October, I'm Running

The clunker slides along into a narrow street with cars parked on both sides

to face off with a short yellow school bus.

A child gets out and runs through cold onto a black, burnt-roof porch.

On the phone there is heavy breathing.

One end brags about how they will get arrested soon.

On the other, sirens trail coolly in the background—

the candles of the night melt each other,

forming pools of wax, each around the other

in minor concentric circles

which harden after a few seconds.

And his favorite books would always end with “there are no ends.”

When she cries quietly, curling and uncurling,

a mint-leaf in an unpredictable winter,

he sees it for the first time—

a very fine silk leash stretching back behind her

for years, and for miles--

being yanked—

How can any of this be let go?

A woman whose son was murdered by the police

paints her nails blue

and shrugs at her scarf before

walking in front of the crowd to talk about destiny.

At an unplanned moment though,

she bursts into tears, not really knowing why--

goddamnit she rehearsed this.

This is not the time.

On the balcony above, two airport cashiers reach quietly to hold hands,

dry hands hidden by plastic folding chairs,

until one gets nauseous enough that her mouth fills with bile.

She runs down the stairs onto the marble steps outside the church,

slips, falls, and rolls onto her side before she retches.

The white folks lilt along beside their mantelpieces--

submarines neither rising nor descending--

rocking in their chair’s,

laughing at their blankets,

passing a joint.

In an empty house above the trolleys,

a book case begs to be released.

The hamper is soaked with sweat.

The floors are cashing in their chips.

The papers posted along the walls get terribly drunk

and go to sleep.

In the snow on 52^nd street,

mothers try to reach their children before day-care closes.

It is winter and no one can stay off the street for long.

But who can afford an extra $25 for comfort?

I am trying not to drink 750 ml of bourbon,

because in all this noise,

I see her from far away, walking quietly further.

arrival

we are the same backwards and forwards.

There is nothing that is not god.

Here I am leaving, old man

Bundled in brown breathing heavy out

The doors of the beautiful blood-blown carpet.

Here are the tears of leaving you,

Forming the lake I could not stop writing about through my adolescence,

Before we ever met.

I see it in the movies, lake blue, your blue, eyes

panning the strange patterns speaking in the curtains

at the border, that light blue of dawn curling through everything

like smoke letters, that would-be title of my first book

but instead that was a moment to accept

apocalypse. Your smell laughs here

and there in moments, like now, when I can

spare the time. It grows cold as glass shards

beneath advertisements for bankrupt businesses

I think philly will never erase, maybe it can’t.

I burn hot, furnace fur where a history of lovers

Scratch their names but here,

Now, you are writhing this moment and with your hands open

Pushing it to the blue flame. In graffiti

Whispers, our perfection clouds itself

Like a storm, and we love

The beginning and end, don't we? Indescribable

And mimicking and indecipherable whether a breath

In or out. But in the middle here,

The n’s, where hope and sadness, excitement,

Love, human emotions prevail,

I will hold your neck hard and knowing,

Like the spine of the book I read every summer. Babe,

I know it’s confusing but I feel it everywhere

Around me and loving you is like rereading

All my favorites but somehow escaping out.

It isn’t you at all, or even us, it’s that

The pages are falling out and across the country

Lie roads to be driven and eyes

To be looked into and skies to open

And all already, already there. This is the wonder

Of a world so full, not me as in the solipsistic days

Of highschool catching smoke in the alleys,

But everyone's infinitely outwards and whole—the train

Overhead sounding the clop clop of horses coming to the river,

And the night, this night carrying my whole life

To me in a breaking open moment I know well.

She is dead. And she is dying and my first child

Is being born screaming and I cry alone in the theatre.

Orange and grey, green and black, gifted shoes dissolving

And trees growing like lungs to better take it in, my dear.

The moon is full as it was when my mother released the hawk that had crashed onto our porch through the harsh metal wires of a screen I had helped put up two years before that would later be chewed through by a squirrel and now overlook the closed down pool in light winter snow that will house the 85^th birthday of Sidney who will eventually lose it and die. I wrote a song for her with chords Michal had written for a musical. Ab minor.

You too know death. See it. I choose this here, again and again.

Backwards and forwards.

Her in chemo refusing to let me see,

Or her showing her brown eyes to me coming for the first time

Or those eyes lighting up for another,

Or my mother spitting bile into a pink fedora deep in the night as I rub her back,

Or you asking me to call you a slut

Or paul’s nervous grin when the hearing aide goes out

Or john threatening to kill me in the black woods by the lake

Or the car crashes that almost claimed my friends

Or the mushroom gangplanks to the moon

Or the endless giggles over the availability of every damn thing to be played with

Or when I told off a boss for the first time in his office and he shut his mouth and took it

Or when I tasted victory in dweh’s champagne toast and his hand on my shoulder,

Or in my fear at the darkening road on the wrong highway outside of Wroclaw

Or in the constant love filling purposefully each morning eyes opening sun down or up but a day coming full of trials,

Or in the way I always leave and begin again

Ive got it on my back because I know

There is nothing that is not god.

postcard of virginia pines

We are neither so old as to be bridges

Nor so young as to be forgetful.

A matte postcard of Virginia pines

Claws its way through my life,

As every month I clear my desk and find it

Still sitting there.

I am sorry I have not replied.

It would be simpler

Were it because I loved you too much

Or even not at all anymore.

The truth is your truth

Has become something I am afraid of.

Because it is simple.

Because I knew it when we were children.

In the brief hours when I make it back to boston

We make love but

I never break through to you anymore

Which is unsurprising because

My broken pieces no longer lie

So close to the surface as they once did.

My fingers calloused, a thousand poems written,

And a taught anger I use as a tool everyday

How could we be the same?

And you touching a hundred burns

And roaming for the first time along

the Appalachian spine, where did you expect to find me?

We are deep into the pages now,

And it feels like the only way I can give my story

These days is to sell it,

but I can’t sell you my life.

So what on earth could I write back

If you talk about Christmas

And say you still love me

And send a Polaroid of brown Virginia pines?

It feels like there is no paper in the house

That can contain the years of silence,

Though probably all we need

Is to seal a few blank pages with the cost of a stamp.

Hannibal

It is the second night of channukah.

All the doors are still open.

Years have passed since the decision

not to render beautifully—

on the trolley home I run into a doctor friend.

He has more money than me.

We pull each other out—

me his face from the book

him my feet from the bar I would drop on.

As we speak, it strikes midnight 

and it is his birthday. I go home and cash checks 

on the duct taped screen of the computer 

my parents bought me in highschool.

Certain things have to last.

The drawers with all the most precious things have holes in them

where the first letter from sara goes missing

where the years worth of half dollars my uncle sam collected 

for me, can’t call back.

It is forced to be ok—24 hours in brooklynn

whose final 3 are beyond memory

and then back without a word from anyone I saw

or anyone I left.

My girlfriend is angry I don’t love her enough,

so these days we are drifting apart.

I won’t sacrifice feeling good about my heart

as long as it beats.

Some things catch you by surprise

since you were 13—your ability to listen,

the distinction between the you and you,

a willingness to sacrifice ad infinitum for an idea of a life.

Whose revolution? And when?

I am annoyed with the flamboyant educated black men I went to school with

for loving themselves more than I allow myself.

The candles are downstairs heating the house,

and a cat with 10 fingers and trouble balancing

looks me in the eyes as I close the lights and decide

tonight is a wash, tonight will not break me through.

He asks me” have you moved on

From the road to yourself

From your striving into some great way

And some huge feeling

And something more?

“

“I do not think you have”

riding past the Barn

When we finally pulled our hips apart

Opened the great door naked and wide

To a summer night that had stumbled into fall

it was the streetlamps speaking

A language I recognized and the friendly bubbles of pavement

Of my home which sung something sweet and it was as if your lips had not left my shoulder and what we thought must grindingly come to a stuttering halt at the end of the line

Continued on into the something beyond what we know

When , after id shown you the parts of me I cannot control

And you laughed at them and their beastliness

And cupped their cheeks and stroked their hair, when

You showed the way to your special places where I was not the first

But where we both felt discovered and discovering there for a moment,

And When the candle was out , when the night whimpered and purred

And when we played the Pandora jazz station because I could not make love to hip hop, when your eyes came in and out and the fear played itself flickeringly there,

When I watched and asked you to look at me as you came, and when we finally reclaimed our separate parts beautified and shining and touched

There was a saxophone playing in the street

I biked on towards home

He was outside the bar where I would be sitting drinking into something

Were you not in my life

And I stopped

And he kept on

“ hey daddy—thank you”

pierced nose and bright eyes

I whooped and rode

wired across my limbs.

And thrumming in my blood

You and your looks and your addiction

Played out

And tonight I am alive to it all

Day 3 of sobriety

Fuck you, stay with it

No toe itching till the blood creeps out

No more sappy sitcom over sepia toned down computer light till sleep dribbles

Its way into your slip.

No more manhattans, scotches, ipa’s, negronis, margaritas, bottles of chianti,

Boxes of chardonnay,

The sounds of your swallows drowning the blue bird inside.

Here you are, this giant mirror, pointed convex over your life,

Trying to get the angle in,

The shadow of the Chicago bean and the time you spent there falling

Onto your heels with the labor movement and the woman who would become a casual acquaintance of kb.

Do you see what you look like now?

Greet the dawn crusted streets with gloved hands for it is getting cold out

But greet them, do not sleep through “daydreaming” and “myxomatosis”

But feel it in your gut when you cannot have a meal on time

And when you get off do not go gentle to the bar next door singing songs

Of romance, degradation, and preach what your life might be to your unfocused eyes in the bathroom with the warnings about pregnancy.

You have learned.

Hop on your bike sober and ride home.

You are not so young as to believe your life is a story

If you aren’t writing it. And even then, why cut off your fingers

fOr your liver? You’ve gotten ink stained now and a glass pen across from the window overlooking the 50^th street of cedar avenue to prove it.

Use this. face this. stay with this.

You’ll never see the bottom of the cup if you

Keep looking away.

every day the you who’s eyes are not tired

grows louder.

I can see your heart like linen in front of a flame.

cape poem 1

Avoiding the glare, and sting of sunscreen,

My eyes flow to the cattails dancing in the afternoon,

Wind-whipped, sun shorn

Protruding from the muddy bank.

We are at 55 knots in a turtle shell of fiber glass.
My mother sings “eili, eili”

And her voice is at once the wonder of the moment

And the moment itself, the way several days ago

I stood staring down the beginning of a storm,

Chest heaving with oxygen and skin slick

With sweat becoming rain,

Invigorated by life and surprised by how close I felt

To being gone. Mary is gone, the one

We used to fool with mints behind our teeth and

Beer cans below the gas pedal. Her son is showing

His teeth, has a new haircut,

Asks us to tell stories about her

Though the priest tells the same one over and over

As if to say “don’t worry. She isn’t gone.”

But she is. Tim knows it,

Tears behind his tongue and the stink of last nights drinking

Resting its legs just below a $4 spray of cologne.

And today the spray salts my wounds and floods my heart.

We whoop and shout. When we find land, we stream across

The hot sand as if running across water, as if the things

We are running towards or away from are right there,

Are underneath and ready to swallow us whole like the whale.

It would not be so bad.