Since I’ve run out of stories to tell,
I go at last to the cupboard
and pull out the bag of walnuts
and a hammer.

Laid out before me on the floor,
lined up on butcher paper,
points facing away so there will be no
projectile damage from the blows,

they await my creativity.  I raise the tool
and bring it down on the one to the far left,
choosing the order in which I would read
a book if a book required violence of me.

Inside is the whole meat, which predictably
looks to me like a brain.  I see the walnut
as a brain, meaning that my brain
sees itself in the walnut, as we are creatures

of comparison.  Yet I did not think at once
of the whole nuts as skulls, curiously.  Despite
the all-encompassing violence of the process,
there’s a break in the perception.  Perhaps

I can find a source in literature which will illuminate
the source of the dissonance.  I go at once to the bookcase
to seek examples in literature of walnuts being compared
to skulls, and find (of course) many with a brain metaphor

and none with a skull metaphor.  I go back to the nuts
and stare at the next one, trying to see a face, a reflection
of humanity, something to hang a meaning on…nothing.
Nothing at all comes to mind.  Now, I’ve got a dilemma:

should I continue cracking these walnuts
if I have no social, existential, philosophical,
grounds to work from when I observe them?
I’m just a man, after all; how will I know anything

about the walnuts if I can’t see myself in them?

1.
I like the muscles
in words.  I like
how they move.  I like
how it’s not even work
when they move,
how different work is
from that.

2.
Ripple
in still water: a line
from some old song.

You can buy lines these days
from any songs
you want. 
This one suits me fine:

I’m the ripple sometimes,
the water sometimes;
doesn’t matter,
I always hum along.  I paid
for it, after all.  The moment
can always be made to fit.

3.
Don’t want these
hands or cornfields anymore.
Don’t want
to hold things
or be well-fed.
That would be too American of me.
I’m trying to be a citizen
of the world.

4.
Forever, the blue
and the red
for this white.  Forever
the straining for the anthem’s
penultimate note,
keening as did the heart
torn from the captive’s
chest.

5.
If I still listened
to new songs, or wrote them;
if I needed these hands
for what might be held,
then there might be hope.

6.
I’ve not left this home soil
once in the last twenty years.
I was born here
as were all my genes.
The only time I left
was to go and kill
elsewhere, and all that happened
was that I came home certain
that all the creation stories
my little nation ever believed in
were literally true.  Coyote
brought us fire, the snakes
were postal carriers to the gods.
I was fashioned a warrior,
and someday, the vast occupation
will fall head first into our villages
slain.  It has to be true:
every brown person I killed
told me the same story.

7.
This house is a perfect shade
of rose.  It’s clothed
in vinyl.  It’s air conditioned,
well-heated,
and it smells of mountain spring
in the dead of winter.  It chases me
when I try to flee, and when I tire
and fall, I crawl right in
and fall back to sleep.