Punk kids, instead of having choreography or jumping up and down with hands in the air,
Punk kids knock, bounce and rattle against each other like broken glass in a bag or pin ***** in the most complicated machine,
I hate loud noise but I love loud music as long as I have my headphones
Back and forth, headbanging until the noise from our heads comes out those ringing ears
Nervous tics to music
Stress made into a party
Rocking out, rocking ourselves forward and back
Just like I do when I'm overwhelmed
Catching or reaching a hand to anyone who knocks themself down
Loose limbs and heads slack
Hands and feet across the crowd are literally twitching,
It's a monster mash looking, skeleton disco.
Some kids look possessed but they're okay with that
No one's worst demons can get in because the venue's at full capacity,
The window-watchers chase any evil spirits into the snow,
Fear and worry leave for one set because they can't stand the racket,
The rest of the day got lost in all the cables and pedals,
I bounce against kids in chains and band t shirts,
Hardly need to use my eyes,
My shoes are covered in Doc Marten footprints and people shove me and I shove them right back and I don't need to say anything in the huge mess that is the mosh pit
The room is full of people moving like zombies on a sugar high whose brains are being eaten by the music,
For a while, we let that happen.
When the final set ends
My neck and feet are sore like the speakers and amps were a workout you can buy from Guitar Center,
Headbanging is my favorite kind of cardio,
And moshing is my favorite catharsis.
The silence is everywhere as the punks exit the Scene.
I hardly know any of these people by name.
But we just performed one strange, scene kid dance
For the night to watch
When I go to bed my legs spasm
I think because
they are still dancing

My breathless mind runs in circles
I bike laps around the roof of the parking garage as the sun goes down
It’s too loud for a quiet town
The clouds look back at me colored like a Renaissance painting
The concrete frame’s got pain and no window pane
I play gunshots or fireworks
And ride home to my white suburbia perks
Is this my first Renaissance?
I hope not the last
I’m overwhelmed by the ambiance
The ground pushes back and the concrete slips
And I’m too out of breath to reach the city’s loudest taunts
The steeples rebuild and the plywood sits
The streetlights blink and the tree trunk rips
The train comes north at an alarming sound
And I pray to any God that there's no body on the ground.

I can’t say that we go anywhere when we’re gone
That said, have you ever stood somewhere where everything washes up? Everything lost, everything left, everything broken
The ocean is not endless, no
Endless means forgotten
The ocean is everything
When something falls in, it rides the currents for as long as it takes to get somewhere.
Somewhere might be sinking, or in a fish’s gut, on the great Pacific garbage patch or on a little island
If you want to know how to get there I’ll ask you if you know the neighbors
Everything washes up there
Everything lost, everything left, everything lingering
Lobster pots
Shredded lines (the ocean holds all barriers)
Broken buoys (everything that floats, floats forever)
Seagull bones
Cans and bottles
Even rudders
There are stories of how tractor beach got its name:
There was once a whole tractor that washed up on its shores
Gears, wheels, engine, rusted metal (all things lost are not all things forgotten).
Pieces of it are long since buried in the rocks and mussel shells
But the ocean has parts of it somewhere
The ocean has parts of us, somewhere.
The ocean has parts of the seagulls and their wiry legs
Or the murky tidepools (even when we are left behind we are still ocean).
If planets were marbles the earth would be the only blue sphere in the whole pile
The ocean is the universe’s blue moon
One day a tractor came through one of its portals to an island
Heaven is a doubt, but perhaps heaven is Tractor Beach: a place where everything washes up. Where the egrets perch dreamlike above beach roses and sumacs. Where gulls kneel by broken eggs in nests of rocks. Where trash is treasure is the legend of a tractor in tide. A legend of escape, a place to float away, and a view like no other. What else could we need after life?

Hell is shaped for the hand of a wishful, foolish painter
Its caverns wait for us to paint over the mistakes again
And again
And again the walls become crude and rough under the layers of our harm.

I was on the brick and cobblestones one afternoon, among groups of wishful oppressors, their hands clenched in dried paint. They ask how to scrub it off. They’ve heard “Black Lives Matter” but they don’t know where, or when.
It’s here, and now, and everywhere, and always.

Hell is shaped like my young metatarsals, creaking and aching under some unrealized purpose.
Hell is shaped like a ladder that my ancestors soaked in lighter fluid
And waited for everyone else to scramble up.

Hell is shaped like venom tongues and weapons alchemied in colonialism’s genocide. It’s also shaped like disposable responsibility and eyes that stray from the fire and like greed in the flag with nails in the palm.

I was brought up in a stolen, and false, but beautiful and loving safety. I would give my sense of direction to let someone else’s baby have a memory of swimming the meters from one parent to the other in the shallows if the ocean– so small, so humbled, but so, so safe.

I was in a park when I had to write a lawyer’s defense fund number on my forearm. A cop car trailed our peaceful protest like an unwanted lantern. I am grateful, but maybe not well-deserved, to say that is the most scared I’ve ever been.

Hell is shaped like too-loose strings on an old guitar. No matter the harmonic chord, there will always be dissonance in the punishment of created evils.

I was not raised to believe in hell. I’ve been told by the outlying sign that it waits for me. I still think it is a metaphor. I wave my rainbow flag and breathe through my white skin. I am kneeling to be knighted by my moms and waiting to pull up those lying down. But I can’t reach for Dominique or Layla or Brayla or Tony or Muhlaysia or any of the names I’ve been burdened to forget because they are not here. I can’t reach for Michael, or Emmitt, or Breonna, or George, Ahmaud, Daunte, Eric, Sandra, Toyin, Trayvon, Elijah, or Moses.

Hell is shaped like a twisted funeral florist. It makes me want to scream, “God, let me have enough arms and energy to hold as many flowers as I can”, because I need to give them out while everyone is still here.

When we write stories about an apocalypse, it is usually because we are living through one.

No zombies this time

But someone had to light the first match

And someone has to raise earth

From its flattened ashes.

When the destroyers,

the children of dissatisfaction grieve this place,

will it feel sorry for us?

When the world starts over, who will hold its calloused tongue until its first word is something greater  

than  “more”  

and its first taste is something more limitless

than sky