You think of this work I do
(when you think of it at all)
as the opening 
of petals, or veins.

No matter how many times
I tell you otherwise.
No matter how many years
I’ve been at it.

If it were the opening
of petals, 
I’d have long ago
turned to fruit,
fallen to the ground,
rooted as seed, 
regrown.

If it were the opening
of veins? How red 
would your hands be if
every time you touched one
of these you then
chose to just wait 
for the next one?

This isn’t as easy
as simply blooming
or bleeding —

it’s opening, sure,
but more like cracking
a safe or picking 
a lock and then pulling 
a door until it swings wide.
Inside,

maybe flowers, maybe
buckets of brimful red;

you can have those
as I live

for the cracking, the picking;

for the sound (my God, the sound!)
of moving doors.

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.

The best words in the right order.
The perfect ghosts to animate them. 
A rhythm, and the struggle to understand
how words slide over the crests
of those waves. Sound upside
of downbeat, and the opposite
as well. A trumpet in it,
a drum, a monster’s sharp and plaintive cry
as it realizes it’s the last of its kind.
A child’s scalp tingling — you can measure
the height of that raised hair in 
dactyls. You can explain the creation 
of the world in the precision of 
enjambements. Justice
made metrical, pain
made sibilant, war
made alliterative: slice of sword
and swoosh of bullet bringing back 
pull of projectile into purpled flesh.
Best words in best order and
a world fashioned in its enunciation:
and now what?  What spell
are you under?  What
happens now as a result of 
such a thing? How are the ghosts
faring now that it’s ended?

Hunched before my keyboard, trying.

This is how I live: waking up
hungry for light after swimming
all night through healing dark,
then trying to explain to you 
how that hunger keeps me alive.

When I say “trying to explain
to you…” I am not speaking to “you”
of course, but to a “you” beyond
any of us. You are welcome
to the conversation, but it is not
meant for you specifically…so…

unless I have erred, and you were
there in the dark stream of my night
without my knowing? If it is you
the work is meant for, speak up:
I will raise my eyes from this work
and look to you directly as you
know my core and the words
will likely just obscure it. 

We who wake up hungry for light
understand this: that the words,
the long strings of words we troll out
from our lonely rooms, are just
invitations to a table
that is set for a feast.

y’know

the main thing on my mind
when i started taking my poetry
SERIOUSLY

was that i might
get
SOMETHING
from it

(loved or laid or noticed)

later i thought i might

CHANGE THE WORLD

even if i didn’t know
what i’d change it into

i admit to
having had aspirations
but
instead

it all was a laughfest
or tragedy
depending on
the day and 

the most recent poem

in the end
what i got 
from poetry

was this sublime
and magnificent

NOTHING

rivaling 
grand emptiness
at the core of 
egg-zero

into which i may dissolve
all that came before

in preparation for

SOMETHING
else

which
i have yet to imagine

to which
i will do my best
not to aspire

If any miracle
happens in this room
I will surely witness it
as I rarely leave
this room.
In fact, if any
odd occurrence 
at all stirs here
I’ll certainly see it.

Now, if I leave this room,
that will be
an odd occurrence.
If I leave this room,
I will myself become
an odd occurrence
in whatever room I enter.
If I become
an odd occurrence
I hope I can see myself
outside of this room.

I think about these things
so you won’t have to.
I stay in this room and think
of odd occurrences
and then write about them
so you can read what I wrote and say

how odd.  
What an odd character he is.
It’s a miracle that anyone
could think that way.  It’s not
as good as walking on water
but it’s a little like
raising life out of death.

I suppose that comes
from how he stays
in that room. I couldn’t do it.
It takes a special sort
of oddity to do that, I think.
I’m glad someone does it
but I couldn’t.

From my room,
so sticky thick
with oddity,
I can hear you out there
discussing me.
I can hear you out there.

It doesn’t make me
eager to leave
this room.

It doesn’t
make me eager for
anything out there.

“Splashy examinations.”

First words encountered upon waking. 

Splashy examinations?

Maybe a misheard radio announcer? Maybe
a band name? Maybe it was something
entirely different
and the daffiness of those words
is in fact indicative
of some lost acuity
between the ears?

Sit with those words a bit. 

The work clearly ahead
is to take those two words 
for a ride.  Get on them and decide
on a direction they might be going
and go there.

Maybe there won’t be a path.
Maybe such passage as they demand
will require fire and sword. Maybe 
it will be all about going back to school, 
or about plunging into despair. Perhaps

that plunge into despair will make
a splash

and the subsequent need to 
describe the height of the water
rising as it is displaced by the plunge
will lead to a meditation in which 
the weight of the aforementioned despair
is examined

and that
will explain everything — 
that would be a splashy examination,
right?  

Maybe it will work, maybe
it won’t.  Maybe it will be 

perfect and save a life or
the world, maybe it will be 
forgotten. Maybe it’s already

being forgotten, sinking 
noiselessly into a deep lake.

Maybe it required more
than the poet could give
and the poet sat with it for so long
that it became a source of despair:

those baffling words, the anxiety 
of missing the God therein,
the near-certainty
that something had escaped —

sitting with all that
heavy within
like a damned, dry stone.

I’m trying to break
my bad habit 
of depriving myself
of thick words.

I’m going instead to savor
yucca, saltimbanque,
muscadine, and
riprap. Lie back with mouthfuls:

jingoistic, marbling,
dysplasia, nave, 
sacristy, homunculus,
mellifluous, melisma.

As much as I love
the stark bite of small
and simple, there are times
when I want the rich silk

of long syllables and 
sibilance, diphthongs
flitting across my tongue;
a lateborn taste for complexity

turning my scorn
for haute linguistic plating
of easy thought on its head.
I shall fatten myself

on these words
until I loll back
sated, full with them,
into a new round slumber.

And when I wake? 
I cannot yet know the spells
to come from this, the soothing
afterglow of such gorging,

the possible combinations,
sounds, denotations,
connotations;
an entirely different man 

may rise from the bed
where I laid myself:
hungry for synecdoche,
new as an egg, humbled

by potential, awake to language
as if it was again
that first time being turned away
from mother’s breast

and introduced to 
soft, utterly
unknown nourishment,
and finding it good.

In this sullen practice
of mine is the root of
happiness.

If you must ask
why it is therefore called
a sullen art,
understand that I practice it
knowing that any happiness
that may grow from it 
will only rarely
be my own

yet I sit myself down
and work at it daily,
pounding on dark metals
to make brightwork
from them
that others will look at
and rejoice in
after I’m gone.

No, there’s no why beyond
how much it needs doing; no,
there’s no explaining how it chooses
its apprentices; no, there’s not much 
to recommend it as a lifestyle
beyond that potential for 
making joy for others and 
slight immortality.  No,

there’s no reason to become 
a brightworker in words,

other than the impossibility
of becoming anything else.