This is a social justice poem

about Jill staring at the lawn
so long that it breaks into pixels
and shimmers through water
while her husband cries into his sleeve
and cleans out a tiny locker full of tools

An anticapitalist poem

about Tomas reimagining his genitals
and singing forth a new weapon
to draw a harpy’s bead on ecstasy

A racial harmony poem

looped over a forsaken beat
with a noose in its mitts
while a dead suburb of heaven steaming
in the middle distance

This is a poem for the gross domestic product

slipping one by us
as it turns its hip-hop vices
into remedial charges

This is an empowerment poem

which scrambles to eat its placenta
for the protein and the soul scraps adhering
to the bloody rags on the kitchen floor

The poems come pleading
to put war in the docket
peace on the barstool
and music in the porches
of the weary king’s ears

The poems come a-curdling
in corners of convenience stores staffed
by the blue soldiers of the new
waving the scent of their empty pockets
at the promoters

But here is Jill dancing with her blurry eyes
for the comfort of her representative child-man
and his stranded dream
And here is Tomas with his re-imagined arms
moving furniture and earthquaking routine drama
to make a home

This is a social justice poem
about how it is that a poem
doesn’t mean a damn thing
to those trying to figure out
how a cherry bough
can hold a noose and flowers
at the same time

Ein Jeder Engel Ist Schrecklich

Every angel is terrifying.  — Rilke

Close a door, open a door, write a letter
or make a phone call: endings are easy,
as easy as beginnings.  Small stuff,
actions we take every day
when there’s no potency attached.

What matters, what makes it hard
to end or begin, is the Angel
of Possibility who hovers on the margin
of decision. Who could fly off with us
clutched in her brazen arms
if we choose a false path.

I know too much
of her scarred wings
and fruit-toned breath.
Too many meetings,
too many flights into
sun and stars. Each time
I’ve moved into or out of something,
I have flown with her,
and I am scared of the height
from which I might fall,
or might have fallen.

That any journey
leads to anywhere
is terrifying.
The Angel who carries us
is of little consequence,
but I stay perfectly
still while she floats
at the edge of vision, near the door,

as I pray for my feet
to remain on the ground.

You long for redemption after death.
But redemption after death is a probable myth.

You long for that myth.  But all you desire
is a fiction.  Here are the facts you need,

as far as can be told
from this side:

death is final.  You’ve been digging a hole
all your life, tunneling away from it.

That hole will fail you and in a panic
you’ll dig another one to find dirt to fill it,

having given away all you dug out of it
as a penance ahead of the expected redemption. 

You’ll keep digging, filling the previous hole,
making a new one, always falling short as you dig.

You’ll be surrounded by holes up to the moment
you die, and then you’ll fall into one of them.  That one

will come out even, because you will have put everything
you rightly own into it. 

Someone’s going to trip over the pits you’ve left behind.
You can’t even apologize to them.  Offense continues

to build even after you’re gone. 
You’ll never get even.  You’re a gravedigger

and all you bury is the original myth
with every stroke of the shovel.

Craving
the cracking sound my back makes
when it’s overloaded,
I pile on rocks and rocks
and more rocks.

Carry them as if they were
wings, despite
their utter lack of lift. 

I can fly
strictly because
if I believed in the harm
I am doing to myself,
it would be
impossible. 

I will fall someday.
Perhaps today —

perhaps that burning, shattering moment
is what I’ve lived for
after all I have said to the contrary.

Hope
takes different forms;

sometimes it is shaped like
the cairn a man
is buried under, the one
he carries with him.

Every time I go to New York City
I always make time for two things:

one, to read poetry before an audience;
two, to eat pizza.

My obvious presence on the stage
attests to the former,

the obvious presence under my shirt
confirms the latter.

There’s something about that burg
that brings out my appetites.

Something about how swiftly
the people move makes me want

to add to it all, stir the air a bit on my own,
and to take something of it back with me

to my slower home.  I shovel in a giant slice
from a hole in a wall and it sticks to me

as close as a brother in arms.  It makes me want
to nourish a sheet of paper in return, to offer

gratitude for what I have received from this place
on the run, filling myself as I walk among the crowd

without a name of my own: just another shlub
doing the New York Thing, taking whatever I can,

leaving whatever I can, and doing it all
at the speed of life.

If what is usually invisible
were to become opaque,
would we ever leave the cover
of our beds?  Would we dare
to immerse ourselves in brown wind
or pale-blue humidity? 

Light would be forgotten at once.
We’d have no need of it,
and we’d have to find new constants.
Everything would be subject
to redefinition. 

Think of us all, for instance,
so certain of the intangible natures
of love and hate.   If we found ourselves plunged
into this new life, suddenly blind, drowning in its indigo
stew, catching only the fire of its
red-streaked highlights, with no certainty
as to what we were feeling, or how it was
happening, I think we would all
go mad for a time.

Until we retrained ourselves to navigate
from one passion to another, we would
fall silent and still. 
Our comas would show
endearment.  Stasis
would indicate a longing for change. 
Language would fail.
We’d be dumbstruck.

Eventually, some genius would realize
that words themselves could be exchanged
for paintbrushes and palette knives. 
We’d learn how to mix colors
and exact our meaning with varied strokes and scrapings.
Every day would be art. All of us would become
artists.  We’d loathe the crippled hands
of the untalented.  We’d come back
to our former lives, throwing back the covers
to greet the day, all our prejudices and pressures
restored to us in a new swirl
of paradise reimagined,
with the essential question unanswered:

how do we draw out Eden
from a cloudy, muddled world?

Stephen
the flint,
a handsome
but somewhat common
sedimentary rock,
could not believe his eyes
when first he saw Sondra,
the girlfriend-shaped
parachute.

God, he said,
and I do mean that,
I love you.

A thermal took them
and they soared,
pendulum and silk,
rocking back and forth
until they landed
with a thump
and a sigh.

Sondra billowed a bit,

and they at once sought a cliff
who could marry them. 

Dearly beloved,
said the cliff.
Gimme a reason,
I dare you, said
the couple in unison,
making
that most formal of vows.

They kissed a lot
and fell over the edge
and they either made it down safely
or they didn’t.   That’s the end
of that story.

That cliff is still there, though,
waiting for a breeze
to bring in the business.
Never has to advertise. 
The oddest shapes
always seem to find each other
and come wanting to take that fall,
hoping
this time
for one soft landing.

Whatever bird
you are

The little one emitting
a slow and steady series of similar chirps

The rockstar melodian
trilling fluidly for hours on end

The sharp jay shocking up the neighborhood
with bully in his voice

Or the guardian laying down smooth tracks
on the perimeter circuit from tree to tree

You ought to consider
the window mounted cat

Who watches everything
and contemplates bringing you to silence

Who imagines you as just another irritation
worth his attention

And after having considered that
for a while

Please —
sing louder

No sir,
no.  I won’t
grow up — I’ll
grow down instead,

into the earth,

drawing in
shadow nutrients,
gritty water.

It is the Goddess of Dirt
that I serve.

I may present to you
a form
that seems
symmetrical
and bright,

but it springs from
the insistent tug
in a holy underground,

and what can be seen, admired,
used for shelter or shade,
logged
and laid out in board feet
or carved into utilitarian
shapes —

what you count as important —

that’s
not the truest part of me,
no,
no sir:

go ahead
and take it.

That stump
you leave behind?
That grip of roots
holding on after
you think you’ve gotten
all of me
that matters?

You come back.
Try grinding me out,
blowing me up,
poisoning me.

I’ll be there, somewhere under
your feet,
well and deeply dug in,
still saying my

"sir, no sir"

to you
with every ring of sucker shoots
I send up around my remains,

a crown for Her dark
and somber head.