Look at us, I'm carrying a basket made of trash
and you're carrying a mouse, well
the dog chewed up your glasses
but you're still rockin it
you have a single drop of coffee on your nose,
we're ready to go to D.C.

I had another where-are-we moment, it was fun.
Good, that's downtown Baltimore right there,
****** capital of the world.  

An elaborate mural graffiti.
Wall after brick wall.
A rustbelt city like Grand Rapids
Detroit Cincinnati.

Did you sleep well?
Yes I woke up feeling like a clam in a cocoon.
A sea creature inside of a forest insect, okay.

I've wasted too much time on both desire and regret.
Yellow bridge.
Blue-green supports.
Singer on the radio saying, we're young right now.

There's a healthy and an unhealthy way of dealing with pain,
I'm sorry for my selfish behavior in the islands.
I want to go back and leave a better legacy.
'Word.'

Last night to come see you I drove I-95 N, the overpass
and though the rest of the city was really moving
I was all alone up there, it was like
driving in the sky.

We pass signs saying: Icy Conditions:
bridges and ramps freeze first.
And a billboard: Learning Kick Flips
Takes Work, So Does College

We listen to our favorite island song:
love the islands, love the islands, oh.

You look like a rasta snowboarder girl
There's something really right
about having you in this car

An old man is sprawled
across my steps, in the night,
shouting for cigarettes,
crying out—as he does—
Lord, have mercy on a poor man’s soul.

**** or be killed.
That’s how it was
in North Vietnam.
He’d said that and pulled out London dry gin
to wash away only God knows what thought that got in--
I do not understand him
but I understand him
better than I used to.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst to do right.
Have you ever collapsed the bridge under which you slept?
Leapt from your bed when the earthquake hit
or lay awake in it when the kids came to school
with black eyes and suicide eyes?

Blessed are the poor in spirit
but the kingdom hasn’t come yet
and the children are too beautiful for their own good
and I am not good enough.

I am on Your steps, crying
Lord have mercy
on Your poor kingdom

in a Me society
you stand on my broken back
to climb

in a We society
you share roof & blanket
we look at stars, both warm

in a We society
you share knowledge,
story, guitar

for the good
of everyone because
it's not about Me

in a Me society
you are showing off
if you do that

unless you are making money
(can someone explain this
to me?)

everyone though is always free
to be a Me
or a We

and life America
despite what you say
is not a competition

come be
a We
with me

to me it seems that the truly rich
are the contemplative,
the homed
are the ones
who can find a home
or create one
for someone else
the orphaned
are the ones who have forgotten
to look into the soul of the world
and one another's eyes

the blessed are the ones
who find themselves cradled
in the arms of the stars
feeling themselves more beloved
than anyone on earth
knowing the Creator
wishes everyone
to feel like that

knowing
love is waiting:
like a favorite woven hammock
in the jungle between the betel-nut and the soursop tree

like the tiny waves that seek the shore
to say hello over and over
to kiss the cheeks
of the hermit *****

like the seahorse clouds
brilliant orange and red
mirroring the ocean until
the whole world is a sunset,
i am in the sunset, i am the sunset

and the sun never really sets after all
it's bringing light to india
kenya hawai'i
it will
be back

At his little hippie college
he shows me a *** that looks like a wall
in a Rwandan museum, all skulls, he

learned clay in the Rift Valley
boarding school, on a kick wheel,
still his favorite

My brother is a potter
multicolor plaid shorts
little goatee

Banjo
Japan dreams
girl from Mozambique.

When we were little in Loiyangalani
we made tiny huts out of obsidian
while our Rhodesian Ridgebacks

sniffed the ground for cobras
sand vipers
scorpions

while twenty camels
walked by in a row
followed by tiny replicas

My brother is a potter, says to me
'When I am doing this I am
doing what I was created to do'

He makes a green and blue
candleholder for me which he calls
'The Islands,' light escapes through many holes

which look like sea turtles
pockets of air and
an atomic bomb just gone off

we turn off the lights
in my room in the hood,
snorkel in candlelight

My brother gives me
Rumi, incense, peace flags
We walk the silent night

smoke a clove
look at stars
like we used to do in the African riverbeds

waiting for Jina;
can't write poems
till he comes back

I'm standing on weird edges
There's blood in the sky
There's a boy named Pi.

The night is black, so
old blood.  So cruelty,
I've had enough.

I was born with barbed-wire sickness.

Is your blood running high?
Blood is life,
don't spill it.

Watch the mind of day
become the mind of night.
Better is the house of mourning,

better the sky at night,
I can hear God better.
Blood runs from our eyes.

Are you facing the sky,
boy named
Pi?

I'm not saying
I'm in love
w/you
except
I am.

If the time ever comes
when human touch
is taken from you

(because you are
sick or in solitary
or castaway or...)

you will understand
how much
you need it:

your skin will ache
as a riverbed
cracks

for
want
of rain;

you will never take it
for granted
again

4:17 AM
Robbie's studying Japanese
and cooking bacon

Just a cousin and the stars
and talk of you, and 27 jail-years;
'Forgive or stay behind bars.'

But Nelly Mandelly,
I've got sand in my eyes
and lead in my belly.

Oh Nelly Mandelly
we do things with the best intent
yet hurt each other terribly.

I've got blood on my lips
and grenades in my belly.
Oh Nelly Mandelly:

as Johnny sang, who can blame
the voice of youth for asking:
what is truth?

Everyone I know wants
to be more free,
including me.

We've got songs on our lips
and the sky in our bellies.
Oh, Nelly Mandelly

Pax.
Pax.
Be with you.

Peace train.
Peace Corps.
Power to the peaceful.

Peace or violence?
The peace of the grave?
Shalom, amani, pagas:

Peace.
To the far off.
In the streets.
Peace child.

Peace.
Strums a guitar.
The sound of the stars.
Your face in my heart.

Blessed are those who make: peace
on earth,
between brothers,
with God.

Peace
of path.
Of mind.
Of sleep.

Peace
I leave with you.
Peace, foreigner

Faith is a troubled word in muddy
clothes, walking with the unthinking,
the enraged, the **** tube prophets

Still: I believe a few things, like
that You exist
that You reward the seeker

that the greatest anything is love,
You always did say that:
'Love each other, love Me'

Faith reveals the invisible
hope which lifts sunken eyes to
Love

which is the only redemption
in the burning streets
of a condemned world.

Choosing a love ethic means knowing
you are connected
to every other life

and even to eternity
which Tagore describes
as the place where nothing can vanish:

no hope
no happiness
no vision of a face seen through tears

we tend to cry
for those who
die young;



why?

A baby sea turtle in my hands:
the outer islanders call him Wol,
he will be a nomad, if anyone will.
What will the world look like to him?
Will he dream of killer whales,
those Swiss Cake Rolls of the sea?
Of winning the three hearts
of an octopus?
See what the turtle sees,
and rejoice.

The sea turtle, like the human, cries saltwater
and the tears cover two-thirds of the earth.
He risks pirate ship, cigarette boat, Chinese net.
He mistakes bait for food. (Who doesn’t?)
But he can swim away from; swim towards:
India, Mombasa, New Zealand, Ulithi.
The world's a turtle’s home,
why is anyone a nomad if not for this?
See what the turtle sees
and rejoice, carrying only
the markings on your shell.

A jungle.
A shack.
Half a moon.
Islands sprinkled like tiny green beads
across the Water of the Sky.
A first tattoo—seven little turtles--
and it hurts in a good way
like the world does.
Dear Creator
keep me from evil
keep my life
keep my going out and my coming in

When I was a child I once sat writing
where Hemingway once wrote, at a table made of a canoe,
overlooking Turtle Bay, that little dip of Indian Ocean,
where my mother body-surfed the waves with us,
where my father spent some nervous scuba minutes
on the ocean floor, beneath a whale.
A lot has happened since then;
sometimes life is hard and sometimes
we don't know how to talk to each other.

What is a father? A Mother?  Child?
The answer is so different for so many.
Who are you?  I dream
I'm saying goodbye to you,
I don't know which of us is leaving
or where we're going but
I cry asleep and wake up crying;
and I remember there's been a few times
when there were tears in your eyes too.

And what is a Creator?  That infinite spiritual being
who fathers us, mothers us?  Acts 17 says
we are His offspring:
the children are hurting,
the children are crying,
the children are killing,
the children are dying and their dreams are dying.
But love still covers a multitude of sins.

Oh fathers of the world oh mothers
we do not say it often enough: thank you,
for what you could give, thank you,
for what you did give; and know
that I understand, finally,
that you were hurting too.

To the Creator, also, I say thank you
for fathering, mothering, even me.
We are Your offspring.
Deep down we're all dreaming the same kind of dream,
I haven't met a human yet who doesn't hurt about something;
we're all in this together if we let ourselves be

And love still covers a multitude of sins

On a Greyhound bus from NYC to New Haven
I sit down next to a skinny man named Fatz
who looks at me askance.  He says:
Long as you ain't crazy.
Long as you ain't gonna
stab me up in here.
Fatz? I say.
We agree.

Oh Jesus time by the pink and purple sunset
Thinking of a traveling guitar boy,
of chai sleep broken by dying beggars
all trying to tell me something.
If the ocean lights don't call us home
we could backpack to the crocodile places
eat thirteen camels with the people
smoke tea and rainy day cigarettes.
Heartache sits like snow on the roof
of the hollow hut Connecticut.
The kids tried too many times for nothing.
Mom dream better for me
Wear your peace face
I'm trying to change

You're talking France nostalgia while upstairs
the weaver makes seven-dollar laments
for international slum chickens.
We can't do better than the break-bone average
reading scorched Chalbi newspapers
hacking coughs and statii soup for company.
Bukowski's in Mumbai eating cheddar
My siblings are in cages down in Egypt
The Spanish Communist cowboys
spill Turkana survivors on the floor of the Greyhound bus

Is there a hood idealist, ghetto healer?
My Sacramento roommate's drinking skeleton coffee
in the bathtub, she's got the Arab fever, so have I,
and not much else but these crazy plague jackets
this hungry smoking December
and Rumi's kids in cold-bread streets with protest signs.
We're easier taught the panic than the magic or the save,
There's too much strange and midnight waste.
You didn't know I needed you but you came through.
You're shimmering in clothes of saxaphone

A lot of people come here just to survive
I'm **** lucky but I'm not better than anyone
It's such a beautiful world

It's such a fallen world
I have this dream that I want to build a home
for a lot of people and myself too

I try to be happy and strong
but I cover up so much fear
that I don't know who I am

so I'm really dangerous.
France, Korea, Panama, Kenya, Greece
it may sound nice and international

but it's hard to feel accepted
when things change so much
I think family is really important

especially siblings.

Life is not a lie
Life is not a fantasy
Life is enough to pain you

Life is so close to death
Guard your entry points
You influence them, they influence you

You could bring voice to a community
Whether you fail or not, you try
The way you think needs to be heard.

We make a fuss about the dying
but what can we do for the dying?
Be a neighbor

Be a friend

We can be easily broken.
I have enough skeletons in my closet.
In spite of the inequalities

all of us are spiritual beings
and the one thing that is equal
is the value of everyone's soul

Jesus is very straight:
You want to come with me? 
Come

You in Georgia?  
Kentucky?
Oh **** man,
that's my vagabond girl right there.

Come here.
This place is full of you
your face is in it
and it's full of books.

I know what you're sensitive to
and I'm kind of an idealist.
We'll do it up.
Or down.

We can get scrappy!
That's our middle names.

We called it the summer of love
no drugs though
no ***
just love

and Oahu
and our kids
from New Jersey
and India and Egypt

arguments about pineapples
the chicken in the fire escape
ocean chemistry and don't let me fall
and that last dance when we were all crying

because
the magic
of childhood
had been recovered

If I were from Africa or Brazil
or one of those places,
where I slept on a mat in a little room,
America would be weird to me.
Because of like food commercials.
McDonald's.  Or Tempur Pedics!
Where it's all about comfort
and they're worried about the arc
in their bed, and I mean,
I'm sleeping on a mat.

I think about myself too much
and I don't think about other people
as much as I would want to.
I want to think about how others are feeling
when I talk to them, you know?
I've tried to drop all stereotypes
because really everyone
has an individual category.
And I think everyone has at least
a small amount of mercy.
Even if they don't show or choose it.

And I love Mom.  
So much

Why
do we call the blues
blue?  I'm playing on
your blues guitar,
wondering how you are.
Blues, blues.

My mind walks the streets
of saxaphone,
experience,
cigarette smoke--
like Radiohead says,
I don't care if it hurts,
I want a perfect soul.

Blues, blues.
The Yapese call blue
'ran mak'ef'
the water of the reef,
the blue within the blue,
beyond the blue--more blues

than these eyes have ever seen,
than this mind has ever known.
We only call the blues blue
because there is often something
so beautiful
in sadness.

all of us
want to think
'my place is best'

to have a place
that is yours
though, is enough

i can't believe
you thought i
wouldn't come back

Saint Jude says what's up
been in Boston all night
having coffee and tea, I bet
you're doing the same
in Tibet or wherever

They tried everything
on you: the secret arrests
burned Rumi books
poisoned coconut water
giraffes with broken faces

Loneliness is the door to the traps
but you know
who you are
I know too when I see you
on the coast

as still, as skinny as
one of my African statues
as lithe as a palm frond or a jellyfish
You were always going to get free
you were always going to get free

half of grace
is letting
your
self
accept it

Last night I ate broccoli and cheddar soup
from Panera
--in a breadbowl

which I gave to my mouse, Chai;
now I am at the typewriter,
we are listening to Ziggy.

And with Chai sitting inside of it
the breadbowl looks like
a little mud hut in Mali

The Croc has been hacked by her little croc brother...

Don't worry, I have nothing to say.
I'm throwing up blood anyway.

I'm hungry, lost, broke.  Whatever, happy.

I don't have time to care that you look down.
I don't have time for my excuses.
It's okay that neither of us understands.

I am so loved and so lonely,
so lonely and so loved. Both.

I'm not running anymore.  Not dying of thirst anymore.

I write to be known. I am known: me, by Jesus, we've been traveling.
Call me crazy,
okay.

Don't worry, I have nothing to say. I'm listening.

Do you miss me like I miss you?  
Do I miss you like you miss me?

I’m standing on the edge of a broken porch in New Jersey,
pink 3 AM clouds around a bowl of stars.
This jacket’s been warm for nine years.

Yes,
I still despair sometimes.
But I am learning to claw out of it by writing it.

Also, Jesus.

Tonight on this porch I’m thinking
what are symbols of happiness, what is
happiness, experience of it, etc.

I think of:
driving an overpass into the city tonight
all that color like spilled Christmas lights
like driving up into the sky.

--Think of:
7th grade boy with an earring and soft eyes.  
Angelo.  His name is.
Translating the story into Spanish for his friend.

--Of:
The blue, the green.  Of the reef.
Pacific silence.  Coconut cathedral.

Of: The Avett Brothers song, The Perfect Space.
Of friends who are like that.

: Africa, all seasons.


Also,
Jesus

My mind is a little street beggar boy
covered in scars and sores,
freezing by a bus stop,
no blanket nor expecting any.

                 …Tell me:
if you could remove
pain or fear
from your life
which would you choose?

Mind is a little beggar boy.
In a street market.
In a riot.
Not pretending
that a life of despair
is good enough for him
when it isn't,

more free,
more free,
so far surviving
slum and street,
decorated
with scars,
just as he is

meant to be

we gotta watch
this movie.

you are the main character.

except that
you don't have

scissors
for hands

that's the only difference

Crowds of weary people
shuffle from life to life

in the bellies of subways
claws of escalators

past booths of seven-dollar coffees
taking off shoes and jackets

as a voice in the roof says that
the flight to Mumbai,

or wherever, is now boarding.
All of it disappears

because--after these many years--
your face

(I shrug off
my backpack)

your voice
in my ears

The road has taught me
so much about universal
fragility.

With enough time and chances
almost anyone
can end up almost anywhere;

guard yourself
but be kind
to the unguarded.

It's been ten million miles.
Few, and blessed,
the undefiled.

Christ mourns
with me as we
walk down rainy street

towards caged and crying child

Is it the American
dream or nightmare
I so seldom know

the average American
whatever that means
encounters

thirteen thousand
advertisements
every day:

all saying
outward things
meet inward needs

but a lie repeated
thirteen thousand times
is still a lie

Man fire
street guitar
world dance

******
pain
heartache
shame

safety love
comfort love
everybody love

heartache
rage
panic
strange

man fire
street guitar
world dance

safety love
comfort love
everybody love

I don't want to keep
any of this beauty to myself
nor can I

As soon as I said that
God laughed upstairs.

You inspired me at least.

There's two huge mistakes:
when you shoot and you shouldn't,
and when you should and you don't.

Nobody knew
about the killing
but all of them knew how to get out.

Don't fix a mistake with a mistake.
             Don't be pride.
                              Don't disappear.
I know you have a tendency to do that.

We know who we are
but we try to convince each other
that we are something else.

And I don't want to do that anymore

The last time
I saw my landlady in the hood

She said, 'I hear you been spending
a lot of time in the woods'

It's true, I said

'I thought so
That's you
you'll sleep in the woods
before you'll sleep in a hotel
have your tea and you'll be happy'

It's true, I thought
happy
in hoods and woods

'Baybo,' say I,
'do you think
my car is okay?'
'Well what you
gone do with it?' says he.
'Bring it into
the house?'

my name is
written
on the hand of
my God

When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death
I carry my homeland as if it were in my arms.
Remembering:
chairs made of wooden crates,
footballs made of newspapers,
cigarettes made of camel dung.
Someone once said: a best friend will help you move
and a best friend will help you move bodies
but if you have to move your best friend’s body,
you’re on your own.

When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I think about how you and I
belonged where nothing belonged:
shimmering with heat waves Africa,
rainy season pounding the mabati roof Africa,
weaver birds weighing down acacia trees with their nests,
Africa.  Where do we lay the blame and the bodies?
It could have been me holding the machete,
could have been me holding the machine gun.
Why is that?

When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I see acts of courage and sacrifice that take my breath away.
A boy, shielding his sister's body with his own.
A girl, leading a blind woman to safety.
And you, holding an old man in your arms,
his life dripping down your clothes.
What I wished for you was a place where you would not fear
the terror by night, nor the arrow by day,
nor the plague that walks in the darkness,
nor the destruction that lays waste at noonday.
I wished for you the deep red sunsets over the vast hollow of the Chalbi desert,
the brother that reads to you in your break-bone fevers,
the camel that carries you and doesn't get tired.

When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I wonder why I lived
and you didn’t.
And for your sake, and mine, and the world’s, and God’s,
I want to leave behind the failed resolve and the excuses
that keep me from leaving the world better than I found it.
When I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will learn
to fear no evil.

I am hungry.
I think homeless.
I wish naked.
I am flesh.

I am calling.
I think answering.
I wish cries.
Here I am.

I am pouring.
I think satisfied.
I wish darkness.
I am noonday.

I am scorched places.
I think strong bones.
I wish spring of water.
I am child of what does not fail.

Greyhound station the midnight customs man
goes through my backpack looking
for a glock or **** I guess; instead
he pulls out Thich Nhat Hanh's
Teachings On Love.

You teaching love?
says he; I say

learning it

I am glad
we are
doing this
instead of
Facebook

Bald headed mountains with thin tree hair.
We're okay, though
we didn't think we would be.
I got a message today
from an ex-coal miner
with anti social paranoid depression:
keep them coming,
he said, of the poems;
and I too felt less alone.
The snow darkens sky,
lightens ground.
I don't know about you but I think
I've been making too many excuses.
Sometimes I sleep in the coal mine
because I want to, that's all.
Three brown birds say,
"See me!"  "See me!"
Snow falls on my head and I'm thinking:
I don't want any more birds to die for me

I am sitting by a fire with a cup of chai,
in Africa somewhere, thinking
of twenty dead children.
The Turkana women keen in the dark.
‘Woitokoi,’ they say, ‘Woitokoi,’
a call of lament.
Oh, mom.
It’s your babies
It’s your babies

I rarely turn on the radio, but do tonight.
14th of December.  Cooking coconut curry.
I watch the last red and gold fall behind skeleton trees
and step out into the cold with my guitar and Willie Nelson’s
‘Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be Cowboys.’
Is anyone watching the sparrows falling?

You mothers who have lost a child,
you fathers who have lost a child,
have gone where none can follow
but One who loves you, loves me,
even school shooters, maybe;
One who hates evil
for what it destroys,
One who
(for this love
and hatred)
listens to His son say:
Father
Father
Why have you forsaken me.
One who says to you now:
though father and mother forsake you
yet I will not forsake you--


I am sitting by a fire in Shelton, Connecticut,
thinking of twenty dead babies.
Oh mom.  Mom.
It’s your babies.
It’s your babies.
It’s your babies

I'm not making
an argument
for the Communist

I'm not trying
to Robin Hood anything
from you

I'm just saying
sharing is so much happier
than nonsharing

Please
take what you want
off my plate

Lust is toxic
sad and
hollow.

Love says
somebody else
throw the first stone.

I wonder what You're writing in the dust.

'Acting like everything
is okay
when it isn't
creates a certain craziness,'
says Beetle, crouching
on the wooden  slat porch
to pick up half a cigarette.
'Because you are all
survivors,'
she goes on, 'so you
push people away
so they don't find out.'
Find out what,
I ask myself.
Find out me,
is I think the answer.
Because the question
behind the question
as always
is
could you  
love me?

Oh Lord--you know me--
I'd be totally happy with a thatch hut
by a heavenly ocean;
a few birds maybe,
a typewriter,
and cigarettes that are good for you:
you know me so really
I'd be happy
with anything