Worship
what works;
forget the rest.
If they tell you it’s forbidden
it offers something they can’t.
Forget about prayer
creating what you seek: prayer works best
when it fails you.
Those who die in their own evil
go somewhere you can’t imagine; the ones
who die good go the same way. Imagine
that an angel has power beyond
one stroke of its open wings
or you will never understand
the ways of nature.

Finally,
pretend God has your face. Pretend
Satan has hold of his mirror. Move your jaws
in words that spell the same
both ways. You will find yourself
saying little. Spend yourself
understanding it.

changing skin to steal a birthright
is old news. bleach, conk, ink and scalpel
make a new lie. the bluest eye
is a plastic falsehood, the brownest tan is lifted
from the people you’d never speak to
in the street, the straightest hair
kills your family, the smoothest face speaks to
denial of every kind — no history,
no memory of play or sorrow.

the ink dries under the skin and the pictures
never say enough to matter enough.

you open your eyes through a mask
every morning. somewhere inside
is the bark of demand: notice, dammit,
notice me — but no one hears the dog in you
recalling its wolf past.

you know it’s there. it drives you
batshit crazy a little at a time.

then you let your dog out to play one day
and the world steps back from you when
you come down your front steps into the morning.
someone says you look like your mother.
you don’t flinch. you cover the dragon
on your back and crease your brow
the way she used to. you are
who you say you are for once: no whimpering,
no pampering, grooming is for the small
ones, and today you’re far taller than your fear.

leave your hair uncombed
and keep walking. trot and sniff
as you go. piss on a tree
once in a while. there are others out here,
you know.

NOTE: Thanks to louiserobertson for helping think through this.

Hidden Track

a dreadful fate
would be to wake up someday
and find i’ve been reborn
as a pop song.

worse yet, born into a family
of pop songs.
(worse again, born a twin.
it would be intolerable
to look to my left
and find myself.)

i’d cringe if all my other siblings were
catchy and simple.
what fear to have
a mother and father at the top
of whatever charts might exist
in such a place.

i know i could never stick
in anyone’s ear long enough
to become a favorite.
even if i did, i am sure
it might happen once at most
in my life. i could never
carry my own tune. i could never be hummed
by millions. i could never make
my family proud.

still, there’s one hope: when i was young
needles would slide to a hidden track
at the end of the vinyl. maybe
it could happen here. no one ever knew
the name of that song. that might work.
i might look to my left
and find her there when the track
began to play. maybe that counterpart
might give me some hope: lines
twinning as we are twinned. they
love her. maybe they could love me
for the counterpoint i could add
to something the family could not name.

when you go
i’ll cut off my ponytail
and place it in your casket

this is called
“giving back”

when this was how
it was always done
there was always a rule
about what you couldn’t do
while it grew long again

that is called
“managed pain”

when you go
i’ll think of something
i won’t do
and i won’t do it

that could be called
a “sin of omission”

when i go
i’ll have grown that tail back
no one will lift that hair
while i’m above ground

i know you’ll be waiting
to see if it’s there
once again

and that is called
“heritage”
that is called
“legacy”
that is called
“shackle”
that is called
“home”

1.
Potato chips and ice cream
make a bad supper —
sitting on the couch
in front of reruns
with a lapful of fat
is enough to kill
anyone’s lust for life.
I might as well
be eating lard with a ladle.

2.
At 3 AM the thought of a cigarette
requires me to weigh
getting dressed against
staying put and turning
over and over in bed. Addiction
versus comfort is no battle —
I pull on a hoodie, sleep pants,
socks, a jacket. It’s not enough —
I’ll surely freeze if I smoke two.
I smoke two. I don’t freeze.
It’s a Pyrrhic victory — the fire
sears me together even as
my eyes frost over and I forget
how to get back inside
and go back to sleep.

3.
I’m wishing
I had that lard
and a ladle now.

4.
BBC News report: The Australian
box jellyfish
is the most venomous
creature on earth, can kill you
in two minutes, is ninety percent
water, travels in huge drift herds. I find myself
longing for that — for the ability to defend myself,
longing to be surrounded by my brothers,
my sisters; more so, longing to be
so much a part of my environment
that I am the environment.

5.
Already, I want
another cigarette. I want more
ice cream. Turn on the TV,
I don’t want to talk
to anyone — I just want to drift
awhile, not imagining a different life,
wondering at my own immunity
to my own poisons.

Praise be, I tell myself, for myself;
for the fats at bedtime
and the death taken in upon
insomniac awakening. Praise be
for the box jellyfish
who does it all with his family
close by. Praise be to all of us
who are so made. Who sit
immersed in danger, who become
our danger. Who slip through the world
transparently. Who know what we do
is toxic. Who do it again.

I made a couple of edits to this.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Aubade

You must wake up. You must.
Unless you open
your eyes at once you will miss it —
today you are swathed
in a rapture of agreement.
Yes from the blue
basket of perfumes in your
bathroom, yes from the ivory
of your face after a night
without sleep. Yes, yes from
all of the browning grass,
the bittersweet orange
in your neighbor’s hedge — yes!
Stereo in the car blaring salsa,
yes! Fat cat shredding her rival,
yes! A city’s breathing beginning
to quicken, a truck engine praising power,
a bulldozer down the hill moving
the earth below heaven, yes! Yes!
School’s almost open, banks not far
behind, the cruiser ignores
the dope being smoked on the corner,
your hair is natural for the moment,
your skin warm from the comforter,
there’s coffee if you want it —
yes! Yes: the morning note,
the paper in the box, your jaws
stretched in a yawn
and no one here to disapprove
your scent. Yes!
This is a day like all others
and today you can see it
for what it truly is:
Yes! This is the holy yes!
Awake and see it:
approval everywhere,
and not
a preacher in sight!

grant me

a life that is more than just
subject matter
and
a way of life that is more
than the collecting of ideas
for future pieces

let me know
when to put down the pen
and when to pick it up
even if that means
I never pick it up again
I only write because I must
not because I want to
so if there is a way
to be released from that
release me

I would rather be simple and calm
than complex and at sea
I would rather be silent and unseen
than known for my strident fame

if there is a way
to live an unreported life
and not go mad

show me

tossing at night
we remember our history

do not suffer
a witch to live
kill the children
because nits make lice
destroy the village
in order to save it

hang him high
his fall will be
an important milestone
for his country

so many casual deaths
that you’d think one more
would bore us

but in the moment when
the body drops
the rope’s snap
echoes old mantras
and we sit up
to listen

for they’re playing our song

This wee life
has been triumphant
more often than not
so I will not choose to recall
what is under my nails
or where these bruises came from;

why the squirrels will not
speak my name
or why I know every car
on this street and recognize
their drivers before they emerge
from behind their wheels.

In the small hours
I have watched the day wrestle
to be born. I’ve laid
next to warmth and sometimes
been cold, more often
scalding, always aware
of the pressure on my hip.

There were dark nights
and dark days
but there were also so many hours
that were soaked under a lava sun,
drowning in the company of friends.

I was never too far from the lesson,
though I did forget it now and again:
the time is short and the life is small
in comparison to what surrounds it —
there are miles between moments
you can either fill with hope or despair
and the choice,
if only seen in hindsight,
is no choice at all.
You will live and you will die,
and your life and death are yours
to create or let rot.

If there is a way
to hold this, keep it here
in my pocket or close
to my core, I will hold this:
This wee life can grow or wither.
Choice is all I have,

and so I will forget the names
of drivers and learn them anew,
ask the squirrels to forgive my trespasses
and bake myself brown as often as I can
beneath the volcano that is day.
When I sleep I will not sleep alone
and when I sit up late
it will be for the stars’ sake.
I will be the life I think I am
and take my death as adviser and confidant,
listen to it whisper soon, soon enough,
learn to race it until
we tie at the line
and choosing is finished at last.

Everybody in this bar
wants to be my baby
because I’ve got
the Cigarettes of Love
the Booze of Enchantment

the Ace Face Jeans
the Godzilla Tongue
the Frankenstein Member

Down the bar
some dick is wearing
a T-shirt that says he’s
“10 Feet Tall and Bulletproof”
Shithead, I’m blast-hardened

James Brown
stole my blueprints
I’d have sued him
for patent infringement
if he’d lived
because I’m that machine

Outside
it’s fucking colder
than my eyes
There’s a wind out there but
there’s a fire in here

I spark up another Cigarette
(of Love) and down another drink
Everybody in this bar wants me
Everybody in this bar’s
just biding their time

and I’m not leaving the building
till they come for me

NOTE: I just recorded this and put it up on Myspace, if you’re interested.

You can’t make
everything bad
disappear in
one day,
she tells me,

rubbing my back
as I sit head down
on the bed.
Around us
is all the wreckage

of a holiday: paper,
boxes, gift cards,
small scraps of drama.
All I’ve ever learned
tells me to cry

but then I remember that
the light grows longer after today
and when she kisses my neck
and pulls me closer
I find I can see through the dark.

Day one: I was born
with fists. Empty lungs
atop bowed legs and below
a balled up face. Skin dawn-pink
and eyes bear-brown, but it was still
those fists my parents saw first: knurled
walnuts on pumping, jabbing arms.
They laughed. I stopped swinging.

Day two: today. Speaking
to them at lunch I recognized
the sound of those fists
in my voice.

He shuddered and said,
“I don’t think I could even
look at a dead body, never mind
touch one.”

She jacked up her eyebrow
and said, “Do you never
look in the mirror, then? And how
do you wash yourself?”

After a cigarette
smoked so quickly
on the cold porch
that I can feel the cells
in my lungs dying,
I come back to my room
and shut the door
and think about the hole
in my words.

There’s a place
in my speech
that is void.
I know I must fill it
but the words that will be required
terrify me.
They’re hiding in my room with me.
In the closet, on the bottom
shelf, under the bed —
shards of language waiting
to be pieced together,
and I can’t face them.

I find myself thinking
not that, not that
whenever I open my mouth.
It’s not that I don’t know
what I should be saying —
it’s that what I should be saying
scares the breath out of me.

Picture my daily sentences
swerving around the hole. Words
whir like cars around a traffic circle,
entering pre-designated roads,
leaving the big space in the middle
untouched.

This is not about art
or science. The hole in my language
is thousands of miles deep
and if I fall in I’ll never get out.
No magic applies, no physics,
there’s no masterwork waiting in the pit
for me to climb upon.

Not that, not that. I know
I’ve got to go there but I can’t
face the dark of the familiar places.
This is why I suck down smoke
knowing what it will do to me.
Some fears are so distant
they mask the closer terror.

When I sleep tonight
I’ll not bother to dream. The words
I won’t use steer me every night
to the singularity, and until
I can wrestle with them and make them
into a bridge instead of a ladder, something
I can cross and look down from, until then
every day will be more of the same:

not that, not that;

certainly not now,
surely not tonight
when the mere thought of breathing
steals my breath.

Daphne Martinez,
star of one segment of a TV show,
tonight plays a dead prostitute
with a killer’s letter to God
written on her back
in black Sharpie.

Jeremey Raine, not far away,
practicing his handwriting
with one eye on the news,
leans forward to hide
the pistol in his belt.

On screen the neighbors chime in
just as he wanted: good kid until
she got into drugs, the creeps
on the streets, city’s gone to hell…

it’s a wrap.
Next up, tragic
bus accident.
They’re selling
classical music favorites
by the time Jeremey makes it
out the door.

He leaves
the Sharpie behind.
Bartender picks it up
and uses it to make up
a sign: No Drinks Made
With More Than Two Kinds
Of Liquor. That’ll teach
the damn college kids.
He changes the TV.

Daphne Martinez is not saying anything
about the way she’s twisted around
on the sidewalk. The detective rubs
his eyes: what looked like a ramble
to God is changed now to some message
about liquor. No one here is talking sense,
not even the corpse.

Jeremey’s no fool. He dumped
the murder weapon back at the bar.
The gun’s just for show.
He knows the medium makes the message.
He’s already plotting the next show.