was a lot of fun. Good food and lots of good poetry and prose on the subject of food.

I read “A Lemon” by Pablo Neruda, and a nasty and lovely little poem about bad poetry (comparing it to shit after a big meal of steamed rice and meat) by the nineteenth/early twentieth century Vietnamese poet Tran Te Xuong. I’ve been reading a lot of older world poetry lately just for kicks.

I also wrote this for the evening — just a little ditty; accompanied it with some guitar. It’s been a LONG time since I wrote something light and relentlessly positive and I wasn’t sure I could do it. I may do more with this at some point, but for now this is enough.

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Angel Food

the random backfire
one block away
means nothing for once

and the neighbor’s reggaeton
ripping a hole in saturday afternoon
means even less

when there’s angel food cake
on the coffee table
for yolanda’s birthday

daddy’s home for once
instead of serving someone else’s chicken
to someone else’s guests

mama’s not looking as tired
as she usually does
after a week on the Wendy’s register

the whole family’s here
bearing hot dishes and foil pans
full of what they’ve made for each other

someone drops some mac and cheese
in a corner
the dog gets to work on the pile

while everyone laughs and yolanda claps
her smile’s more delicious than usual
with that smidge of frosting on her chin

yolanda has a love for angels
and seven years worth of joy bubbles up today
with all these angels bearing heaping trays

of cookies and wings and old recipes
they just call “grandma’s favorite”
there’s white bread and stewed tomatoes

but yolanda’s got no business there
when there’s sweet sugar frosting
clinging to the white crumbs on her plate

outside this room
there may be people addicted to devil’s food
and the darkness on their lips may be rich enough

but in here yolanda’s having a birthday
with her yellow dress sweetened by more
than the smear of angel food that her mother

rushes to clean away before that dog
starts licking it off her
(even though

yolanda
would probably
beat him to it if she let her)

and when she’s done
she turns to her sister
and says

I’ll never taste
an angel food cake again
without thinking of yolanda

and the beating of wings
covers
the break in her voice

I love the way dead things
are revealed sodden on the lawn
once the mud arrives.

I love how idiotic
the first flowers look
when mocked by late snow.

I love having
the first bees
sting me,

I love the way they die
in the aftermath of battle
and not in the heat of it.

Mostly, I love
the way green
becomes the new white,

how it’s still
just a blanket
over rot.

What do you think about
when you’re facing the near-empty parking lot
at the end of a long day?

Me,
I head for my car trying to imagine
a workless existence, days spent
on artless fantasy, nights wasted on
television and cheap ice cream.

Everyone I know
wants to share their vision of this: lottery
segues to inheritance merges with reality show rewards
and business schemes. At the end of the day, after
all the lunchroom blather, we go home and keep thinking
about the report still looming undone, the meeting politics,
the kids who don’t want to pay their dues
(who seem to get away with that)
and the God-damned boss who does exactly what we do
(but gets more out of it, we think).

What do you do with your hope?

Me,
I push it down to bubble within me, making
thin soup of my blood and talent. I sleep
badly, self-important in the small hours.

Occasionally,
I toil over a single word and tuck it away in the desk
I keep at home
in the spare room
next to the dusty guitar,
the room I call “my office” to make it easier to pretend
that daylight’s cubicle is secondary to the night’s work
I spend so little time on.

What is the nature of heaven?

Me,
I’ve started to think it’s a place much like this one:
a globe with a molten core speeding around the sun.
The same physics apply, the same gravity
holds you. The only difference is in
the level of will needed to rise from your place:
in heaven your feet go where you want them to go,
even if where you’re headed is miles above the ground.

I can imagine that it never rains in heaven.
At the end of the day there’s a shuttle to your car,
and if you decide to stay home tomorrow
no one’s going to call you
to find out where your key is
or how far along you are
on that report. You’re in love with your boss, you’re still one
of the scrubbed young things moving up in the world,
plenty of money, plenty of time.
Your dreams become so compact they smolder
like a coal seam fire, and you’re warm enough at last.

Think about that often enough
and you will barely mind
the long walk to your car,
as long as you can afford
a new one every few years.

There will even be days
when all you’ll want from heaven
is a better umbrella.

If you want the Ecstasy

you will have to set your fingers on the dead garden
and plow. Defile the old neat rows where the stunted tomatoes grew
last year or the year before. Imagine the first
translation of the King James Bible is breathing down your shirt.
Give up the missions and the passions and dig
as if you’ve got a mother down there gasping for breath.
Lift the dirt up over your head and pour it over you.
Watch the earth gush out over the tops and sides
of your fingers as it chooses liquidity over stasis. See your own face
in the quartz flecks hiding in the soil. Urge the stones
to bite you back. Ignore the neighbor’s laughter
and the police waiting for you to finish so they
can ship you to a place built to hold the diggers.
Exalt the broken glass you find lodged in your hands

when you finally stand up with your back sobbing into your chest. Go inside
and find the phone book. Bury it in the hole you’ve made. Spit a glass of sugar water
into the pit and listen to it gurgle around the pages. Tear up a suit and lay the strips
gently upon the Body of the Names of Potential and Contact. Open your eyes
after a prayer and cover it all with everything you have moved this morning.

If you want the Ecstasy
you have to dig.
You have to be ridiculed.
You have to be filthy.
You have to wait.

It will not be at all as you expect when it happens. You will be
clean and the garden will have been long ago forgotten. You’ll
have moved. You’ll be in another city on the day you see
the long buried Phone Book in the eyes of a badger encountered
in a foreign backyard.

Ecstasy — there in the badger’s eyes.
Upraised dirt and blood
on the badger’s paws.
He has been feeding on the tendrils that grew
from what you buried long ago: connections
to the larger world.
You’ll know him:

the old man, the flattened man, the man
who dug past his humanity to reach
the breast of the Mother.