Originally posted 7/12/2013.  

Section One:

Explain intersectionality
as it relates to
systemic oppression.
Include in your essay
the following terms:

blood dugout. 
pitted bone.
rape shop.
sharpened stone.

Section Two:

If you are assigned 
the role of scapegoat,
how will you survive
your turn in the wilderness?

Show your work.

Section Three:

What five words
ought to be erased or respelled
in order to lift their magic?  
Defend your choices

without attacking others.

Section Four:

Define a process
for removing
the history
in your own eye.

Section Five:

Will there be any room for any mercy
in the next world
that has not already been shown
in the present one?

Discuss.  

Originally posted 1/11/2010.

Please, no earthquakes
or supervolcanoes tonight.

If the world is going to end in my lifetime
I want to be awake when it happens.

There will be something to see
in those last seconds

before the curtain tumbles around us
laden with stone and flame

and I’ll surely be one of those 
compelled to capture it

and cram what little sense
can be made of it

into words 
no one will read.

I would like a good night’s sleep 
before I face that, a good night

thinking of good things
to do in my good future.

So please, no asteroid collision,
no planetary conflagration tonight.

It’s not much to ask,
I think,

to want to be awake and at my best
when the worst happens.

Originally posted 4/3/2014.  

If you choose 
to remake yourself 
as a dead man, 
bull-boy,

when you have done yourself in,
whether you do it yourself
with a tool or weapon
or whether you do it yourself
with food or drug or antic mistake,
everyone will know it was you

and you will learn
(while you are newly disembodied 
but still able to hear everything 
they’re saying about you)
that your people
will get as angry as picadors
when a bull escapes 
its obvious fate. 
They will rage on about it
for a time,
wanting to stick that dead bull
till it bleeds anew. Bull-boy,
they’ll be really angry with you
at first

but after a time
you will be forgotten.

People prefer their bulls to live or die
by the hand of 
a matador
who stands and fights
with a bull who stands and fights.
No matter who wins 
the winner is loved,
no matter who dies fighting
the loser is loved.
He who does not die fighting 
is always forgotten,
win or lose.
Just another animal,
another meal,
another heap to be carted offstage
amid cheers.

Bull-boy, it’s time: 
time for that cape, 
that suit of arrogant and foolish lights;
those darts in your hide, 
the blood running down;
the lusty crowd calling for your charge.
Time for your best, or your worst.
Time to trample time underfoot,
to render it flat, to trap it
by crushing it forever 
under some body
that will never move again.

Originally posted on 3/2/2010.

Your opinion
seemed right to you.
Then
shit started. Soon,
it happened:

Nazi,

says the anonymous poster,
you’re a
Nazi
for suggesting
such a thing.

By now, you’ve forgotten
what you actually said so 

Nazi,

you respond,
you’re the
Nazi
for bringing
Nazis
into this. 
Trying to scare me
into shutting up
by invoking
Nazis,
that’s a
Nazi
thing to do.

Nazi Nazi!
chimes in a
supporter of your enemy.
What was this about again?

Nazi!
Nazi Nazi Nazi!
NAZI!

Damn, doesn’t it feel good
to bring them up in connection
with anything at all?
Baseball card futures, Area 51,
that Palin woman, hairstyles,
the latest incarnation
of garage rock?

It feels good
to hear that marching
in the world outside, 
as if your blood
demands it from you,

as if it doesn’t matter
where you were headed
as long as you eventually
get to a point

where that word
can roll off
your outstretched fingers.

Originally posted 1/17/2013.

In late spring,
almost at the solstice,
far outside
my own home city,

I sit alone and eat a bowl of oatmeal
in the kitchen of a house
with a model of Stonehenge
on the coffee table in the living room.

In the back bedroom
a tired, tender woman feeds a fawn
whose mother was killed by an 18-wheeler
this morning before dawn.

If any of those who built Stonehenge
were to appear here right now
they would at once recognize this light
as what they’d once seen through the pillars.

Originally posted 3/30/2013.

Amid the conventional people
and everyday happenings
on my street, something, perhaps

a blue whale, has passed
through the air
behind me.

I turn
once it has gone
and see only

conventional people and
everyday happenings.
I sense something

I have been missing for decades
has just brushed me,
and I want to weep,

but only with someone else
who felt it as well.
I cannot weep alone for this,

because one man
weeping alone
is no way to offer praise

to whatever has made
such things,
to whatever

has seen to it that things exist
which, though unseen,
are nonetheless deeply known.

Originally posted 11/29/2011.

Open the car window at
eighty miles an hour. 
Cars peel off behind me

until the highway’s
empty. No one 
is going my way. 

The city forty miles ahead.
The sky, orange
over deepest black.

Rumors of riot and fire all day.  
It’s the end of the world, some say,
but no one wants proof except me.

How foolish, how
odd that is — to
just curl up and die

or hide in the boondocks
without seeing for yourself?
In fact, how can you even flee

when you consider this world?  
Maybe that’s the best of all possible
pyres up ahead.

Stuck my fingers
into wounds once, long ago,
to prove to myself

that the world wasn’t ending
after all.  Why wouldn’t I
do this? It worked out last time so

I gun it.  I go.
I’ve always been the one
who has to know. 

Originally posted 10/29/2009.

When you’re a hammer,
said my high school buddy
Joe The Hammer,
everything looks like a nail.

When you’re a hammer
facing a problem
you do one of two things:
you bang on it or
you pull it out.

It works, mostly,
but sometimes I wish
that I’d been born
a precision screwdriver.
I wish I’d been made for details,
like you were.  But I wasn’t.

I was a hammer, did
framing twenty years,
had my own business the last ten.
I slammed and yanked
and banged my thumb
a lot.  It was
a good living for a long time,
it’s been up and down lately,
but I don’t complain.

You, he said,
you, though. Man!
You write, you travel,
make stories come out the way
you want them to be.
I’ve read some of it, and damn, man.
Damn! What that must be like.
What is that like?

The Hammer
slapped me on the back

as I peeled the label
off the bottle,
studied my unscarred hands,
thought about stories coming out
the way I wanted them to be;

tried to figure out
what kind of tool I was
that I wanted to be
anywhere but there right then.

Originally posted 9/28/2012.  

My neighbor’s standing naked in his window
singing a children’s song
Licorice stick, licorice stick, gonna eat one pretty darn quick

Somebody get that man a robe
Off to another dense start
to another dense day in Whipsmart City

Last night flung me around my bed
lodged between sleep and wake
Oh my aching back and sides, oh my aching heart and mind

I wish I had a river of sleep
to drown my aching heart and mind
But it’s too late for sleep to do me any good at all

It’s off to my day job on the morning drive time
describing massacre victims with a sweet vocabulary
with a hey nonny nonny and a robot chip

(I almost said “massacred innocents”
but then I had to laugh
because if I thought any of these stiffs were innocent I’d go insane)

Two pills for breakfast two more for lunch
and a fifth mid-afternoon
I get no kick from God or Country, no kick from going along

After work a beer
or a blood and Jaeger cocktail
I drive home and wrestle my guardian angel to a draw

Soon enough I’ll be off to bed
which I’m fond of up to a point
Gabba gabba dead man gabba gabba flay

Thank God or Some Bigger Monster that I stopped dreaming long ago
My neighbors took my dreams away
which explains their children’s songs

Next morning the guy next door is once again
standing naked in the window with those stolen songs in his mouth
Sweet land of liberty of thee I loudly sing

I can’t get too excited about him
being obscene or crazy or maybe some kind of performance artist
when there are so many corpses to talk about here in Whipsmart City