I’m supposed to be
among these massacre bones:
that’s where I was born,
after all, nestled
in a bleached nest of
what was once alive, and though
I got up and moved on,
I was not whole. Part of me
stayed back, remained
with these dead
who’d unwittingly cradled me
and lent me a certain air
of loss that I can always feel
even if others cannot tell.
I measure every day
against that sense. Sometimes
it surges within
and I can’t take a breath
without the scent of old bones
filling me, choking me. Other times
I can get by with only a whiff
or two here and there. Either way
those dead held me when young
and still hold
all the essence I grew from:
the knowledge that I live always
among those who, if they’d seen me
in another day, would have laid
a sword against my infant neck,
a rifle’s barrel against my child’s skull,
and not held back. I live
always knowing how little it takes
to unleash that urge,
how easily they could send me
back into that massacre pile
if given permission and
a flimsy rationale. Every day
I do not run screaming
to lock myself away
is a marvel; understand as well
that every day I convince myself
from dawn to dark
that you only look like them
and are not like them
is a miracle — not one
of trust, but of magical thinking
and provisional hope. I make
no apology for that. You should
expect none. You
should do more
than wring your hands
when there are
so many of these bones
still to be laid to rest.
Tag Archives: meditations
Surviving
There Is A Light
There is a light
in a glass of whisky
that never goes out
as it travels
to dark places.
As it goes
on its way it is
its own torch
and what sights
it sees in
there, in those
normally unlit
crevices — things
in some cases
not seen for years,
unexamined for
decades. Take,
for example, stories
of an absent father
who disappeared seeking
those same items
the same way years before —
there those stories are,
tucked into a cranny
above the acid fields
of the deep belly. Or
the memory of
first taste at twelve,
chased by
the memory of
that grapefruit soda
chugged after to cool
the flame that burned
again all the way back up
to the light and out again
leaving you heaving,
swearing never again,
no way, never, no way
never no more; that’s
all there in the same
shadow as the others
and all the light there is down there
is in the first, second, third, fourth
glasses of gold, dense
shine barking briefly
in the tongue, its hazy
illumination upon those
secret places counterbalanced
by how it sweeps fact up
into emotion and then,
after a while, the light,
ever a lie, indeed
goes out while leaving more
dank remnants behind
inside to soon be sought again
with the breaking of the next
wax seal, the next crack of
the cheap tin on the cap
of the next bottle of flame.
Green Street
Bodies on fire on Green Street:
once leafy and pleasant, it
now has become
a scourging field.
You smell this smoke
and are initiated into
an intimacy with those
whose bodies are burned
as well as with those
who burn them.
It is now
a relationship,
a greasy coupling among
actors and those
acted upon. If you think
you can leave Green Street
in horror to regain
some level of innocence,
think again: sniff, breathe,
cough it out, vomit, it matters
not at all. You cannot detach
from it, just as every lover
leaves a mark within. Even if
the trees recover, even if
a canopy of life
returns here,
you will be a partner
in these deaths
forever and
will never pass
this corner again
without holding your breath.
Trying All The Keys In All The Locks
Hard to believe now,
but when I was a child
I spoke more
of my mom’s Italian
than English, knew
all the Russian she knew,
and could mix it with
my dad’s sprinkling
of Korean, Chinese,
German, and Apache
as needed.
I lost them all
in elementary school
where they made me
an English-only exclusive
and it worked so well that
when I got to high school,
as hard as I worked,
I could not get past Mr. Albert
and junior year French.
Never made it out of
the replacement Spanish class,
either. What little
of each language I can recall
still tangle in my mouth
when I try to use them
just to pronounce names
of people and places.
I’m as monolingual
(and thus as all-American)
as all get out,
one ossified adult
turned to stone
in the coils of
a colonizer’s words,
sentenced to
their sentences,
wondering who the hell
that kid was
who once moved
so well
among his given languages
that he felt at home
in the fullness of the world,
wondering if all the poems
he’s read and written
and spoken since
were just keys stolen
from the warden
to be tried in every lock
until he and his tongue
once again
got free.
Tired Angry
When “tired”
means there’s nothing
to give.
When “tired”
means your lungs
whistle dirges.
There are trees
bent more by the weight
of life than you are,
trees that grow
anyway, but you
are no tree.
So tired,
stunted,
stalled —
lonely too, or
alone at least,
even among friends,
lovers, family.
Tired, alone,
shortened, stuffed
down from full height
and wasted, too wasted
to rise again. Or so at first
you believe,
forgetting how
“tired” can easily become
“angry,”
shifting
in one breath.
When “tired”
becomes “angry, ” those dirges
turn martial, go loud.
When “tired”
becomes “angry” you
straighten like
a full tree, even if
a storm’s coming
full of lightning
and doom. When
angry, you grow.
You see who else
is angry alongside you and
realize the lightning can’t
take all of you. So
get angry, not tired.
Be what is needed.
Rise, grow, sing war.
It’s too early to fall asleep.
Please Come
Please come,
said something.
This voice was soft
and unfamiliar yet
had managed to get
so close to my sleeping ear
that I could feel it stir the air
as it spoke.
Please come,
it said again, there is
urgent need here, there is
a great famine, a profound
drought, a bitter war,
a rage covering us all here.
Please come, it said again,
and I rolled over to change
which ear was exposed as
I try keep some of my hearing
to myself and not let just anyone
in that way, but it got into
the pillow itself and denied me
sleep, clearly saying again
and again:
please come, we
are vanishing, we are being
snuffed out the way breath
takes a candle flame
and just as the smoke
from that small extinguishing
lingers for a short time and
ribbons back and forth until
it’s gone, this whispering
can only reach you for a moment
until it too wisps away. Please
come, please,
until I could take no more
and talked back to it
and drowned it
and snuffed it
and blew on it until
it cooled into silence
and left me in darkness
to sleep and
keep to myself —
but I found
I could not.
Exile
It does not happen
overnight, but
one day your neighborhood
reveals itself to be
your enemy. You realize
the streets long to cradle
your crushed face. All the familiar
walls are reaching out,
first to hug your back
and then to hold bullets
that ache to pierce you
through and through. Soon
it becomes a daily race
to go from stoop to work
and back to stoop
while menaced
the whole time by place.
You spend every night
huddled in a room
you are not sure
you should trust. This
is where you’ve always lived;
you know you should belong in
your town, your place. But
what you know
and what you feel
are different. What you do
and what you should do
are different. This place
as it is and as it should be
are different and
suddenly it appears that
exile is no longer a function
of where you live.
Instruments
On my rack,
a guitar the size
of New Mexico.
Tone drawn from
scraped concrete
and morning traffic.
Neck slim as
a racist’s excuse,
strung up tight and bright
to breakpoint. When I need
to write a song about white fire
rising from the caved chest
of a corpse, this flies
from its wall to my hands.
There also is
a small guitar there,
tucked behind the left ear
in a Victorian portrait
of an unnamed
woman, a guitar so small
I could swallow it and
I do — not often and not
without choking.
It comes
without my asking
to my sleep, where
my long throat tunes it
to an open chord
when my need is for
a song that lights its own
flame. I find it warming me
upon waking; I come to slowly,
wondering at this sound within.
I cannot tell you all the names
of all the instruments that live near me;
some are ancient, some are new.
Some plant blasts,
some stick giggles
all over everything.
Their only commonality
is that if another took them
and tried to play, I do believe
they would fall to dust in their hands
and blow away, perhaps to become
mingled with the dunes in White Sands
or piled upon the paired graves
of centuries-old lovers;
never to be played again
unless somehow
they were to find me, bereft
and songless, lingering here
long past my time
in dire need of
a dirge, an elegy, a tune
to bear me away.
Go
Go.
Live a sunlit life.
Leave shadow to me
and my team.
Go.
Turn off the news,
enjoy the silence.
Leave the dealing
and terror to me
and my team.
Go.
Live in constant
yes to the feel of sun
upon your face.
Leave the moon
and all its gentle maybe
to me
and my team.
Go.
Get with your
folks. Get safe
and get comfy.
Leave the spikes
and road rash, the
holes and fractures,
the dinging of the fight bell,
the complexity of how much itch
you can take before screaming,
to me and my team.
We are out here
already. Born here,
in fact. It’s nothing new
to us.
Go.
Do the nothing new for you.
Leave the rest.
We got this.
We do.
Green And Gold And Spring
It’s such a good
spring day here —
good birds calling,
good shoots
of green, good sights
of people on foot,
lightly dressed and smiling
as they see the good gold sun —
that it becomes
hard to believe
that it’s also spring in places
where the calling
is the sirens
of ambulances,
the people are
heavily dressed in blood,
and the sun
is somewhere behind
the smoke
from a bomb.
The sky negates
what the air whispers:
that this
could happen anywhere
and everywhere
soon.
In spite of that
I go outside
and plant a seed.
I pray it takes root
and that I live
to see it full grown,
that I live to share
its fruit someday
with someone yet
unknown to me.
On that day
may we sit and speak
of good, of green and gold,
of spring
and how it never fails.
Neuropathy 1
My left thumb,
numb; left big toe,
numb; the rest of both feet
perpetually burning
after first daily contact
with the floor; lately
both hands are beginning
to tingle as well.
They all still work but
are starting to cost so much
in comfort and ease
that I’m beginning
to avoid using them,
some days
doing next to nothing:
staring at screens
large and small instead;
plotting dark points on
black graphs in my head;
making this agony so mythic
that it keeps me in my bed;
holding a grudge against myself
that pushes me closer to dead.
Still, there are those moments
when the window works,
the breeze works,
the sunlight works
to remind me
that I still have senses
that can be trusted
to offer joy as needed; still,
in spite of the long needles
in my soles,
the pricks and flames
that rise in my skin
at the slightest brush,
most days
I get up and see
how much balance
I can salvage
as I rock between those
extremes from
fearful waking to
exhausted, relieved
sleep.
Current Events, April 2017
All day,
out of boredom
and patience,
I stare at the news.
Red flags
to the horizon:
carpet for
a nation-sized room.
Too much red
for me.
Too many
stabs:
death of a thousand
cuts, and I’m
not even
their true target.
How selfish
of me to think
I matter
in all this.
How like me
to make it about me.
How like me
to know that,
yet be unable
to stop myself
from centering
on my own pain.
Immobility (Ludacris Remix)
Originally posted several times, in different versions, under the title of “Stationary.” Major revision.
When I move, you move…just like that.
Remember sticking a thumb in the air?
When I move, you move…just like that.
Remember turning a key in the ignition?
Remember the last minute ticket,
the just going,
the just getting out there?
Hell yeah, hey DJ, bring that back.
Tell yourself
we all used to travel without a lot of thought.
We all used to travel without a lot of anything.
We all used to trust one another.
Try to forget
it was instead
a flag-wrapped dreamtime,
a selective American walkabout,
a stack of ad copy woven into a myth of a collective self.
When I move, you move.
Just like that.
When I move, you move.
Just like that.
Tell yourself this is all new.
Tell yourself it’s a shame.
No one picks up hitchers anymore.
No one buys a ticket last minute
and gets on a plane without running a gauntlet.
No one rides a train.
We fear the buses will smother us
in other people’s germs.
We fear that the ship will sink.
We don’t drive at all
without a screen to tell us
where we’re going.
We don’t move at all
without a plan for what to do
when we get to where we’re going.
Tell yourself :
There are reasons;
things are different now.
Tell yourself:
It’s a necessary change;
things are different now.
Tell yourself:
Back in the day
cops gently patted every traveler down
exactly the same soft way;
things are different now.
Tell yourself:
Back in the day
they’d let all the folks
go easily on their way;
things are different now.
Tell yourself:
the bullets peeping from the cylinders
of those old police revolvers
were only there for show;
things are different now.
Tell yourself:
standing still
is all the safety you need
and you aren’t going to move
even as everyone else
blurs by you
because things are different now.
Insist upon ludicrous fantasy,
insist it has to go back
to some way it never was
for anyone but you —
when I move, you move. Just like that.
even as the world
turns its back upon you
and moves on.
The Truth
the truth:
it’s exhausting being alive.
it’s not fun much of the time.
we only choose it
because the alternative is coming any way
and most of us aren’t early adopters.
the truth:
I’m glad there are people
who like to mentor the young
because it needs doing but
I’m neither good at
nor willing to do it.
if it happens inadvertently
as a result of my work, cool;
if not, ah, well…
the truth:
I’m pretty certain that
even given all our best efforts otherwise
what we have here
is a society based on
everyone but the elite
having a bad case of
failure to thrive
and you can’t run forever that way;
it’s failing
by design.
we better learn
to mine the rubble.
the truth:
I’m too old to matter
to 90% of the people
I wish I mattered to
and 90% more stupid
than I think I am anyway.
the truth:
I am beginning to forget
my power
and I suspect that’s a defense mechanism.
the truth:
I never mattered much to begin with
and
that is a comfort.
Gone Is Gone
an apparent tragedy
is visible here
above these caved sockets
whether a lost battle
or a won war
created this cloven skull
is unimportant
as this is
the end product
what is present:
bone
what is gone:
all memory
of any color
once found here
any life
any love
both long gone
so no matter
how this fatal wound
came to be
whether in victory
or defeat
gone is gone
and
dead
is dead
Dark Matter 