cheery days

i’m thinking cracking down to the marrow
and the pop of fingers as they’re bitten off
while it seems likely to the casual viewer

that i’m just being friendly
but i’m a smiley kinda villain
i’m a fake snake who looks splendid on a good lawn

during the day i follow criminals
to learn their shit
at night i regale the adoring with the day’s stories

longing to spit in their faces
i’ve got acid in a mouth pouch
i like the idea of the melt

and then i come home
alone and say gimme a reason
and a word to make into a vulture

and i’ll let it feast on my liver
moaning the whole time like i’m in cat heat
about how it hurts

i like it hurting
i like to spread the hurt
it makes me smile

and people love it when i smile
i look so good and smell like impending christmas
though i’ve got a gift for being hell

Comment, son,
on the darkness you feel
when you hear the word
“Father.”

Comment on
its bat wings, how it navigates
in darkness, how it fills its mouth
with mosquitoes full of your blood.

Comment on its
soft opening, seduction
in its syllables and
its growling finish.

Comment, Mother,
on how it feels
when your son says it
in the hopeful, dreadful way.

Comment on its acid
and the bag of regrets
that hangs from it
as it flies from him.

Comment, say something
to make the word mean something
it hasn’t meant for a while.
Comment so you can both remember

how to breathe.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Mario stirs
from a dream where he’s become
a children’s book.

He looks at the clock
and thinks, “I need more time.
I don’t know how I begin.

I know where I am supposed to end
but that first sentence, how to lead
a child into me…it is not there yet.”

He falls back into
his pages
and finds himself

staring at that first white leaf.
“There ought to be some
huge illustration here, bursting

with all the colors,
and one line that sets me in motion
and makes me irresistible,

but nothing comes to mind.
Why would I as a child
would have wanted to know

this story?  Maybe
there is no beginning
and I’m a pure middle,

graspable once I’m formed
but hard to enter.  Would I
as a child have made an effort

to look into me as I am now,
or would I have been ignored
in favor of another?”

Mario dreams on
as his daughter tosses and cries out
in another room, another house,

and Daniel, the new man her mother married,
rises to comfort her.
Dan reads her a story

full of moon and stars, mice
and fishes and bluebirds and turtles
who speak in rhymes of lovely things

set in a full home, a place
with no blanks.  She falls uneasily into
her own incomplete dreams.