Once upon a time at the corner
there was a man loudly explaining 
how to change your weight by changing your name.
Look at me, he says, I once weighed 438 pounds
as John Quinones, changed my name to Remarkable Jones
and became a 260 pound tiger of svelte grace. 

I changed my name at his suggestion
to Natasha LaShotgun and ballooned to 3,438 tons.
I developed a gravitational pull of my own that worked
in concert with that of the Earth and began to levitate
quite pleasantly three feet off the ground. Reverting
to my birth name gently grounded me again.  

The trick according to Remarkable Jones
was to never keep one name for too long 
once you’ve learned the process. Shift constantly
between identifiers and you’ll never get pinned down
or rise too far above where you want to be.  

So I dug the advice and dug the doing for a long time.
Gained as John Smith, reduced as Almond McGillicuddy.
Shrank as Penny, grew as Penelope, swelled to substance
as Monster Don, slipped into feigned normalcy
as Smoky Face Butts Patel, DiRienzo Delmonico.  Sometimes

I just went with titles: the lightness of being Mister,
the unbearable lightness of being Hey You. The gravity
of Your Honor, the unbearable honor of being Reverend,
Officer, Boss. Honey raised my toes ten feet off the dirt,
Asshole sunk them pointedly six feet under. If I took

a name I was given, a title, a slur? How I tossed 
and rolled and laid about based on the massive potential
of those words I did not myself own, how difficult it became
to find a name that gave me back to my self at a size
I could work with, huge or small,
offering whatever peace I most desired. It all became so much
that I ran one day, shedding names as I ran, all the way to the corner
where the man sat waiting as if he knew I was coming. 

I knew you’d come, he said. 

The truer trick according to Remarkable John Quinones Jones
was to find a name that you could completely own, 
no matter how long, no matter how many syllables
it required, no matter how hard it was for someone else
to pronounce — in fact, that might be your best tell
that you’ve found the Right Name with the Right Weight —
that no one can dismiss it by saying it wrong,
that only you can teach its correct sound.  If you find that,
you will forever outweigh whatever name they try to hang upon you
no matter how big or small you become…

oh, he was right. How right he was.
I say it out loud when I’m by myself at night,
and I fill the whole damn sky.

Larry, Curly, and Moe have become
childhood-eating ghosts. They taunt,
they haunt, they still slam heads with
an overhand fist, still gouge eyes,
still teach the young to giggle at pain.
I recall everything they taught me
about how art doesn’t always imitate life — 
something I learned by hours of backyard practice
of every Stooge-stunt on the neighborhood kids,
just as they learned by trying things out on me.  

We went out into the bigger playgrounds
allegedly having learned the difference between
a staged massacre and the real thing.
It’s hard to believe that now.

Maybe we learned a different lesson:
one about how little it hurts
to inflict mayhem on another, or one about
how quaint such ancient comic savagery appears
when given enough filter through time and grime

to forget how much we loved it once, how hard
we worked to perfect every noise they made
as they suffered so hilariously,  how well
they set the stage for the world
we now call our own.

We have good things 
on our to-do lists:
take time to visualize a better world,
speak gentle ill of the rich,
dance like we’ll never
be asked to dance again.

A rising wind carries to us
a song of trauma —
no one singer, a plural song — 
beggars’ voices rising. 

We open
the blinds and the window itself
and hear a bit of it so, 
in just a moment from now, 
we can go out and drop coin into its cup
and then choose to ignore it. 

Granted, that song 
won’t end so easily 
just because we put cash 
in its loving cup
as it sits on the sidewalk keening,

but we feel better
believing 
we did something, 
even if it was something minor,
to keep
the minor song
in the minor key alive
a bit longer. 

“The country
seems so sad these days,”
we sigh as we turn away. “It sounds
so, so sad. It must be
the wind.  It must be something
in the air.
So much better when we couldn’t hear it.
We’re sad that it has to be sung,
glad that it’s being sung 
elsewhere.”

View from the backseat:
a head not facing you.
Climb over.  Make them look. Take the wheel.

From this side of the wall
it’s clear that there’s no gate.
Climb over. Break through. Tear it down.

Bottom floor, looking up.
No stairs, no ladders, no windows.
Climb the skin of it. Come through the roof.

No invitation in the mail.
No open hand.  No call.
There’s no climbing that.  Turn away.

Say no to all
of what they do bother to offer.
Climb up and out. Rise.

The centaur,
fully aware of his 
fictional status, 
nevertheless
did not hesitate to enter
the food court at
the mall to stand before
the rotating trays of
desiccated cheese slices
and turn singing to the crowd
with arms upraised
while clopping a martial rhythm;

said crowd whispering
their delight (mixed with 
a little fear of this thing
which they’d only heard of
in story prior to this moment)

turned then to each other
and saying, he fills a hole
we hate among us, he tells us
the hole can only be filled
by him and so we should
ignore the steam rising 
from the piles all around him
and elect him, acclaim him,
by God let’s bring him to life.

Hearing that another Black boy’s
been killed by police fire — 

seeing pictures of police taken from a distance,
body cameras having failed to fire

in this never ending death season where crowds of people stare flames
into a kneeling quarterback who somehow is not yet on fire

despite the wash of kerosene poured upon him
for daring to suggest that police need not always fire,

while elsewhere dogs on the Great Plains
lunge from brutal hands, their kill-trained eyes on fire

for the ancient taste of Native flesh again — ooh, 
it’s been too long — someone give the Guard the order to fire

and bleach the earth free of this human tide
hugging the millions of acres yet to set on fire — 

and if you think this one is not the same as the others
look at the match that starts the fire,

see who holds the unburnt end
after the passing of the fire,

check your hands
to see if they stink of fire.

If you remain on the edge
of the point overlooking 
the vast space filled with
what you don’t know and

remain unable to bring yourself
to look down and perhaps
lessen your ignorance 

if only by straining to find
a tiny break in the clouds below you
so that you might possibly
catch a glimpse 
of the bottom of what
seemed at first glance to be
a bottomless pit, how

are we supposed to believe
anything you claim for your own
growth and maturity?
You should just 

admit your complete lack
of interest in, or your own 
paralyzing fear of, the 

unknown in you, even the unknown
that has in fact been revealed to you
by others so often, the unknown
you refuse to know for whatever
reason you may provide, real or
imagined, falsified or true;
then step off 

and let the space have you, let yourself
vanish into it 
like a ball

maybe to land and then
bounce out and be saved
if you’re lucky or blessed;

to be honest, though,
we won’t be looking for you;

self-care being what it is in these times,
we have our own cliffs to conquer,
our own fatal falls to avoid,

our own clouds to pierce.

Splintery enough 
for ya? Tension —
can’t live with it, can’t
drink enough to kill it.
It’s like walking through
blood soup lately. I’ve got
wet legs and famished
eyes. Did you hear the 
forecast? They say it’s 
all over the whole damn
country and getting worse,
every city’s a flood plain,
every town a fire zone,
every road a rain of bullets,
every kid’s a potential orphan
and every parent’s got a wound 
open for grieving. There’s bound
to come a moment soon
where we stop calling it
bad weather and call it climate change,
stop calling it protesting and call it
uprising, stop calling it a great country
and just call it a country bearing up
against splintering, stop pretending
it wasn’t built on cracks to begin with,
stop pretending it’s not inevitable.

Spell it with two guns
and a coat of whitewash.

Spell it with three picket fences
and a wolverine trapped
under a left thumbnail.
Spell it with seven dirty words
and rigor mortis laid thick
between bricks.

Spell it with fifty-seven apologies
flavored with forgetting,
sixty-three apologies
blind to remorse,
one hundred and eleven apologies
offered on a dagger’s tip.  

Spell it original thirteen,
broken five hundred.  Spell it
three-fifths, spell it six-nineteen.  
Spell it nine-eleven; spell it with
a cloud over it, a strained 
flag, a lowered boom.

Spell it with two more guns
and a Nagasaki blister.  Spell it
with moon rocks and cratered
cities, dead kids, dead eyes
dotted with good flowers. 

Spell it with a burr. Spell it
with flanks quivering.  Spell it 
with pink dawn over gray streets
and a boat swift-rocking 
down a snow fed river. 

How to spell American:

with a cauldron. A melting pot
if you prefer. A bullet mold,
a fireproof suffrage, a vote
for steam over simmer, 
a last summer of drowsing bees.

Spell it,
respell it,
spell it,
respell it;

it’s not like anyone knows
the correct way to pronounce it.