For What We Take

I put you in a floured, plastic bag
and then a flimsy, deep aluminum pan
since eating winged things
and quickly tossing the mess that’s left
is how we Americans give thanks.

2012

The Techno-Optimist’s Love Song

If technology advances
exponentially, and my body,
your body, these oscillating,

electrochemically, aesthetically driven
love machines have self-organized
this complexly—quantum flesh

reaching through each other
virally, evolving memetically,
transcending ideational duality

and the tragedies of biolinearity,
then let us spend a raptured life
together in a year, a month,

three days, a night, a song.
Download your honeyed app,
and, yes, your starkest one,

right here. Spread your thumbs
until my deepest windows shine.
Step in. The beginning is always near.

2012

~with thanks to Jason Silva

The Dangers of Adoring Living Poets

Screw together wobbly word stairs I have not yet climbed.

Marry us like bleeding fingers and fenceless lands.

Sink into the great gut and wait for me, an ear.

Stir my hardened words with long, calloused hands.

Give it to me straight, one rough character at a time.

Misspell yourself upon my belly’s sand.

Douse the torch and dance with me until a sphinx appears.

2012

Existential Risks in a World of Immortals

1
No lines rewriting the story
of your face is a risk I wouldn’t take.

2
How would your story change if your body didn’t?

3
I wouldn’t know the soft way you smile
in the days before you die.

4
Hero, if there were no risk of death,
would the prize mean as much?

5
Enough empty promises!
Eternal Life would finally call Eternal Love’s bluff.

2012

Red Bead

It is never safe to assume
karma is through with you,

that all you have done
and do has been released

like a necklace spilling
beads across a floor.

You gather the beads,
re-string them while you sleep,

always a familiar,
pleasing pattern.

Oh, to sleep! This sleeping
storm that blows games through.

One game, you let it go.
You let it go. One name.

It rolls just within reach,
the red bead.

Again and again,
you have slipped

it in your mouth
between cheek and teeth,

your foray tongue
a muscled dream.

Try to spit it out,
the dead seed.

Wishing is not the same
as living or reprieve.

2012

Zephyr Blues

My right palm
Is a memory
In the boiling pool
Of my own back.

My left fingers,
A steel slide
Tracing the wet line
Of your nape
Across mine.

Can you hear it?

I fever drowse
In a westward bed,
Two-bodied alloy,
Still red with no sign
Of cooling.

I swear this is no ploy:
We have laid
The track.

I chew the slow train sound
In the center of our names,
And see for the first time
That ache
Is my hidden spine,
The fastest route,
A certain wreck.

And yet
There is
Your mouth.

The rails.
The roll.

I wail to warn the town.

2012

When I Show Rosemerry My Home for the First Time

In every room I point out the flaw:
discolored spots on walls
I could have painted better,
a leaking bathtub hot water knob,
crumbling grout between green tiles,
dust on my son’s piled dresser,
the unfinished edges of a shelf.
I am only noticing what is beautiful,
she responds, and I realize
what I have done,
what I do, walking her through
the house of me.
Look here, I say, over soup and rice,
at the way desire is eating my face.
Do you hear how I am becoming loud
carrying a house and three kids
and 52 students and one gallery
and a town of hungry poets?
And later, over her homemade rye:
See how easily I am high jacked
by barking dogs and distant trains?
And finally, in the kitchen doorway,
my last confession:
I am becoming bony and thin-skinned,
which translates: I am slowly dying.
This time Rosemerry doesn’t respond.
This time she lets silence answer.

2012

Fine

She would beg:
Press your cool coin
Here and here and here—

If water faring were a game.

But she once paid
For smuggled lips
With children’s years

The same sad way
Her gold-lost fathers did—
A toll nine decades dear.

This swell is no child’s play.

Her only claim:
Scrawled treasure maps and
Deep sea dreams of a pirate’s beard.

2012

Map of Sorrows

Unfold your map.
Soft as clothes,
thin as Mother’s eyelids.

You’ve read the bloody roads
and made the signs for sisters.
The map is older than Alone.

This town called Grief:
the morning’s carrion crow.
Let it fly before you wake them.

Its arc is closer than they know.
Breathe wider in the river Skin.
Break the sky’s dark wish bones.

2012

Breaking One Rule

I will make rhymes
and measured lines

of myself inside
the poem of us.

Wait for the turn.
Watch the couplet burn.

2012