Under my Americanized skin
I’ve got a dog soldier and a fat Neopolitan cop
keeping track of infractions.

Under my Americanized eyelids
the marble graves of my hope
are rolling like blues tombstones.

Under the meat of my lower lip
an Americanized raspberry of justice delayed
burbles at odd hours like a soul revue bass line.

That’s my Americanized heart
banging like kitchen help when the party’s over.
I’ll gather the leftover wine and we’ll pioneer something, or kill it.

And those are my Americanized nostrils, flaring
at the scent of the dying cotton mill and the rising pretense
of coffee served in Italian vessels of pure paper.

This Americanized face of mine, beard-bruised and faux-tender,
hangs open-mouthed before the choices of ease and waste.
Don’t be dismayed at all the gold in my pores —

the Americanized man in me says: it’s fine.
I never want to wipe
this skin of mine naked again,

don’t want to see the gold start to disappear,
don’t want to see Cortez under the shine,
dont’ want to see how Americanized his rotten old smile’s become.

Do you know me? There’s a wee battle
in me. I recognize you, your own war,
the memorials we share.

I’ve no clue
about the methods of our dog soldiers and cops
until I see them in action, and I try never

to see them in action. Americanized as they are,
they own their invisibility, pass it between them
even as they hate each other’s histories.

They play their games,
knock each other off and punch back in
next morning to redeem and continue.

Instead of that, just give me the usual something, and give me death too,
an Americanized death of course, bristling with confident stickers
and steel tubs of beer across the rehab hall from the President.

The fat cop and the dog soldier will lift their heads up out of me.
Death always gives our contradictions something to do,
gives them a pose to assume — as if to say:

here is the family portrait;
here are the brothers in arms
who campaign under the skin.

When I sit down to write
in an unfamiliar room
and there’s a mirror over the desk,
when I can see
that same old raccoon looking at me,
shaggy thief with his paws full of
things worth saying, things I can’t get at
and that would be utterly different
if ever I could hold them —
I almost die laughing, choking on the words:

old bear,
there are so many places like home.

do not pretend
you haven’t grown up to be
one of those boys
who sits on the grass
at the highway rest area
counting thongs
and nudging your friends.
you have, because you are,
I’m watching you do it.

do not gloss over your snickering
when you are called on it,
when it is pointed out
that you only began to snicker
when a black couple pulled watermelon
from a picnic basket, especially when
the white couple next to them
did the same five minutes before
and you saw nothing. do not
play that game.

how did this happen?
all the things you should know,
things you should know better than — you’d think
we’d be past this by now — but here we are
and you’re not showing much progress —

so stop with the “dothead” cracks,
the defensive rationale for using the word
“bitchslap,” the “mustache ride” T-shirt.
stop calling everything you dislike “gay.”

and then there’s the predictable comeback,
after all it’s a free country,
you’ve got freedom of expression
all over your ticked off smooth little face
and you’re not afraid to use it. it’s just
talk, you say. you don’t mean it, really, really,
not like that, never hit a woman, just a joke, gay friends,
no racist bones, fuck you, fuck you, PC sumbitch
fuck you.

now I get, of course,
that the nuances of language are in general a mystery to you
and that you don’t know the difference
between “camel jockeys” and “dotheads”
just by the way I heard you use those words
five minutes ago

so I was never expecting much to come of this.

so, then, one favor only:

stop pretending
you aren’t the kind of guy who does this.
do not play the whistle past the lynching tree
game. do not tell me you never
saw a roofie in a friend’s hand
and said nothing. do not tell me
you never kept the awkward boys who didn’t date
away from your high school lunch table,
and don’t tell me you wouldn’t do it again.

do not tell me you aren’t the kind of guy
who flips off a confrontation over this shit
and laughs with his buddies all the way to the car
and does it again as soon as you reach
the next place you mingle with the rest of the world.

just tell me you’ll remember it
when you first hold your own son,
when he grows up and asks you to explain the way things are.
just tell me you understand that first things last.
tell me something
surprising. tell me
it’s gonna end someday.

Twenty-five years ago
when we were both still drinking
all the time and the Depot Lounge
was our favorite spot,

Davey was the undisputed king
of the Black Knight table. When Ron
replaced it with Space Invaders, Davey
stopped going to that bar.

“You don’t play a video game,
you learn it. You play
pinball,” Davey always said.
“You don’t learn life,

you play it.” I ran into him
the other day at Shaw’s Market
and he found a way to say it again,
still pissed about it, even as his son

moped around the two of us, these aging men
bitching about time and stupid changes
while he watched the cute blonde in the produce section
stack grapes in neat rows so the customers

could easily pick them off one bunch at a time.

she is just the Statue of Liberty to us
she doesn’t have a name of her own

we stole her name
when she entered the harbor

no “I am…”
for her

no sense of herself
to fall back on

so many names were stolen
from so many

but names
what do they matter

the Statue of Liberty
was born to watch over

things other than identity
wasn’t she

there are times when she wishes
she could run the streets of New York City

calling out for the ghosts of those she let pass
saying “Maria Gunther Luisa Michael

I remember who you were
when we met”

hoping one would turn
and say

“yes I remember you
with your lamp and your crown

your name was…”

she thinks this way
whenever the pressure of being forgotten

becomes too much
to hold in silence

she wants to lie down and sleep
one good night’s rest might help her remember

she thinks she might have been French
before we turned her turned into something new

she never wanted to be iconic
if it meant forgetting who she was

1.
Death’s poor cousin Poetry
comes begging.
“Loan me a line.”

Death says,
“I can’t believe we’re
even related, you shameless
bastard — all the material
available to you if you’ll just work for it
and you gotta pull this.”

Poetry
responds, “It’s not like you can’t
spare it…endless last words
in your ears all the time and
you can’t toss me a bone?”

2,
Moonrise-faced gray cat
in a dark window across the street:
instant poem.

No need now
to meet the neighbor
or get to know the cat at all.

Instead, cut up the moment, butcher
your life for the meat of it, break it down
to parcel and parse, wipe the blood off your hands
onto your lips when you’re done. Such perfect things
come from your perfect lips. Anyone hearing you speak
would think
the cat was real.

1.
Outside the tavern
a brokedown cowboy’s giving
bad life lessons
to a high school couple
sitting on the step
after finishing their restaurant shift.

His friend’s drunker than he is
and he calls Cowboy a “whiny bitch.”

He tells the kids, “Don’t listen to him.
He’s wearing a Yankees shirt
which means two things:

one, he’s retahded,
two, he’s a common slut,
three, he’s a weasel — know why
he’s a weasel? Because

he can suck the ass out of a chicken
and keep running.”

Then they go back inside
where the band’s playing
“Strange Brew.” The kids
get up laughing
and walk away hand in hand,
two hoodies heading for their car.

2.
Cowboy
does the airplane slide across the floor,
ends up standing next to a woman
in a slick gray dress who turns her back on him
to face the band, swaying to Janis Joplin.

Cowboy
throws his hands up and goes over to a pole
where he stands with
his head down as if he’d become
one of those silhouettes they use to sell
cigarettes to wannabes.

3.
Turn the radio on
in any city you can name
and it’ll pour out over you
like a big Western storm: Beatles,
Stones, Zep and the Eagles.

That humid sound,
flash flood that it was back then,
carved a channel that led
to tonight, soaking everything
in a bath that still feels
both familiar and fresh.

The whole of your life
may be circling the drain
but one twist of the dial
and you’ll find that water
has bubbled up again,
and what else is there to do
except dive in?

4.
Cowboy’s buddy
is face down on his table
when Cowboy comes alive
as the bass bubbles up
into “Brown Eyed Girl”
and he’s on again,
this time not caring about who’s
on the floor as he floats
out there alone, thrilled
that no one’s noticed his T-shirt
for an hour or so, and no one
thinks he’s anything except
a guy like them,
lost in a song
everyone’s been lost in
at least once in their lives.

marvelous here, say the civic leaders,
wonderful that we’ve got

coney island hotdogs,
the kenmore,
the boulevard,

the numbers,
the cardinal,
the hotel vernon;

ralph’s diner,
ralph’s tavern,
ralph’s plumbing.

gotta love that blue collar charm.

it’s almost scriptural for some that
having a lot of guys
named ralph in your town
can make a place unique —

until you get on the road
and find the next
flock of ralphs
because there’s always
a next flock of ralphs
even if they pretend
to different names.

i once ate a pizza
in a bar in suburban chicago
and damned if the guy who made it
wasn’t a ralph
with the same lithe fingers
and dumb drunk charm as the ralph
i dropped off at his apartment
just before i left worcester.

if ten blind men named ralph
put their hands
on the walls of any city,
they’d complain about
the same ten different things.

nothing in worcester
is different enough
to make me want to stay,
anywhere else
is the city i want to live in,
i am afraid i’ll get lost
and come back around
no matter how far away i go,

so this is just to say
i’m changing my name to ralph
because if i’m going to stay
or even if i end up leaving,
i want to make an effort to fit in.

first i’ll breed my gripes
in the marrow of my thighs
and try to keep my eyes open.

then, with a name like any other,
no matter where i am
it’ll feel like home
when i set my hands flat against the walls
and begin to speak disdainfully

of ralph the pothead
at the door of the blues club
that ought to be called ralph’s
but for some reason isn’t,

of ralph the worst cop in town
who for some reason here is named
maritza,

never mentioning ralph the whiny sumbitch
straining against
the bricks, closing his eyes
again, translating for himself

the nickoby tavern, the blackthorn
social club, el coqui, lafayette’s feather,
yet another coney island, yet another george’s,

yet another band of ralphs
simmering in the evening, staring
at the road out of town.

This is an instrument
I’ve never fully understood —
at first sight it was
everything I dislike in a guitar —
but it works, somehow,
most of the time.
Big body, blonde maple
ribs, blonde spruce top
and decoration from the butt
all the way up the neck
to the head. Brand new, too —
no vintage splendid ruin
with the nicks and scratches
to tell all its previous owners’ stories
and prove its worth.

Till now I have always counted
on age’s cachet to make me love
a guitar: checking the patterns
of wear and tear to try and puzzle up
the best way to play it, play it
as it always has been played,
make it tell me what it knows.
I’ve loved best of all
a grown up guitar.

But now I play this infant
and more and more
no instrument has ever been
more dead on right for me: the thump
of the woody bass, the ring
of hard treble
and brightness, brightness
on every stroke and strum.
It tells me everything
I’ve always needed to know.

Sure, there are nights
when it hurts
to play it
for hours at a time,
wrapping myself around
its wide pale waist,
both arms gone to needles
and pins as the fingers
squeeze frets and
stumble across strings,
pulling out
flat old songs and odd
noodlings of new tunes
that sound suspiciously
like old songs anyway.
On those nights it hurts
to hear the maple first resist me,
then reluctantly give
just half of itself up
because it knows
there’s no one warmer
and better loved around.

More often these days,
it’s more than a tease.
It’s becoming comfortable enough
to play with me through
the wrecking of my hands,
play through our mutual
bulk and inexperience
to get the sound we seek.
This is starting to be joy.

And then there is the peace that comes
from knowing that someday
someone will see my own marks on this one,
my signatures all skull-weary
and blue tears, and it seems
all I need to do
is grit my teeth and keep learning
how to make them mean more
than first impressions might lead one
to believe.

1.
Star: a sharp response
to this blunt question: “what if
I never get there?”

2.
Shroud: reservoir, urn;
grey coat of many collars.
Put it on. Forget.

3.
Death: a shrouded star
wished upon hard enough to
shine, briefly, for you.

— written 7/1/07 at the Java Hut; inspired by another’s work

The hemp t-shirt
next to you
at the rally
bears a fair trade
coffee stain.
The hemp t-shirt next to you
on the other side
has a Mayan glyph on the back:
a seated god laughing
balanced on a single point
while a bulky base supports him.
You have just finished an iced mocha
and tossed the cup away, mindful of
stain danger. You burned
your own hemp shirt with a stray ember of hydro
not too long ago and don’t want
to look more like a hippie than you already do,
with your carefully cultivated three-day beard
moisturized by pure vegetable oils grown
somewhere on a plantation in Guatemala
tended by someone
descended from someone
who designed a pyramid
a thousand years ago.

Your’e here today because
where you live there’s a pyramid too
and at the top of the pyramid
there’s rage because
people are crossing
a government line, and everyone’s forgetting
that the crossing’s not an exception,
the line is the exception,
the line is something new
that Maya and Aztec and lots of others
have nevertheless crossed and recrossed
that land for years
looking for a way to stay alive.
Today they’re cleaning cars, raising garages
and clean organic vegetables, local food
for global shoppers
who own reckless amounts of things.

You know all this,
and while you can admit that you are one
of the reckless ones
at least you can say today you are thinking
of your footprint, your
sweatshop free footprint.
You looked for a recycling bin for that cup you tossed,
after all, and even though there wasn’t one
you figure you get to stand
righteous on the sandy earth today
denouncing the pyramid
on behalf of the children of
Maya and Aztecs.

And so you do it, you raise the banner high
for the Cause,
and once you get home
you coast
among the CNN and BBC and Google News sites,
burning the midnight Venezuelan oil
looking for one proof shot of yourself
holding that banner that proclaims
the downfall of all pyramids
even as you stood on top of one
because you convinced yourself
that’s where the banner
would be most easily seen.

Yes, that’s you. And you look
good.

The Maya
once tore the hearts from captives
and bathed their pyramids in red
even as they clocked the heavens,
carved down the jungles,
developed perfect time,
and scryed the end of their world
from far above their sticky
plazas. Once they knew what was coming
they left what they built behind
and the green came back
with life full and lush
from long years of blood
and swiftly rolled over the proud stone.
Do you suppose that
years later the Aztecs,
on the eve of the Conquest,
knowing the world was changing
but not expecting the end,
do you think they pitied the Maya,
thought of them as children
while sipping bitter chocolate,
standing about smugly and preening
in the steep angled light of their evening?

In a corner booth at a party
a guy who’s a friend of a friend
tells me:

“One night some years ago
I made calls
to two different crisis hotlines.

The first call,
I shit you not I was on hold
for ten minutes.

The second call, I asked the counselor
for a place I could go
for emergency meds. He told me the story

of how Michael Jordan and the Bulls
had to be beaten by the Pistons
before finding the drive they needed

to become champions,
and what I needed was to see
that this was my time to find

my inner drive.
I thanked him when I hung up on him
because

there was no way
I was going to end my life
with either a bad punchline

or a sports metaphor
as the last thing I ever heard,
and I’ve made it my business since

never to stick around
longer than is polite
when the phone plays me sad music

or someone who claims they care
proves they’ve got nothing
but game to share.”

On TV a woman
having a physical
blurts “INEEDANHIVTEST!”

in the middle of hearing about
her blood pressure, and then
twists her lips into a half smile

and sighs as if she wants to say
something about how much better
she feels now.

She’s apparently not afraid
as much as she is embarrassed
and a little worried,

and I think we’re supposed
to laugh at the look on her face
and the tone of her voice.

I think
this is supposed to be
progress, and perhaps

it is,
if what this means is that
someone is going feel better

blurting out
how they want to live
a long time, or how

it’s better to know the truth
than to wonder
like so many others did.

Still,
I can’t laugh
because it’s taken so long

to get here, to get to a point
where someone bothers to think
that maybe a pretty blonde woman

in a late night ad
might make someone else want to ask,
to blurt something out

so few once thought
someone like her
would ever need to ask.

Thinking about all those people
who never asked, who asked
too late, who kept out of the doctor’s office

because of the overwhelming fear
of what they might hear, or who never
believed they could need to hear

answers
to that
unimagined question,

I can’t laugh
even though the woman on TV
seemed ready to laugh

two seconds after the camera was turned off,
who might have gone home and
because it felt OK to say it then

might have gone
to the doctor
the very next day.

And I can’t laugh even though
someone else might have done
the very same thing the very next day

because a funny commercial
made asking the question
easier.

I suppose it is progress that
I get to think this way
about something so simple

as asking, learning the truth,
smiling to oneself just for asking
for the truth;

I guess it’s progress that
someone like me,
who has never felt that need to ask,

who maybe should have asked
at some point
instead of counting on luck and statistics,

can sit here smugly and quibble
over whether
it’s appropriate

to laugh at such things
when all that matters is ensuring
that the question is asked and answered.

I don’t know how
fishnet stockings
and high heels
work
but they do.

There’s a reason
cliches exist:
someone once called
a cliche
a fossil poem
so maybe
fishnets and heels
are fossil avatars
of the temple
of Aphrodite.

No matter,
getting caught
in the net
still seems to work;
a fossil
can always tell you something
about your life.

This one says:
You evolved to get here
but you’ve still got that appendix,
you had gills in the womb,
and it’s not so hard to believe
there may yet be in you
vestiges of a time
when it took a map
to get you where you were going.