Originally posted 3/30/2013.

Amid the conventional people
and everyday happenings
on my street, something, perhaps

a blue whale, has passed
through the air
behind me.

I turn
once it has gone
and see only

conventional people and
everyday happenings.
I sense something

I have been missing for decades
has just brushed me,
and I want to weep,

but only with someone else
who felt it as well.
I cannot weep alone for this,

because one man
weeping alone
is no way to offer praise

to whatever has made
such things,
to whatever

has seen to it that things exist
which, though unseen,
are nonetheless deeply known.

Originally posted 11/29/2011.

Open the car window at
eighty miles an hour. 
Cars peel off behind me

until the highway’s
empty. No one 
is going my way. 

The city forty miles ahead.
The sky, orange
over deepest black.

Rumors of riot and fire all day.  
It’s the end of the world, some say,
but no one wants proof except me.

How foolish, how
odd that is — to
just curl up and die

or hide in the boondocks
without seeing for yourself?
In fact, how can you even flee

when you consider this world?  
Maybe that’s the best of all possible
pyres up ahead.

Stuck my fingers
into wounds once, long ago,
to prove to myself

that the world wasn’t ending
after all.  Why wouldn’t I
do this? It worked out last time so

I gun it.  I go.
I’ve always been the one
who has to know. 

Originally posted 10/29/2009.

When you’re a hammer,
said my high school buddy
Joe The Hammer,
everything looks like a nail.

When you’re a hammer
facing a problem
you do one of two things:
you bang on it or
you pull it out.

It works, mostly,
but sometimes I wish
that I’d been born
a precision screwdriver.
I wish I’d been made for details,
like you were.  But I wasn’t.

I was a hammer, did
framing twenty years,
had my own business the last ten.
I slammed and yanked
and banged my thumb
a lot.  It was
a good living for a long time,
it’s been up and down lately,
but I don’t complain.

You, he said,
you, though. Man!
You write, you travel,
make stories come out the way
you want them to be.
I’ve read some of it, and damn, man.
Damn! What that must be like.
What is that like?

The Hammer
slapped me on the back

as I peeled the label
off the bottle,
studied my unscarred hands,
thought about stories coming out
the way I wanted them to be;

tried to figure out
what kind of tool I was
that I wanted to be
anywhere but there right then.

Originally posted 9/28/2012.  

My neighbor’s standing naked in his window
singing a children’s song
Licorice stick, licorice stick, gonna eat one pretty darn quick

Somebody get that man a robe
Off to another dense start
to another dense day in Whipsmart City

Last night flung me around my bed
lodged between sleep and wake
Oh my aching back and sides, oh my aching heart and mind

I wish I had a river of sleep
to drown my aching heart and mind
But it’s too late for sleep to do me any good at all

It’s off to my day job on the morning drive time
describing massacre victims with a sweet vocabulary
with a hey nonny nonny and a robot chip

(I almost said “massacred innocents”
but then I had to laugh
because if I thought any of these stiffs were innocent I’d go insane)

Two pills for breakfast two more for lunch
and a fifth mid-afternoon
I get no kick from God or Country, no kick from going along

After work a beer
or a blood and Jaeger cocktail
I drive home and wrestle my guardian angel to a draw

Soon enough I’ll be off to bed
which I’m fond of up to a point
Gabba gabba dead man gabba gabba flay

Thank God or Some Bigger Monster that I stopped dreaming long ago
My neighbors took my dreams away
which explains their children’s songs

Next morning the guy next door is once again
standing naked in the window with those stolen songs in his mouth
Sweet land of liberty of thee I loudly sing

I can’t get too excited about him
being obscene or crazy or maybe some kind of performance artist
when there are so many corpses to talk about here in Whipsmart City

Originally posted 8/10/2010.

Colonial dentists
advertised for tooth donors
when they needed to make dentures — offering
half empty mouths
and fuller pockets for some.
The ads read, often, “White Teeth Only.”
That didn’t refer to their color.

Some white folks back then
didn’t want African teeth in their faces, but
George Washington, denture wearing
father of his country,
didn’t care. Teeth were teeth
no matter where they came from 
to George Washington,
even if they came
from slaves he always saw
as lazy and unwilling to work
in bad weather. 

Suck it up, 
he told his slaves.  You’ll be free
when Martha and I die.
That’s a promise in our will,
right there in black and white.
Until then, smile and get going.

In an act of generosity,
Martha Washington freed all the slaves
George had brought to their marriage
upon his death,
keeping in bondage only those
she’d owned before the marriage.
124 slaves out of 300 got an early release —

an early example of how things get better.

They banned the slave trade here a few years later,
leaving the breeding of existing slaves
as the only source of new sweat.  No more ships
full of anguished cargo, no more immoral raids
in Africa, no more need of the Middle Passage
for resupply.  

Things, again, were getting better.

There were all those years of conflict
and finally a war to free the slaves
once and for all,
replacing human bondage by law
with human bondage by money,
but at least
no one could be called a slave,
at least the dentures
all came from free men. 

Things kept getting better.

Say it with me: it gets better.
It’s what we always say: 
don’t worry, it gets better.
Just hang on, it’ll get better,
suck it up, it’ll get better,
we know it’s cold but it will get better,
just ignore it and be strong, it will get better,
how about we wear a bracelet 
in solidarity till it gets better,
a T-shirt till it gets better,
chin up, it will get better
someday,
don’t know how fast
it will happen but it will get better,
just look at history — 
desperate teeth became pearls of honor,
the mouths they were torn from all became free,
those who suffered because the circumstances weren’t right
suffered on the future’s behalf
and see, it did get better — 
don’t die now
or cry now
or despair now,
it may not feel like it
but it will get better.

George Washington, father of the country,
must have known what he was doing back then —
full medical care for his slaves,
would not break up their families,
kept them marginally happy
while still enslaved
till he had no need of them,
after which it was perfectly OK for it all
to get better.
It’s the American way

and it’s how we look at you now,
you pained, you pushed,
you bullied, you edged out
and crushed and murdered and starved
and regulated until you are 
invisible,
and say it again:

it gets better. 

Who are we to say it?
Who are we to say
we are not the better
that was intended back then,
the better that is always intended?

Maybe better isn’t just a word.
Maybe better
is the choice to put ourselves
between the bully
and the victim, between
the system and the fodder
now,
not tomorrow.

It’s up to us
to shut our empty mouths
now,
stop smiling
now,
stop comforting the sorrowful
after the fact,
stop giving up our bite
and put all the teeth
we’ve got
into the moment before us.

Stop waiting.
Step in between
predator and prey.
Take a blow
before we take a bow.

It only is better
if we are better.

Originally posted 12/19/2013.

Before dawn
the clock radio
comes alive,
floods my room
with Spanish evangelism.
No music — pure preaching,
one man’s voice, 
one woman’s voice.

The only words
in the rapid flow 
I catch and understand 
are “contigo” and 
“alleluia,” but
I don’t need
the translation for the rest

as this whitewater pulse
of ecstasy and imprecation
soaks my morning
in splashes,
a torrent
rinsing away
any remnant of
unholy dreams.

Originally posted 5/30/2013.

Ask me once
what I want from life,
and I usually say
that what I want from life
is to be alive
until it’s more right
that I be dead,
at which point
I will be dead.  

But if you ask the question again
and ask it often enough, 
the answering of it
transforms me
through an obvious,
delighted hysteria
that anyone
would even care to ask,
and I fall into the consideration
of a delicious engagement
with the world — 
how the taste of it
may not at all be that
of ashes on my lips;

how like a first
post-virginal ecstatic sleep
each night could feel;
how like a morning
when a death sentence has been stayed
each awakening might feel.

Ask me, ask me, ask me what
I want from life — ask yourself,
I will ask you the same,
in fact let’s run through
our town asking everyone
what they want from life so many times
that there will be no choice for any of us 
but to laugh and love
and turn the streets into a banquet hall
and our stoops and yards into tables
where we can feast on the question,
reveling in the last meal we’ll ever have
before we take our last, gentle leave
of each other.

Originally posted 6/16/2013.

Upon waking I am an engine
for cobbling together random things
and hoping they are true.

My first thought is of
a landscape
with a football stadium.

My second is of
a scrap of paper bearing these words:
“your prime is seven.”
 
There may be,
suddenly somewhere,
an esoteric cabal

of crushingly huge men
chanting prime numbers.  
I hope so. 

So much depends
on it being true
after I write it.

My next thought
is that I ought
to sit up in bed and see how I feel.

My first action
is to sit up in bed 
and see how I feel.  

I’m still afraid of social media,
angry without cause,
desperately in love.  

It is morning,
I am the new carrier
of the disjointed day, and

my first action upon others
will be to write something.  
It will be angry or loving or based in fear — correction: 

it will be angry 
and loving 
and based in fear,

but it won’t be large. It will not assume
the form of a linebacker.
I’ll be gentle.

Count to seven,
push aside the covers.
The world needs me

and people like me
who are the sand grains
outside the oyster.

We are many, we have
pearl potential.
Some become random irritants

but most likely
we’ll become the bed upon which
beauty happens, mostly in spite of us,

even as the offense
thunders forward, bearing
the irreducible math of living.

Originally posted 6/29/2013.

On more than one occasion
I’ve nearly burst
from imagining that I
was self-sired
and never tired,
on an epic solo flight — 
a great aviator,
all alone.

Self-sired, never tired;
those are my best lies — 

as if I’ve ever been anything
but a lonely son, 
as if I’ve ever been
anything but exhausted. 

As if
the sleep I rise from
hasn’t always been robbed 
from the dark.

As if I
have ever been
formally cleared to land
on my own.