I’m telling myself
I’m not here
but I am
here in front of
a duplex bearing
on one side
a rainbow flag bearing
a peace sign and
the redundant word
PEACE and
on the other side
that Nazi-sanctioned
thin blue line version
of the American flag
and in this town I’m certain
someone thinks 
it’s a beautiful thing
that they can coexist
but all I can think of
is crematoria and 
my god this is 
the town where
I grew up and
how the hell
did it happen and
how the hell
did I not end up 
here and 
how the hell 
is hell not here

Snail on
the porch rail.
A friend says,
look, a snail.

I say, no,
that’s just 
a snail’s house.
The snail’s inside.

They say, but
it’s an extension 
of the snail, grown
from its body. That’s
how this works. You
can’t separate the snail
from its house. The snail
without its shell
isn’t a slug, it’s 
a dead snail. 

Down the street,
a snake flag on
a house. DON’T
TREAD ON ME,
undulating like
the swirl of a shell.

I stare at it often,
but after this I’ll be
imagining the house
is not a house at all

but is indeed the
odd woman 
who lives in there,
who will not wave
when I drive by,
who is her flag and
is waiting
to strike.

Do not say how horrible
this world has become for you
without speaking as well of how horrible
it has always been to others.

If you are surprised to feel at last
its downward slant and how
you now struggle to walk anywhere
when every destination is now somehow uphill all the way,

imagine lifetimes of doing this; imagine
the millions now alive and millions now passed
who have needed to be ceaselessly wary,
clutching their hearts, guarding their footsteps.

I’m going to tell you a secret 
that’s really never been a secret:
your prior ease was grounded
in the uneasiness of those others. 

I’m going to tell you a secret
that’s really never been a secret:
your recognizing it today and calling it new
feels vaguely insulting to those vast crowds.

I’m going to tell you a secret
that’s really no secret at all:
some of what you wail about, what ails you
now, what hurts your back and strains your lungs?

Some of what feels so new to you
is age-old and so common
that your shock and anguish
look at least a little like a lie. 

Did your bogeyman tell you
there was just one villain
to blame for all pain?
Did your bogeyman tell you
that everything wrong trailed 
from one leading edge?
Did your bogeyman sell you
a volume of such misdirections,
then eat your liver?

Put your bogeyman
in a capitalist hat.
Paint your bogeyman
as a white cat with perfect teeth.
Dress your bogeyman 
in an able bodied suit.
Cast your bogeyman
in a heterosexual play.
Mask your bogeyman
behind a bottle full of money.

I don’t believe your bogeyman
has stopped laughing at you yet.
I don’t believe your bogeyman
adds anything fresh to fear.
I don’t believe your bogeyman
can never show their face to you.
I don’t believe you own
the necessary mirror. 

I believe that if you are riding a unicorn
and said unicorn bucks you off, 
you get yourself a plain old horse
and get back up. 

I believe you then ride after that unicorn,
lasso it, hold it still while you ask it
how it became so trendy and why
that whole virgin myth got started. 
I suspect it will shrug, if unicorns 
can indeed shrug. I suspect someone
started that cockamamie story as a way
to get virgins to sit out in the woods
for hours waiting for something to happen.

Meanwhile, perfectly good horses
sit lonely in their stalls back at the stable
and despite all the stories they play a role in
they’re considered too common
for the magical bandwagon these days. 
Everyone loves a unicorn, so much so
they don’t think enough about
the horses and narwhals
who made them happen. 
(Don’t get me started on narwhals.
I’ve roped a few in my time
and with that whole lack of shoulders
they shrug even less obviously
than unicorns do.)

You’re shaking your head
at all of this. After all,
you are currently riding a unicorn
that shits rainbows wherever you pass.
You live as if you’ve haven’t been
repeatedly betrayed 
by the rest of the mythology
which gave us unicorns
as it formed us.

It’s an apocalypse out there.

Soon enough
you’re going to need a horse
to get somewhere
because once the narwhals
go extinct, the slow forgetting
of unicorns shall begin
and the only thing to do then
will be to create
some new chimeras to ride. 

You might as well start now. After all,
none of us are virgins any more.

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