To **** a man
is to flog his hide
if the hide were his brain
and the scars were
meandering
creases littering.

I have heard
the songed bird cry
when the notes were
both hopeful, unafraid
awake
and twittered.

And in the tired
slow gasping release
of moon upon night
overwhelmed by stars
like satellite
transmitters.

Bottle the guilty, and
Bottle the shamed. Send them to
my God’s messenger.

Shatter their patriot sin up-
on the staunch hickory bark
behind his garden.

Loosen the newborn
ropes that man had set for them
and Bottle the men.

They will not be home in the morning.

If you were here now
like how the red should be in fall
I would wish to somehow
find the movement, insignificant small,
to reach a single finger
drawn in by the call of your gravity
to stroke your cheeks tender
to spurn my heart’s depravity
and yet somehow, not,
because you could only be
a thought that I am having today.

Start.  Tripp-ing your
sneak-ers on black-brown
alley corr-i-dors fast
you’re stum-bl-ing boy
and you gotta go fast
Go. Go. Go. breathe.
glance your hip o-ver
that dump-ster on the cor-ner
and keep go-ing.
bare-ly touch the grime
boy, bare-ly be fly-ing.
Shut down.  don’t ev-en
listen, be-cause if you
hear ‘em you are gone
you don’t ev-en gotta
see a thing go by. go boy.
but then you did-n’t see
that blank-****** cat
and you’re stum-bl-ing
flat on your fore-head
and cutt-ing across the buzz.
you hear that horn honk-ing.

I am the bed in the older boy’s room.  
I am the bed in which he stayed up reading
those comic books about the heroes in
red, white, and blue.
  
Where he laughed on the phone with
his friends about something they said at lunch.  
Where he cried that night when his father
yelled loud at his younger brother and
the older boy yelled back and he got hit.  

I wanted to hug that boy; he wanted to disappear
and I wanted him to sink deep into the mattress
and I would protect him.  I am the bed
where he brought the first girl, where they sat
when they kissed for the first time, the times after that.
When he sat up until everyone else was asleep here

then he got up and went out the window.  I
missed the boy terribly.  I wished I was the girl.  
I wished he would come back and curl up with me
and sleep and not worry about secrets because between us
there were none.  
But when he came back in the morning he was coming
down and he slept.  He slept a long time.  And really I

missed him I was afraid and I just wanted him to
wake up and call his friends or read a book
with the eyes he used to.  Read me the red, white, and blue.
But he lied there.  And once, he cried.  I was so scared,
but I planted myself against the cold floor, and
I supported him, little boy I love you.

I am the bed where the boy got up
again in the night and went out.  But he came back
before the night was over.  And he smoked
the drug that teenage boys do when they’re scared.
And when he was done he put the evidence underneath
me and he trusted me.  And he curled up small like
an infant, and I rocked him away.