A young man sits in a room too small,
Wearing shirts too tight and writing poems too weak,
The passage of time marked by the arrival of fire to yellow filters,
He writes because he believes in the vision of poets,
Those burning angels with arms outstretched,
And a young girl stooped at the knees,
Giving praise and *******
So she can pass
He looks out the window and recognizes
Indentured servants waiting to sail to the new world
Like him
He thinks about freedom and writes
And remembers that all the old ones
The ones who are free
Are dead
Graves marked with empty glass bottles
And he remembers the alchemy of words
That he knows is already wasted
Stillborn poetry
That he’ll pour on critics and admirers alike
Who will stand like gospel singers
Waiting to be washed under that waterfall
Of stagnant recycled waste
They pour on children and their parents from buckets
At theme parks
Already he mourns being talentless
Not being in a madhouse
In line for his lobotomy
Instead rocking with straight jacket arms
Through gauntlets of debt
Contemplating mazes
When he finally goes home he greets family
With empty pockets
But they praise him anyway
And he makes himself a madhouse
Which the gift of poetry itself
Visits on the weekends
Token gestures of acquaintance from long ago
And the young man spends his evenings
Watching distant lights
Blink on and off.

Sometimes I wonder
If I wrote the laws of the universe by mistake
In my dreams as a child.
I would rewrite them
So we could soak the clouds in the sweat on God’s hands.  

I am two toned somber
The bruise on an apple
A door is hanging closed upon its arms
Bent like bat wings.

Stars that have fallen to the earth.
Bulbs like hearts in bloom-
In a red bone cellar.
You will find me there,
Feeding those candles with
My marrow.

There will be time, he said,
To challenge the universe.
I am content, however,
To soak the world in the taste of you
And ring it out again upon my forehead
So that my lantern does not go out.

There is a purple vase of golden flowers on the kitchen table
Its waxy surface gleaning in the morning sun
Through the white and rustling blinds
Shuffling in the early breeze
There is a field of uncut grass that stretches
To the tree line
Purple and golden and green
And my mother is sleeping in the other room
While the coffee brews
I stopped loving when I was a child
And my lovers rejoice in my boredom
Like those flowers I rose to water
While my mother slept

A black man in Florida was forced to take a knife to his genitals
And eat them.
A rope was fashioned around his neck
Thrown over a high branch
And pulled so that it would lift him into the air
After moments of strangling
The man was let down
To resume his self mutilation
With knives that split his flesh
And cattle prods that burned his skin
When they were done they lynched him
And dragged him through the streets
Sold pictures and displayed his fingers and toes
To children
To mothers
To men
They laughed and told their friends
We should choke on the words our fathers have fed us
If they mean that we should be like them

I wish that I could have saved the goose eggs
My grandfather gave me

With His mighty ring
So that I could take greedy bites from them

You know what I can’t get out of my head?
The color of his teeth,
They were spotless, and
His hands were like white powder.

They will make good smoke
For me to soak my skin in

And there are bubbles of silver
Mud, like empty bottles
Stored in the cellar
Of a life measured out with golden ounces
We use to clean knives in.

There is a rusty pewter frame by my bed at home
That I turn to the floor every night
So that my grandfather will not see me being weak

There is no child
Born of blue hands
Around your own neck

We will ask the world for another chance
And we will wait a thousand years
With one collective breath
The earth will whisper

No

I have found candles floating towards the dam
On the lake where my mother drowned
It’s how I learned where to swim.

Those lakes are the earth’s
Wells, a place for the walking breaths

To dip their faces in

And see the gears in the machine
Warming the fires of the sky.

Can’t I slip between the bars,
And shovel coal for those giants
Within the engine of the world?
I would like to pay my debt now

Before the flesh begins to hang
Useless from the hangers
In my maple womb

I might even sing your sorrows for you.

Why are my fingertips made
Of burnt paper
The kind moth wings are made of
That dance like ballerinas
On the air
When we boys were
Sucker punching
God during communion
The flake rising like snow
Out of the basin
Could’ve been holy water
But it just kept us warm
That night

I would hang your flowered
Heart on razor wire
Outside my window
If I could
Familiar red
Spraying in with the rain
The creases of your hands
Are the fall

Of my father’s hammer when he
Nailed my palms
Together

I want to kiss the wicked ones
Knowing that when I move to leave
The ground will be scolded
By my footsteps

You will remember me
By all my molding failures
When I ball them up
And throw them through God’s window.

We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives
And some of us sway back and forth in the wind
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

We search with doubting eyes for the perfect wives
Exes with whom you never thought your love would end
We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives

Our exit strategy involves smoke grenades and swan dives
The clapping of our black shoed feet a drum to mend
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

We Stuff our chests with filling paper derives
Our hollowed bodies suffer no strength to send
We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives

Scaring crows that steal the fabric of our lies
Clawed hands and teeth and fingers we cannot bend
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

Don your pumpkin head and haunt the field of your lives
Until you have no more joy or fear or sorrow left to lend
We are all nailed to posts in the fields of our lives
Like the chimes grandmother made from old knives

Toy soldiers drip from my brother’s fingers while he sleeps,
We carry memories under our fingernails like courtiers to the dead,
But we’ll all wear that plumage on our shoulders like lions

One day.

But we fold the edges of our tombs together and set them in the earth
Like fences, to keep the wolves out,
Or a blanket to sleep under.

We all wear our father’s bones around our neck,
The way my brother does,
While the earth is orchestrated above us,
Cemetery like a stage,
Biding time to whisper,
Are we alive or just lying?

Do we wander or  
Do we race along like wind up cars,
The way my brother does,
On the road to awe.

The old man is made of the hearts of dead spiders from the woodshed
I am my father’s matador
A small spark against a great fire
Showed me you can build a house from broken glass
Better swallow ashes to stay warm
Spiders crawl up my arms and throat
From the firewood in my hands
We rub mud on our faces to see each other better
I write FATHER on his forehead with my finger
He writes SUNRISE between my eyes
I cling to memories from beneath my fingernails
Like closet frozen marionettes
Gun shots crawl out of his jaws at night
And grow like fruit at the end of his fingers
I pick them and leave them on the breakfast table
He keeps fish hooks between my toes so
He can pull me up by the line
But I’m still watching the sunrise from his shoulders
I know he’s made of rain
When he pours me a bath from his bones
A child might play in.

I am five years old
And my mother is dead
Or she might be, I’m not too sure
I am sure I’m in the closet
The one near my parents’ room
Filled with my father’s jackets and spare towels
Bubbling mold, silver dollars falling from my father’s pockets
Rain on one of my mother’s china dolls
Coat of dust, ash, an undertow
Her hands are like white powder
Looking glass, tornadoes of simple blue
Cat’s eyes I’ve won from my dead mother
She was a girl once
With flowers on her dress
Now she haunts this closet
And the things I’ve lost with no regard
They litter this empty room
I’m holding her next to me in the dark
Together in the belly of the whale
She tugs on one of the woolen sleeves
Of my father’s jacket
With her lacey white hands
She wipes the blood from my face
And the breath of escape my mother gave
As I held her for the last time

Take a right at the light that hangs low
On the street with the run down churches
Like a row of coffin womb-breakers
Then you drive on the road that leads through
The empty town in the cold of the north
Where the snow falls like bubbles from the dead
Then dig holes at the end of the road
When you find dried white bones near the house
That is still and is white you will know
You have found where I lived when I died.

This city is haunted
And the dead roll snowmen by streetlight
Holding their translucent hands over the bulbs
When they hear the living cars chug through

Here, music plays to itself
Jackaling the wind
Holding wolves by the ears
The dead give their sculptures
Strawberries for *******

The living laugh and point
To the shoe tree
The dead have made with old sneakers
Their children climb and live in
At night

Under this tree
Joining them in the frozen mud
Turn to ice
We travel on the wind more easily that way
Splitting our bones
Like vultures
This city sleeps
In flames

I hang my failures
Like ***** sneakers from
An old oak tree
In someone else's yard

I sneak in around two in the morning
Just when the shouting stops
And the man leaves the second story room
With the pink walls

Sometimes when I am sneaking away
I can hear her crying
And I hang another failure on the tree
For safekeeping