1.
Miguel once set the back of his head on fire
in an effort to drive the voices
ahead of the flames, into the open —

at least that’s what he claims he’s done,
thought there are no scars or signs of such a blaze.
That he may be lying, though, doesn’t occur to me.

I choose instead to believe
his tale of defense and survival,
and that I have just not earned the right to see the evidence.

2.
Alicia whispers to each turtle
she rescues from our unsafe streets.
She won’t tell anyone what she says

as it’s in the language of turtles that she learned
in childhood, something she insists must be kept private
since such secrets are ripe for theft and corruption

once they become known to all.  I tend to agree —
though it hurts to know that here’s another thing
I don’t need to know, and will never know.

3.
In contrast there’s Krystle who can’t shut up
about all the good little secrets of all my good little neighbors.
I learn in five minutes of through-her-porchscreen chatter

the kinks and hijnks of Crankypants across the street
and what the mail carrier does every day to the fat cat
from the second floor of my building.  How she knows these things

I don’t know, since Krystle never leaves her place
except when her daughter takes her to the clinic,
but I’d never accuse her of lying as I don’t know

what she thinks she knows
about me, and even less about who else she talks to
when I’m not around.

4.
I am salty with these secrets now,
secrets that may or may not carry weight,
water, or truth.  I can taste them in myself.

In a less contorted world, I’d stop
listening, I swear.  I would walk away
from them when offered or uncovered.

Now, though, it seems scary or impolite
or foolish to discount anything I’m told.
I can’t trust anything not to be true,

so I stop and listen to the locals
when they speak.
At least I can touch them.

Real sources, perhaps unreliable, perhaps not,
but with faces I can look into
and eyes I can meet with my own.

The new crop of good dudes
is sitting in the summer cafe
talking nerdcore and geekery
while struggling with beards
that, as the old song says,
have all grown longer overnight.

Rising from those beards:
the perennial incense,
the fuming intoxication of patriarchy.

The dudes know that smell
but this unfamiliar feeling
of safety, the sense that the newly hip beards
give them cover?  The rationalization
that their ethics are slipping but it’s OK,
they’re good dudes
and they vow they will get back
to the struggle
tomorrow?

It’s new to them,
but they’re getting used to it —
they ogle baristas and customers
as secretly as they can,
thinking it’s easily hidden —

fooling themselves,
if no one else.

How stupid:
an American outside its yard
with no flag to protect it.

It wants to believe
it is camouflaged and wary
yet is as loud as a bridle full of bells.

It wants to stray deep
into a foreign affair.  It wants
to be slick yet it’s stomping everything.

When it moves, it tears out
the spot
where it was.

See the country folk shaking their heads
at the city slicker
shining them on — or so it thinks.

They know better
what side their history is buttered on,
as well as how it tends to fall.

School buses are rolling on our streets this morning.
Pictures of a friend’s daughter and her baby arrive in the mail.
I’m waiting on the last tomatoes to redden before frost.

I’m ready
for something to happen.

Maybe it will be
starfire sourcing itself between my eyes.
A beam as wide as a freeway will sprout there
and traffic will begin to bustle back and forth
from within to without.

Hoping for
a new energy,

I’m going to cut off
my beard tonight, and then shave all the hair
from my head.  I will be a bullet, a cannon ball
with a beam of light in the middle of my head
and traffic going in and out, in and out.

I’m ready for something
to happen all right,

because not that much has been happening
with all my old hair and no light to travel on.
Hope is a new energy.  I have to believe that
it will happen.  I’m going to shave and then shine.
I’m going to change the way I look to represent
the change to come, all starfire-beam and speed-revelation.

Here’s to hope,
its own kind of new energy.

Here’s to the close shave of making it through today
with some kind of optimism.  Here’ s to getting stuck
in the traffic going back and forth from my bald head
into the far world.  Here’s to me, cannonball, aimed at peace.
Here’s to me sitting on my fat ass,
waiting for anything to happen.

1.
All weekend sharp-faced old Jacqueline
sat way back in her deep dark porch
and watched her grandson park cars on her lawn

for those coming to the big fair,
helping her to pile up the money she lives on all year
in her firetrap near mansion

where the windsock in the colors of the Irish flag
hangs straight up and down, motionless,
from the pole on the post at the ratty porch stairway.

2.
A leather-skinned couple
bickered lightly by a booth
selling straw cowboy hats.

“Whatya want with that –
you ever ride a horse in yer life?”
”No, but I’ve ridden my man plenty.”

I passed by too quickly
to hear all that followed that,
but it started with smoker’s laughter.

3.
Packs of teenagers — is that the right
collective noun? are they ever anything
but a collective noun? — roamed the midway:

4-H T-shirts
and blue hair;
cowboy hats,
(Connecticut cowboys, again!)
cowboy boots.

Unmistakable: the ones made up
of couples in first sexual union
could not let go of each other long enough
to put sugar and syrup on, let alone eat,
their shared funnel cakes.

4.
The cigar in the face
of the woman tending the shooting
at the midway game
never moved the whole time
she was spieling the skeptical
passers-by.

5.
If the nymph
described in that old song
was ever at this fair

it was not tonight –
I did not see her
among the jostling throngs.

Perhaps the song was written
about sharp faced Jacqueline
as she once was,

and her yard full of cars
is the sequel?  ”They moved
to the fair.”  Or maybe

any woman can be a song
with the right cowboy hat
and the right eyes to see her.