They always want you
face down on the white rug.

Want you to be afraid
to stain it.

Want you to bleed
somewhere out of sight.

Some extraordinary
wounds you’ve got there,

they say. But how old
are they? They can’t still

be bleeding? You must be
mistaken. It must have been

something else, something
you did. Don’t stain

the white rug with it.
Crawl over there if you’re

going to do that. The rug
is fragile, and expensive.

We don’t want to have to
replace it, or dye it — although

we would know
it was a white rug to begin

and still is under the cover
of color. And if we tore it out

we’d just put another white one
down. Meanwhile, 

you’re still bleeding and
face down on the rug as they

begin to clean up around you then
tie a rope around your neck

and start to drag you off
to other rooms where the rugs

aren’t white but the color
of older blood and also, maybe,

 the ash of many bonfires,
black paint on a graveyard marker,

dirt from their disturbed 
basement floor:

from where you’re lying,
nothing looks or smells clean.

This is an American poem;
I should insert
a nature image here.

I should purple
the mountains up,
like a god. Then I’ll chew

the scenery
until there’s nothing left
to suck from it.

This is an American poem;
it contains a rigged dance
of myth and cynicism.

In here we
we step on 
each others’ toes

then apologize nonstop until
the pain becomes so strong
we cannot help but lash out.

In every true American poem
there should be exuberant
ghosts and the sound

of babies, crying, screaming,
playing. Doing all the things
American babies have always done.

If you write it, they say:
Not the babies, please. Leave
the babies out of it, they are precious

and innocent. Bah, humbug,
you say even though it’s 
the Fourth of July. The Fourth

of July is built on dead children,
uses fireworks to justify 
a war everlasting.

In every great American poem
should be an America over half
of its readers do not recognize.

What’s that about ghosts? Don’t you 
recognize yourself in there?
Still cheering, still writing,

but reversed. A good mirror
shows you your other side.
A better one shows you more than one.

This is my American poem and if it’s any good
it’s chafing you like the dish on the table
with the turkey and all those sides

while the country, the nation,
even the purple mountains above it all 
look at all of us wondering

where they went wrong
that this is how it feels now
to write an American poem.

Across the street
Joe has hung
an American flag
with one blue stripe
out the window.

Calls the cops 
on the Black folks next door
at least once a month
for “looking in his windows”
or “parking too close to his driveway.”

It’s a narrow city street
in a low down part of town
and no one’s got room enough
to park their cars without being
on top of each other,

but Joe still blows the snow
from his driveway
against the windows of 
his neighbors all winter long
in an expression of his displeasure.

Loudly calls the folks next door
“the monkeys.” The cops
always come when he calls,
never do a damn thing,
but come out every time.

Joe likes to complain out loud
to everyone about all of this.
“What? I’m not supposed to have
property rights just because
I’m a registered sex offender?”

Joe’s son has a daughter.
I see her now and then
on the porch
sitting on Joe’s lap when they
come to visit.

At least, 
I assume it’s his granddaughter.
There can’t be any other
explanation. There just
can’t be. 

One time, someone
put a brick through
Joe’s windshield. He
called the cops and blamed
the next door neighbor.

The cops came 
and talked to everyone.
Kept them separate,
said they could 
prove nothing, did nothing.

I wish there was
something just and right
to say here,
but all I’ve got is that 
I’d move

but where is it going to be
any different unless
you go so far away you can’t
be found? Until then, I take comfort
knowing that I still have

more bricks in the backyard
should it come down
to that again, and 
the cops have yet to cross the street
whenever they’ve come:

the same cops who told me
that I should have known better
than to live here after the break-in
a few years ago, that things like that
never get solved in this neighborhood;

the same cops who took four hours 
on a Saturday night to come look at
the totaled cars when the stolen car
sideswiped half the street and was left
at the bottom of the hill in pieces;

the same cops who came through
our backyards with assault rifles
and dogs looking for a killer who
(we later learned) walked right by them
in drag down the sidewalk.

I could go on and on and on
but it’s all happening across 
the street right now, and 
I can’t move, so here I sit
on my bricks without a flag to fly.

What you can get away with
in here is

at least three murders a day
depending on your
choice of food and 
drink and how much
electricity you use and
where you drive and how far
and for what purpose

What you can get away with
in here is 
tossing out a storm cloud
of sharp words for fun
as we used to do
with good old
lawn darts
(c’mon, you never met
a soul damaged by lawn darts
after all
must be one of those 
legends the weak tell
to shut the strong up)
and then laughing 
when they penetrate
someone’s head

What you can get away with 
in here is

cartoons on sports jerseys
and high school recreations of 
important-to-the-infrastructure
massacres by bullet
by oil and steel and a hundred
paper cuts from lethal treaties

What you can get away with 
in here is

blinkered messaging and 
whistling for hunting dogs
for some moonlight or daylight scramble
after prey you don’t even know but
once you corner them you can decide
you know enough
to pour blood out on the soil
(not to spill it
it’s no accident) 

What you can get away with 
in here is

blindly misunderstanding
who lets you get away
with all this and why
it serves them to have you
become what you are

and remain here laughing 
and tossing and shooting and 
buying and selling and 
what’s a little blood anyway

No matter what the front room thinks,
the back room knows this business stinks.

The front room puts its smile up front.
The back room’s smile is kept covert.

The front room just assumes it’s safe.
The back room knows it’s all a cage.

Whenever the front room goes to sleep
the back room fortifies its keep.

No matter what the front room thinks
what’s cooked in the back room always stinks.

To be openly ourselves nowadays 
too often feels like resisting an assault:

routinely forced to learn
muscular new love songs, forever

bulking up for the strain
of trying to hold on to each other.

Daylight comes up
on another round of attacks, snipers

watching for us to dare
to be openly together and say,

beloved, here we can sing out loud
to each other, here we can be safe.

At night, assassins roll up on our homes
where we thought we could leave

the curtains open at least through dinner
so we could watch the city twinkle

or see fireflies grace the neighborhood
as night took hold. We dare to say

beloved, even in darkness there’s light,
however small, however fleeting;

then, too often, comes the shot
or the knife, the fire on the lawn.

Somehow, bewilderingly so,
so many still hate us here

who smile and pat our backs 
in public, then slink into corners to plan

how we might be removed or 
erased completely from our own lives.

If we ever escape the need to be
this perpetually strong, this might be

a good place to hold on to one another
more loosely and engage the softness

we keep behind armor now; until then
we flex, we watch, we love, we guard. 

Say “that’s not music”
often enough and someone
will soon enough
sing you wrong.
You don’t have to agree,
but you’ll still be wrong.

Say “that’s unnatural”
often enough
and soon enough
someone will offer you science.
You don’t have to like it,
but you’ll still be wrong.

Say “that’s un-American.”
Go ahead. I dare you. 

In order to stop snickering
at the humor lurking
like vermin in 
each of the growing cracks
in the dike of Empire

I have to think of all
the innocents and
roughly crushed folks
already barely surviving
in the flood zone below 

and remember the quote
about comedy and tragedy
in order to force myself
to pull up short
of a belly laugh

while thinking
of the rumble of stones
and rubble that will come
with the cleansing
when that wall explodes at last

the crater where we live shows
that an explosive heart once was set off here.

no one knows the names of all those
who were there when it blew apart.

the names of all those who became alarmed
at their disappearance are unknown.

that said, we must acknowledge 
that there are oceans of blood in the soil

where we live because
it’s all we have ever experienced.

we can’t see over the walls
to the things that may be out there.

whether it was always meant to be this way
is irrelevant to the limitations we face.

if it ought to be another way,
if another way is still possible, we can’t say.

crater walls limit what words we know.
walls keep us from even asking for more.

many of us don’t even know
the crater is a crater.

if we do we think time and erosion
have leveled it to memory alone. 

anyone who has been to the walls knows better.
they come back and point to them,

then lay hands upon the soil at our feet
to bring the blood up oozing

onto our shoes. they try to tell us
but we can’t seem to understand

that everything old is still new.
the ticking we hear is not an echo.

there is
fire in the hole.

Our work is the work
of becoming complete
regardless of disruption — 
that’s the work we should crave,
or so the career counselors
tell us. They have books upon
books of self-guided exercises
full of words like
“mission” and “vision”
and “purpose” threaded
onto their thick pages — 
needlepoint philosophies
suitable for tattoos or
framing, quaint calligraphy
for perfect, well-washed 
walls in minimalist houses. 
Meanwhile too many of us
stare down grocery and utility 
disruptions as our true work dissolves
into a series of jobs, all of which serve others.
We are battered. We are tired
of being told to just lean in
and do what we love until the money
follows. The money never follows
whether we love what we do
or not. We are tired of leaning;
time to line up, find the wall,
and push.