when you talk that way

of vision quest
and spirit animal

you lie

that’s not your shit to talk
stolen shit

that shit grew in
dirt that grew from
blood that
nourished
wherever you steal crystals from
and whoever you steal wisdom from

they mostly didn’t speak of it
as living it was plenty
it was side by side dirty and clean
it was a life not an add-on

nowadays they live it hard

you don’t
you lie
I can tell because 

when you talk about it
so bloodlessly
you smell like funeral flowers
on a soft bed
for your weakly lucid dreaming
for an afterlife
to follow a barely lived now-life

how gently you wield
the stolen property
how little the source
resembled what you call it
how little what you have
resembles what was taken

how little it seems
when you use it
when once it was a communion with All
and as such
even the smallest stone of it
held a cosmos

My blood’s become
a culture of complaint,
granular with apologies
just scraping by.

Living as I always have
in the place between
others’ love and hate, my body’s
an oft-rewritten history and I am

not the primary author;
though I am trying to assert
my voice in it, it’s not easy
over the grinding in my ears.

Am I at once
as bad and as good
as I’ve been told?
When they insist

I am this and not that, when they
beat into me that I am that 
and not this, when they hold
the patent on what those words

mean, when self-definition
has been so disallowed here,
how am I supposed to hold up
my hand and say I simply am

when my blood’s so thick
with apology, when the scraping of it
on my vessel walls
is drowning out the small whisper

of my real name from deep within?
Sometimes it feels that it might
get me closer if I were to open 
a vein and let some of that out,

spill it on the ground — here’s
one drop for all my ancestors,
one drop for my hate, one drop
for my love, a grainy flood for all 

which is not me but which made me;
perhaps when I see at last
my husk, I’ll know
what I was from the start:

a rewritten history throbbing
with sluggish tales of theft
cajoled from the grasp of proud
and self-assured people; another tale

of a mixed blood boy
ruined almost before he started —
that’s the tale they want, the tale
everyone wants —

but no. No. I’ll rewrite it again
with the full pain of my arms 
to inform me. If that does me in
I will at least have not bled out

a stream of sorry before those
longing for it. If that does me in
at least it will be me who passes:
not their construct, not their boy,

not their exemplar  
of a national tragedy. Just me
cooling down, the culture of complaint
pooling down, the grinding at last at an end.

Descent is
a word for 
downfall, as in

I am of 
mixed
descent, as in

I am descended
from and thus
am no longer

a part of.  
I’ve fallen from
and landed below.

My current name
was pasted upon me
to cover up

whatever name 
slipped off
during my

descent.
I do answer to it:
a sound

of hard landing
in a place I’ve grown 
to recognize though

it never feels like home,
which some suggest
is better considering

how much hate
is attached to those
old names. Better, they say,

to have landed
and be renamed
as if I’d fallen

naked and new
and unconnected,
though I am not.

I don’t feel better
for anonymity and
erasure, considering

what distance I’ve fallen 
to get here and how
broken I was upon impact.

It’s my descent
we’re speaking of.
I’d like to know

what the heights
I fell from 
are like and I’d like

to think that someone
up there would know me
if I somehow returned,

could call me by name,
could help me find
my way back

to who I once was.

I once,
as a boy, 
owned a cane 

crowned 
with the ball
from the top of a femur.  

Grew sick inside,
once I was grown,
to learn it was human;

from its age and provenance
was likely taken from
a Native grave 

or perhaps sheared fresh
from one fallen in battle,
massacre, or misadventure, then

turned into a trophy like a necklace 
of dried ears or a tobacco pouch
sewn from a tanned scrotum.

When the cane was stolen 
not long after, I was at first
relieved, then soon enough

unsettled, thinking of how
heads and scalps were stolen
and traded and monetized

in those days of first conquest.
I imagined it in an ignorant hand — 
or worse, in the hand of one

who knew exactly what it was
and traded it for crisp bills 
to another who knew it too.

There are nights I wake
with my hand outstretched
seeking — absolution? redemption?

a chance to bury it
in the earth where it belongs? No.
I fear sometimes

that if it were
to return to me
I would hold it and claim

it had come back to me
because I am the unique
and rightful keeper

of such things,
though I know
in my own bones 

such a thing
to be horrid
and untrue.

How lovely it would be
to lie to the dead
and allow myself to think

I am any less 
a thief of their rest
than any other

who would take it, 
have it, hold it,
keep it as if it were their own.

NOTE:  This is a radical rewrite of a very old poem not found online.  It’s different enough in meaning and execution that I’m calling it a new poem.

Sing a song of Salvatore,

who married
my grandmother Luisa
after my grandfather died.

After my grandfather died
she had to sell the candy store.
My mother turned six the day he died.

My mother turned six the day he died.
My grandmother tried to hold it together
for her, but it fell apart. She went for relief

to the Red Cross and they told her,
don’t let it fall apart.  Dress up pretty,
hit the street, keep it together.  Lots of women 

do it.  Desperate times, etc. She 
didn’t.  Married Salvatore instead,
her dead husband’s best friend, seemed like

he needed a maid or something with three
old boys of his own. My mother was lost
in that; she found a way out. Went

overseas, met my father, married, had me,
moved back to take care of Salvatore
and Luisa. I remember a rough man with just 

nine rough fingers, lost one young with a single stroke
of a mason’s hammer. Smoked rough cigars,
spoke rough Italian I couldn’t decipher

through his whiskey-soaked emphysema. When he died,
I didn’t much care.  When my grandmother died
I stopped caring altogether. 

Sing a song of Salvatore,

the scary nine-fingered drunk
I never understood or much cared for.
I wonder what might have happened

to his amputation, if the only place it lives on
is in those dreams where I find it
wriggling under my pillow, which happen often, which is 

no surprise as what’s missing 
from my history so often
shows up there.

Luisa wasn’t buried next to Salvatore.
She has her plot
next to Antonio,

my sixty-years dead blood grandfather,
instead. I don’t visit their graves
except like this, out loud, from a distance,

whenever I wonder 
what it must be like 
to miss someone for that long,

what her dreams
were like, what might have come to life
under her pillow, night after night.