1?20?2017

We are breathing heavy over

The bar at 1pm, deep in it,

Changing neon across our faces,

Big bear bartender who refused to put it on tv

Turned with us now, falling on the sword,

Throwing out jabs like bottles from a group of protestors.

Part of this is quiet,

The way we would pass through security at 4am

Sleepy eyed guards ushering us through

With thoughts on their husbands in bed

Or bag lunches crowded into the back of podiums.

He speaks behind a golden eagle,

Wing tips pointed up for freedom carefully,

And interspersed with his wife’s strange garments marching to gold cutlery

Are images of young people in the streets,

Shaking their fists at a row of well trained facelessness.

I am in the stall-less bathroom

Gunmetal showing through the walls

And floor canted down to guide you in.

My ass cheeks are numb and my brows swallow,

As I pass by the mirror, my eyes are low.

My lover is with the miners,

With the nurses in the hills,

An audiobook away, and coming close

To the leatherbound violence soon.

I see a woman clutching herself on tv, hood turned up

And with hand over wrist obviously squeezing

As tightly as she can.

The handing over of power--

A strategically worn bible, casted across the country

Into plains and over mountains, through the hollow parts of cities

And the gullies of the suburbs,

Blotchy white, frozen over pupils,

Calling for blood, the same blood to be shed.

Do not stop, do not stop.

We are calling out to friends

And hundreding glasses left

With only foam along the edges.

If there is a thing to be said here

I think it must be

Held between fingers dry like a cigarette,

Wet like mud.

And definitely broken. I wrote before, “I am broken speech revived”

But these words, broken over themselves

Like backs over a folding chair,

Mustn’t comport themselves like a bourgeois patio garden

And mustn’t tell themselves they are doing the right thing in the fight

And mustn’t simply sit and get drunk over vinyl.

We are up at 6am, launching through rain spilled streets,

Wheels spitting it contemptuously onto our work pants.

She has two children,

But when she cannot control what floor she is on

She crushes her knuckles in the concrete

So that her finger dangles off her hand

Like a climber at the edge of the world.

And she is crying, slowly.

Then they take her to the hospital.

Some days, my lover’s eyes

Say only “see this,

See this with me.

We are the ones who will not look away

From the fire or the blood

Or any of the poetry bubbling bubbling bubbling.

If not, then who?”

Before the birds come out, I think if there are children

 in that crowd I think they are on fire like the trash,

Block bloc is adding fuel and blocking intersections

And they are hated and they are putting others in danger

And they are making me feel better.

White ladies holding signs are named diane

And they want their voices to be heard.

Rose flies to California Wednesday

To take her kids back from that abusive pastor.

I wish I had not gotten kicked out of her bar

Last night.

Or eaten that cake,

Or burned myself on the stovetop.

She was cool against the wood frame

When she whispered it was not our fault.

When I dreamed, it was very deep in the cavern.

First night of more than 2 hours this week,

And it was packing up for a long journey

Where I could not bring much,

But everything I did not take would be destroyed.

Fire is the one element man can create.

First I packed a bag of sentiment, of black porcelain Scotty dogs

Then I dumped it out on the floor,

Some breaking some not.

Then I packed food and knives.

And dumped.

Then I saw at the back of the room,

A tarp still wet with cold rain.

And I knew exactly what I needed

And exactly what I could not take.

Today flirts with apocalypse

The way the ladies at table 53

Look at me and then undertip.

Today is 2 bottles deep.

We are waking in the same dirty sheets

With the same sleeplessness

Wishing for the same pills we cannot afford to take.

Something about today costs too much to speak of.

You’ve gotten down on yourself

And there ain’t no way out

But through.

And before you can say anything

she is coming

down hard on you.

After, she rolls over herself,

And asks, sadly, where you are.

“Where are you?”

Where are you?