The beer is flowing
All hot and high,
Insect repellent on the house-
A restaurant by the roadside.
The streets a little easy
Now that the tears have dried,
But the population still dress in black
For the year the King had died.

I’ve been doing a little dying too,
All the faces I have been,
All the places, all the names;
All the waste I’ve come to see.
It piled in the entryway,
Too many obstacles to leave,
Too desperate to sit and stay,
Witness the death of the autumn leaves.

Too much steady state back at home,
Over here, it’s chaos in the streets,
Used to take a pill to make me calm;
I used to lie and steal and cheat.
I used to have a drink to **** the day,
Now I take a load off of my feet,
Nurse it back and eat well and full;
There’s no trouble in falling asleep.

I see the waitress get a head massage
In the middle of the working day,
I mind my manners a thousand times
Still, my brain does not behave.
*** lingers on every corner,
In every blind-alley retreat,
Every time she smiles at me,
Or hands me my receipt.

Now I sing for life and I sing for death
And neither is full of fear,
Sometimes I tell the world to go to hell-
But at least I sound sincere.
At least my poetry is full of me
And not the absence in between
When I wake in this sober state;
When I fall down to my knees.

This is not the perfect life,
I would never claim it was,
But it’s a thousand shades brighter now,
In the shifting of the fog.
My notebooks are all clean and new,
My eyes alight with love.
This is what true living means,
This is not what dying does.

Cracked heel,
Tiger Balm,
Dust of yesterday’s streets;
Sequins from all tomorrow’s parties
In the lining of unwashed clothes.

Cats sleep in the dirt
Beside ashtrays of white monoliths
Stood brave in a bed of stale ash.

Foreign tongue, the lullaby,
Familiar habits, the birth-ground
To finally be new again.

Spheres of ghost-light
Prevent secrets from slipping out
Into the night.
A hundred beautiful women
And still, I sit and stare.

The air is thick here.
Stone-bench vigils
Through evenings that do not end.

Only strays and electrical hums
Threaten to disrupt the peace.
Tears fall. My hands shake.

There is no reason to be sad.

I have been the crying drunk in the hotel lobby,
The mosquito bite in the thin white sheets.
I have been the monsoon rain in the tropical heat;
I have been everything you said I could never be.

On the streets of dust I can eat my fill,
No more clouded eyes, no more ash-filled windowsill.
No more patient wait for my timely death,
No more passing glance; no more loneliness.

I will find my place with this foreign tongue,
On the precipice I write my immigrant song.
This culture shock makes me feel alive,
It kick-starts my heart; I finally turned the tide.

I finally made my peace in this call for arms,
In this incessant storm, I could feel the calm.
Could feel it loosen my bones,
That age-old ache, that I kissed on the mouth,
That I tried to replace

With every chemical within my reach,
With every pill or lie
That passed through my teeth.
I have been the crying drunk,
I have been the victim, too long.
I sit still and breathe.
I write my immigrant song.

I don't know what he was to others—
   fireworks, lemonade, ants crawling on a picnic blanket—
   but I always knew him at his worst.
He was sleep cycles shaped like carnival pretzels,
   days that bled together,
weeks that clumped like a rat king
   under floorboards in the beach house.
He spoke in clouds
   swollen with diluvian rain,
daggers of lightning
   cracking the river in half,
the language of a muggy body in sticky room
   staring out a window
at absolutely nothing.
   The sort of stuff that makes me think
he didn't know his own strength,
   most of the time.

As always, when he died this year
   he died by degrees,
bedridden in the hospice of September.
   I listened to his death rattle
 of rustling yellow leaves
   and watched the last of the fireflies
crawl from between his parted lips.
   When he went cold for good
I built a pyre out of his firewood bones.
   The ashes fell into the soil
like seeds in waiting, and I watched
   the moon grow so large that it stretched
the nighttime like candy licorice
   and made it longer than before.
My duty done, I turned to go.
   The smoke rose up to embrace the sky,
and at the time, I could have sworn
  that from the corner of my eye
I saw it curl around
   and wave at me.

The astral bowl was full of green smoke,
the tin roof, the fairy-light canopy;
two friends suffered in greed.
The backwater shed,
a monument of beer cans
blow listless on the lawn.

One says,
"I have not given up on my dreams
I have grown tired of sleeping through them."

The other, an insomniac, glistens:
"Merrily, Merrily, merrily, merrily..."

The television was on mute.
A flag assembles from the garments
retrieved at the end of the war.
A red-eyed stare
as they lament
the dried rivers in the carpet.

One says,
"There are eyes on me all the time
so I drink myself blind after work."

The other, a pessimist, decrees:
"you drink to steel yourself for the cliff-face-
no idea where you are going."

The sky was granite
as they ****** outside.
One turns to the other and says:
"I try to live an honest life
but it always feels like a lie."

The other, still *******, replies:
"we keep our secrets close to our person.
Now please - tuck yours back inside."

there's a ringing in my ears that
sounds like the feed trucks roaring down 50
and  broken country music coming through
an ancient stereo, sounds like the way your
thick palms look when they pull a cap off a Coors
bottle, and that side eye you give, why do you keep looking at me like that?

Like what? As if my looks were incendiary glares and not photographs, I'm only taking you in, not taking you out. Like what? Hasn't anyone ever traced your lips or wondered if God built you out of brick? Laid silk over your harsh corners and sanded you down with a smile--why am I looking at you like that?

sounds like I put myself here and effectively took myself
out, sounds like you're one of kind and so different
and i've never felt this way
but I've heard all of those--

he's not waiting but i am, maybe for some kind of epiphany,
some kind of insurgent thought--an outpouring of light in the
rooms he thinks are lit, i wish I could light candles down his
tenebrous hallways, hang lanterns in the crook of his elbow,
make sure that the shadows only ever follow at a distance
but I can't assuage the feelings you haven't found, the fleeting
thoughts you ignore, I can't smelt the ore from your blood or
even pull a
splinter from
your palm.

He told me once he was in no hurry, no rush. But I've felt like i'm waiting on him, how strange, he'd probably say. Probably tell me
at least once more how much sense I don't make--but I tell myself that only a few people beat for me, run the tracks at the same speed--
that my explanations are enough for every other part of myself
and trying to explain that I am many, that I hang fire and break beds with prayer is like trying to describe colors;
warm, but not bright. Rich, hearty, elegant. -- Untitled. 1994. Oil on canvas.

Half of the time we are silent.




I see the tip of your tattoo--the head of an eagle
at the nape of your neck below the delicate loops of a
thin silver chain -
and the thing about skin is that is whispers and pleads
to be seen or stung or washed

to be photographed, of course
mountains and valley exist on more
than one visceral plain, the earth comes
on more than one planet, one grain, we know.

That scientific studies show water to seek
the lowest point,
the lilac crest, the thoraclumbor fascia
(are we water? are you water? am I water?)
a percentage of it is water and the rest is
heart, the rest is soul

go stand beneath the water
and take your shirt off, take
your shirt off, gentle so that
the muscle doesn't stir, so
that you feel every inch of
cloth that doesn't belong
so that you don't see me
behind the lens
so that I don't
ruin what
good can
come of
being
naked.

He's tapping on the hardwood floor
to draw me out of the cracks, the
slender peels of sun stretched down the
hallways, arcing across the patio,
the way hard working men
rap their fingers against the walls to find
studs, stick pocket knives in the frayed wood
beneath the house--

shakes me out of the sand, viciously vibrates
me into his palms, tears me from
deep considerations
where i've already grown
where my roots have struck out
in all directions, says not in this place
not in this soil
not in this way

and I go where he pleases, kicking or
weeping, sometimes with ankles smarting,
raw from the whipping

not this place
not this soil
not this way