Originally posted 8/10/2010.

Colonial dentists
advertised for tooth donors
when they needed to make dentures — offering
half empty mouths
and fuller pockets for some.
The ads read, often, “White Teeth Only.”
That didn’t refer to their color.

Some white folks back then
didn’t want African teeth in their faces, but
George Washington, denture wearing
father of his country,
didn’t care. Teeth were teeth
no matter where they came from 
to George Washington,
even if they came
from slaves he always saw
as lazy and unwilling to work
in bad weather. 

Suck it up, 
he told his slaves.  You’ll be free
when Martha and I die.
That’s a promise in our will,
right there in black and white.
Until then, smile and get going.

In an act of generosity,
Martha Washington freed all the slaves
George had brought to their marriage
upon his death,
keeping in bondage only those
she’d owned before the marriage.
124 slaves out of 300 got an early release —

an early example of how things get better.

They banned the slave trade here a few years later,
leaving the breeding of existing slaves
as the only source of new sweat.  No more ships
full of anguished cargo, no more immoral raids
in Africa, no more need of the Middle Passage
for resupply.  

Things, again, were getting better.

There were all those years of conflict
and finally a war to free the slaves
once and for all,
replacing human bondage by law
with human bondage by money,
but at least
no one could be called a slave,
at least the dentures
all came from free men. 

Things kept getting better.

Say it with me: it gets better.
It’s what we always say: 
don’t worry, it gets better.
Just hang on, it’ll get better,
suck it up, it’ll get better,
we know it’s cold but it will get better,
just ignore it and be strong, it will get better,
how about we wear a bracelet 
in solidarity till it gets better,
a T-shirt till it gets better,
chin up, it will get better
someday,
don’t know how fast
it will happen but it will get better,
just look at history — 
desperate teeth became pearls of honor,
the mouths they were torn from all became free,
those who suffered because the circumstances weren’t right
suffered on the future’s behalf
and see, it did get better — 
don’t die now
or cry now
or despair now,
it may not feel like it
but it will get better.

George Washington, father of the country,
must have known what he was doing back then —
full medical care for his slaves,
would not break up their families,
kept them marginally happy
while still enslaved
till he had no need of them,
after which it was perfectly OK for it all
to get better.
It’s the American way

and it’s how we look at you now,
you pained, you pushed,
you bullied, you edged out
and crushed and murdered and starved
and regulated until you are 
invisible,
and say it again:

it gets better. 

Who are we to say it?
Who are we to say
we are not the better
that was intended back then,
the better that is always intended?

Maybe better isn’t just a word.
Maybe better
is the choice to put ourselves
between the bully
and the victim, between
the system and the fodder
now,
not tomorrow.

It’s up to us
to shut our empty mouths
now,
stop smiling
now,
stop comforting the sorrowful
after the fact,
stop giving up our bite
and put all the teeth
we’ve got
into the moment before us.

Stop waiting.
Step in between
predator and prey.
Take a blow
before we take a bow.

It only is better
if we are better.

Originally posted 12/19/2013.

Before dawn
the clock radio
comes alive,
floods my room
with Spanish evangelism.
No music — pure preaching,
one man’s voice, 
one woman’s voice.

The only words
in the rapid flow 
I catch and understand 
are “contigo” and 
“alleluia,” but
I don’t need
the translation for the rest

as this whitewater pulse
of ecstasy and imprecation
soaks my morning
in splashes,
a torrent
rinsing away
any remnant of
unholy dreams.

Originally posted 5/30/2013.

Ask me once
what I want from life,
and I usually say
that what I want from life
is to be alive
until it’s more right
that I be dead,
at which point
I will be dead.  

But if you ask the question again
and ask it often enough, 
the answering of it
transforms me
through an obvious,
delighted hysteria
that anyone
would even care to ask,
and I fall into the consideration
of a delicious engagement
with the world — 
how the taste of it
may not at all be that
of ashes on my lips;

how like a first
post-virginal ecstatic sleep
each night could feel;
how like a morning
when a death sentence has been stayed
each awakening might feel.

Ask me, ask me, ask me what
I want from life — ask yourself,
I will ask you the same,
in fact let’s run through
our town asking everyone
what they want from life so many times
that there will be no choice for any of us 
but to laugh and love
and turn the streets into a banquet hall
and our stoops and yards into tables
where we can feast on the question,
reveling in the last meal we’ll ever have
before we take our last, gentle leave
of each other.

Originally posted 6/16/2013.

Upon waking I am an engine
for cobbling together random things
and hoping they are true.

My first thought is of
a landscape
with a football stadium.

My second is of
a scrap of paper bearing these words:
“your prime is seven.”
 
There may be,
suddenly somewhere,
an esoteric cabal

of crushingly huge men
chanting prime numbers.  
I hope so. 

So much depends
on it being true
after I write it.

My next thought
is that I ought
to sit up in bed and see how I feel.

My first action
is to sit up in bed 
and see how I feel.  

I’m still afraid of social media,
angry without cause,
desperately in love.  

It is morning,
I am the new carrier
of the disjointed day, and

my first action upon others
will be to write something.  
It will be angry or loving or based in fear — correction: 

it will be angry 
and loving 
and based in fear,

but it won’t be large. It will not assume
the form of a linebacker.
I’ll be gentle.

Count to seven,
push aside the covers.
The world needs me

and people like me
who are the sand grains
outside the oyster.

We are many, we have
pearl potential.
Some become random irritants

but most likely
we’ll become the bed upon which
beauty happens, mostly in spite of us,

even as the offense
thunders forward, bearing
the irreducible math of living.

Originally posted 6/29/2013.

On more than one occasion
I’ve nearly burst
from imagining that I
was self-sired
and never tired,
on an epic solo flight — 
a great aviator,
all alone.

Self-sired, never tired;
those are my best lies — 

as if I’ve ever been anything
but a lonely son, 
as if I’ve ever been
anything but exhausted. 

As if
the sleep I rise from
hasn’t always been robbed 
from the dark.

As if I
have ever been
formally cleared to land
on my own.

Originally posted 1/26/2011.

You claim
it’s a safe neighborhood.
a good one, trumpet 
that there’s never been
a violent death nearby,
nothing at all in your safe space,
nothing at all seeping from
this ground

that is only yours because
at some point
it was taken by force
and force is what keeps it
yours, even if the blood
was and is spilled
by your proxies,
even if you didn’t know 
it was being spilled.

No matter —
you are you, 
you have no need to pay
any mind to that
so you can pretend to ignore
the black feathers
that have just now appeared
in your hair,
that everyone but you
can see.

When you are home alone,
please —
look in the mirror.

When you finally see them,
pick them out
and place them in a box.

Pull that box out, open it
and stare at those feathers
whenever you feel
a little too divine,
whenever you 
want to remember
how human you are,

then
go lock your doors
and feel a little threat
and a little guilt —

not too much,
no,
but enough.  

Originally posted 8/19/2008.

The natural order: first
we breathe,
then we cry.

Nursing, sleeping,
dreaming, eating,
drinking, elimination — 

the breath is the one constant, 
alternating
between sweet and foul — 

smiling, laughing,
writhing, crawling, walking,
reading, writing, eventually
sex and its attendant foibles;
working,  grieving,
losing, winning,
parenting, 
more of all the above — 

the breathing continues through all 
until it stops for good
when all else does — 

we were built to breathe,
to ride those rails of breath
on a lifelong recovery
from the first sharp cry
after drawing
the ripe tang of the world
into our lungs.

The rest of it, all the rest 
of what we call a life,
is merely a consequence
of breathing — 

we breathe, we cry,
we act, we cry again,
and in the end
when the breathing stops
we fade 
like the whistle of a train
going home.

Originally posted 12/28/2004.   I used to write poems “ripped from the headlines” on occasion.  Most served their purpose — awareness, outrage, release of pressure, etc. — in their moment, while not having much staying power.  I thought this one deserved a second shot.

All day a stream of co-workers have come
to the world map on my cubicle wall,
coming to look for the place where it all happened.

Should I be surprised that on at least five occasions
I’ve had to point at the Indian Ocean
and then do a quick finger tour around the rim?

Or should I be heartened that at least
they came by to look? Or that they even knew
the map was here? It’s evidence, after all, that

the wave in fact reached beyond Aceh, that the wave
hit everything,  though not everything
got wet enough for everyone to feel it.

Here, we use money like paper towels
to keep the damp out, and already we’re bundling up
wads of it to ship overseas and make it all go away.

It’s possible that some come by
because they at least want to see
where their money is going.

“How about that tsunami?” “That one in Indonesia?” 
“Yeah, that one.” “I know!  That sucks.”
“Hey, can we look at your map? I wanna see where it happened.”

I wish I knew if I should cry
or just keep going back to the wall
to point it out again:

here is Phuket, here Aceh,
here Sri Lanka, here Tamil Nadu,
here Pondicherry, here Chennai.

Here is Myanmar, which so far
has been silent. Here we are
in the United States,

and here is everyone else.