When they take us
in the night, when they
slip into our beds with us
and rob us of our right
to our desires, when
they carve our beings
from us and leave us
as husks, as remains,

we will have to be our own light.

When they sniff at the sick
and smell what they call
justified pain, when they
seize our bodies to pay the debt
for their own satisfaction, 
when they buy bullets with 
what could have bought 
our own healthy returns to 
our own healthy lives,

we will have to be our own light.

When they come in killer walls
of camo and blue to take our water
and foul it for the joy of cash heaps,
when they step in grand cadence
to darken our streets with metal and fear
while we cower in homes they long to burn,
when they raze the schools overseas with bombs
and raze the schools in our towns with illogic and lies,
then drag our children from everywhere
into prison,
into servitude,
into battle,
into death,
into worldwide shadow,

we will have to be our own light.

We will have to remember
who we are,
what we can do, 
who we refuse to become,
what we refuse to do.

We will have to be
in their eyes
ungovernable,
will have to be our own light,
illuminating each other’s way, even
if need be learning to start
fires, with each torch igniting another
until their darkness either
fails before us
or is left behind
for all time.

Speaking of horror
there’s a
huge Dodge truck
parked at the donut shop
I’m about to go into
and it’s flying both
an American flag and 
a Confederate flag
each one the size of
a comforter or 
opened body bag and
it’s Spring

Speaking of 
horror that is as
a way of saying
something moving
in the dispassionate moment
of how matter of factly
those flags fly together

Speaking of horror
my body is hollering
stay out of there

Horror is how easily I lose
my usual donut appetite

In fact I don’t even
want a coffee

I know I could likely walk in 
with impunity
and buy my usual
with impunity
and recognize the person
who owns that truck 
and stare at them
with impunity in fact
they might nod to me if
we passed through the glass doors
at the same time in 
opposite directions

I don’t want to park
where horror lives
so I drive around the block to 
another donut shop

but it’s Spring and
in keeping with Spring
and speaking of horror

I really have lost all desire
for the usual

When “tired”
means there’s nothing
to give.

When “tired”
means your lungs
whistle dirges.

There are trees
bent more by the weight 
of life than you are,

trees that grow
anyway, but you
are no tree. 

So tired,
stunted,
stalled —

lonely too, or
alone at least,
even among friends, 

lovers, family.
Tired, alone,
shortened, stuffed

down from full height
and wasted, too wasted
to rise again. Or so at first

you believe,
forgetting how 
“tired” can easily become

“angry,”
shifting
in one breath.

When “tired”
becomes “angry, ” those dirges
turn martial, go loud.

When “tired”
becomes “angry” you
straighten like 

a full tree, even if
a storm’s coming 
full of lightning

and doom. When
angry, you grow.
You see who else

is angry alongside you and
realize the lightning can’t
take all of you. So

get angry, not tired.
Be what is needed.
Rise, grow, sing war.

It’s too early to fall asleep.

Please come,
said something.

This voice was soft
and unfamiliar yet
had managed to get 
so close to my sleeping ear
that I could feel it stir the air
as it spoke.

Please come,
it said again, there is
urgent need here, there is
a great famine, a profound 
drought, a bitter war,
a rage covering us all here.

Please come, it said again,
and I rolled over to change
which ear was exposed as
I try keep some of my hearing
to myself and not let just anyone
in that way, but it got into
the pillow itself and denied me
sleep, clearly saying again 
and again:

please come, we
are vanishing, we are being
snuffed out the way breath
takes a candle flame
and just as the smoke
from that small extinguishing
lingers for a short time and
ribbons back and forth until
it’s gone, this whispering
can only reach you for a moment
until it too wisps away. Please
come, please, 

until I could take no more
and talked back to it
and drowned it 
and snuffed it
and blew on it until
it cooled into silence
and left me in darkness
to sleep and 
keep to myself — 

but I found
I could not.

It does not happen
overnight, but

one day your neighborhood
reveals itself to be

your enemy. You realize
the streets long to cradle

your crushed face. All the familiar
walls are reaching out,

first to hug your back 
and then to hold bullets

that ache to pierce you 
through and through. Soon

it becomes a daily race
to go from stoop to work

and back to stoop 
while menaced

the whole time by place.
You spend every night

huddled in a room
you are not sure

you should trust. This
is where you’ve always lived;

you know you should belong in
your town, your place. But

what you know
and what you feel

are different. What you do 
and what you should do

are different. This place
as it is and as it should be

are different and
suddenly it appears that

exile is no longer a function
of where you live.

Go.
Live a sunlit life.
Leave shadow to me
and my team.

Go.
Turn off the news, 
enjoy the silence.
Leave the dealing 
and terror to me
and my team.

Go.
Live in constant 
yes to the feel of sun
upon your face. 
Leave the moon 
and all its gentle maybe
to me
and my team.

Go.
Get with your 
folks. Get safe
and get comfy.
Leave the spikes
and road rash, the
holes and fractures,
the dinging of the fight bell,
the complexity of how much itch
you can take before screaming,
to me and my team.

We are out here
already.  Born here, 
in fact. It’s nothing new
to us.

Go.
Do the nothing new for you.
Leave the rest.
We got this.
We do.

All day,
out of boredom
and patience,
I stare at the news.

Red flags
to the horizon:
carpet for
a nation-sized room.

Too much red
for me.
Too many
stabs:

death of a thousand 
cuts, and I’m
not even
their true target.

How selfish
of me to think
I matter
in all this.

How like me
to make it about me.
How like me 
to know that,

yet be unable
to stop myself 
from centering
on my own pain.