They call it stormy Monday,
Thursday’s just as bad
Siri’s not responding
My GPS’s lead me to Riyadh
The messenger burned out and crashed.
Once a quick-silver bullet
Screaming into the sky,
“Listen to me! I have so much to tell you!”
Evil's another story, a story
whose orphan narrator is misery,
married to pain, son of suffering,
sibling of spleen. I have seen evil.
You have too, so you know there's
only one way to get rid of it.
Your mother performed
Absence so you do not know
Limits to desire
Whenever you face the loss
Of dolphins a void hammers
Upon the scrotum's fell evacuation
the musculature normally declines--
or so the common wisdom of our time
lets one (that would be me) anticipate.
But here I feel a pair of muscles thrive
on my castrated travel-partner's sides:
one time he said men will use
kite strings to decapitate other men
riding motorcycles
no, you’re fucking with me but it is
possible invisible strings can slice clean
You were very small at the time I admired you,
and from each glimpse across the water
you seem only to have shrank away.
Admit the truth
open the window
goodbye to houses and hello to farms
this is the way things are
out in the world
I fake solemnity and self-negation, finish my meal.
Mosquito swarm about my face, sweat beads on
my brow. Emptiness was more fun to write about
before navigating the corridors of cancer wards, orderlies
In my death I meander through mirrors that reflect the void of my face. My eyes dissolve into black holes that contain multitudes of nothing.
Stop that crap! We built this country
And made it what it is, great again,
After losing the topnotch place
With our kindness and indulgence;
It is our country now, and our home!
a beautiful woman among the throngs
removed her dress and began to
march naked, cutting through the
thick crowd on the sidewalk like
a rapier, everyone moving aside
Before he died a few years ago
I touched Moses' dying skin
almost empty
of its fleshy weight
Hummingbirds emanate from a mirage's radiant haze now.
Tornadoes vanish on the glowing horizon comets graze now.
May you know your neighbors’ names. May those names cause
more pleasure than frustration. May they applaud
the life you choose to build—your triumphs and flaws—
your loyalty and trysts—your science and your gods.
The paper is ripped on the page
of my favorite Alejandra Pizarnik
poem, my ear aches, and I cool
my hand with a glass of anything
what kind of city is this where one line goes one way and another line elsewhere and another line with three possible points, another for foul shots, another for out of bounds? where telephones have lost some of their lines? where bodies come in types instead of fonts?
Speech was discouraged
to keep from setting off
the man of fire
who would lash and scorch
then burn you down.
like cornered in juarez
or the rough stoppage
on a dead end street
like this is your other
this is the price of looking
of behaving in a rational
and irrational way
A headless snake
striped like fresh high
way neck rough
gnawed away from mind
away from—
no matter which reality
The medical
papers in his left
hand somehow describe
a journey into hell
going deeper trying to
escape
The bar is stained with alcohol
with a mirror behind
so it looks as if there’s twice as many bottles
as there really are.
I am traveling with my uncle
down this old road falling apart
with potholes and chunked out gravel
an owl watches from the woods
the granite hills burn like buildings
without relinquishing hope
even a sliver that defies
dark sky guarding
person from poisonous
"It is not my fault if you cannot understand what it is I am going to be talking about, if you lack the duende necessary to understand my poems on the run."
Someone has gifted me an
astrolabe. I use it to determine
the distance between the end
of one line & the next. Its
ethnicity changes daily...
Is Love the pinnacle of DIY culture?
If you have a band, can you love
in desperation? Can you print your
own love? Develop your own love
collective? Let’s ask the senior biologist
the undertakers’ polyester suits
couldn’t withstand the volume
of work and soon they too were dead,
perhaps of constant exposure to
despair as well as lack of food,
Keep it close
to the bone, boy.
Keep the blade busy.
You were never
going to be their darling
so what have you got to lose?
Sun cracked grass signals
the yellow haze of transition.
Pinon fire in a kiva stove
is a Southwest desert Fall
in the armpits of tradition
and passionate drumming.
When the buzz of mosquitoes is music,
lampblack is a painting on one’s wall.
When taps are stark, streets are lightless,
circuitous human trails at every trestle:
despite the doggerel of lonely
atoms, out of sync with
the unending Styrofoam
models from childhood
The artist says “I haven't drawn a stitch since;
I shake my fists at words and recall the rising din.”
The butcher says “I’ll grind it fine for you
if you stand over there and vote along this party line.”
Charlotte to Savannah. It smells like bad luck and sorrow plus a look of too much
crystal meth and DIY tattoos. 40 years
since I've taken greyhound.
your antic flesh comes back
a pistol loaf of bread
the door blows open
hair and leaves
by right a rite of passage
should be entered into
by one who has prepared
who understands the gravity
commitment and opportunity
Just look at your face so wasted playing a man so real, as real as charred skin in your hair can get. How far will you trudge down this never-ending path of enlightened servitude? Wade into the river to soothe your feet as many times as you’d like, but the ringworms keep burrowing.
her voice a specific
timeline of remembrance,
that of leading my still
young wanderings through
cancer and familiar cave,
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