After years of attempting this craft, I still didn’t get it.
I read it walking to class during undergrad. Back when
Roethke described how nothing would succumb to death,
not even dirt. But in time, I learned that it is a mere calling

of truth. A slight manipulation of memories. A close reading
of a scene where nothing really happens. A hillside of purple
orchards shaking in the wind, then resting its petals against
the earth. I learned that it is a foggy window seat in time

catching the first leaf of autumn connect to wet pavement
or catching two strangers, after a long day, undisturbed,
quietly ******* in the privacy of their home, smiling
at one another for reasons the world will never know.

Your mistakes
and imperfections

the lines around
your eyes - small

miracles, little
biographical proofs

of your timely
existence.

After the 24th revolution of the longhand
on the clock, the radio plays bossa nova jazz
all night and me, I sit awake in an empty
studio replaying the day in my head as I

row alone across the lake of my notebook
as some now-deceased artist sings about
a 17-year old girl living on Montenegro St.
as beads of moonlight drip from the blade

of the paddle back into the lake as my arms
push and pull and push and pause mid-row
to catch the rhythm and blues of solitude.

Dream works; Lion King
Simba talks to Mufasa.
That's when I pulled my pants up, and started fixing my posture.
Then looked up above.
I struggle with love.
Struggle with hate.
Hard to debate.
Leave and change when I fall But I still wanna participate.

22 in 10 days.
Turning 22, in 10 different ways
A different shade.
A midnight black, to a faded gray.
I opened this chapter.
Dressed for the rapture.
Run and tell master.
While they're telling Ima take it all to the pastor.
Or am I dreaming?
Wake up Wake up.
Time to break up, from the shake up.
Don't let em see you down,
Get dressed,
And put on make up.
I'm evolving.
Starving like Marvin.
Sky is still calling
My name ain't Jim Jones, but one day I'll be ballin'.

Will I give back?
No looking back.
Dashing that.
Getting older now; getting bigger, steady hungry trying to pick up the pieces.
Pledge of allegiance to the money now.
Now and forever.
Finesse, but I'm still not that clever.
One day I'll be; probably never.

And nowadays 22 is still declared young.
But that won't change me from growing, I won't settle for none.
Nowadays 22 can feel old or feel young.
With these 10 days left I know it's better to come.

You were fourteen in Dr. A.’s class
when on that day you proclaimed
to have learned nothing and on that
day Dr. A. held no doctorate degree.

You were fourteen in Dr. A.’s class
when bodies: sick, overweight, in-shape
fell from buildings and into to TV screens
into history books, only to be stuck forever

in a New York newsreel in their Tuesday
outfits with Monday night’s love and touch
brewing, aged and earthy, from their falling
lives. If you listen closely on the eve of this day

the wind still whispers their scent of perfume
trails, still whispers what really happened
that busy day in the clouds, in the sky.
I was ten and can’t recall where I was

or in whose company but like the waters
stretched between Europe, Africa, and the
America’s, I was (am) far removed, was (am)
still putting together the blue-black lineage

of my triangular history that drowned
in the salty waters stretched, flowing
between three continents. But fifteen
years later, we (you and I) have overcome

the billowing black clouds of Tuesdays
the Monday night upsets, and the routed
maritime of our ancestors. 15 years later
you are still alive with your blue eyes

and clear face, are still four years my senior
are still my guiding light and sight of sun.

Before you know it, the week is over.
Some bills paid. Meetings attended.

Congratulatory cake sliced into two
dozen squares for an engaged couple.
When suddenly, suddenly you discover

that a certain reticence has breached
the comfort and security of your partner.
Followed him to the coffee shop. Wedged

itself between his breakfast sandwich
and speech. Followed him to the city’s
public square where a large group of

suburban mothers dressed in loud colors
practiced yoga underneath spotty skies
in itchy grass. Where sunlight appeared

and disappeared from his brown skin
and wind upturned the corners of the pages
of a novel he read from as the reticence said

more to you than he had all morning
and the bees’ only agenda was to land
on the wavering yellow petals of sunflowers

and then take off into a day that would become
tomorrow's news and next year's history.

my name is my mother's strength

my name is an extension of my dad's best friend

my name is a sanskrit darling

my name is a literal gift from god

my name is the key dangling around my neck*

my name is a hair tie

my name is a broken input chord

my name is a ***** pack tied around an old man's beer belly

my name is my name

my name is my name

As the water birds lifted from the morning tide,
I found myself being lifted from an unconscious
state to the dictionary by four unfamiliar syllables

like the many poets before me, searching for
the meaning of nomenclature. Interestingly enough,
it could have been me on the other side of a poem

that I would come back to after sundown: an old,
scientific word who first appeared in 1610,
whose roots grew, naturally, like the hidden

interests of a loved one, from the Latin
nomenclatura (the assigning of names).

But instead, I ended up on this side of the poem,
sitting before an empty screen and a dictionary
in a Yankees ball cap and denim t-shirt, slowly

piecing together a poem about a 17th century novel
while trying to include the sudden interest of my
loved one: French parenting literature on healthy

eating, all while slowly tying the loose ends
of a poem without meaning together.

And even on my most
forgetful days
days when I can’t remember
what happened in an Austen novel
nor the last time I thought
of others before myself
you are still a poem
on those forgetful days
that I memorized several years ago
perched on the sill of my tongue
waiting
like birds
to take off into a
disinterred sky
waiting to be recited before a
disinterested crowd.

There were four of them dressed in loud yellow t-shirts
and muffled white-washed jeans. Three carried rubber
ended stick-picks and sand crusted sky-blue buckets  
for hypodermic needles and diapers and condoms.

The last of them, an older stocky gentleman with thick
red skin and no more than ten years left to live maneuvered
a grass-green, six-cylindered, diesel-powered tractor with
an old metallic rake attached to its bed across cold soft sand.

These four men are the edge-of-morning-heroes,
– they have to be the edge-of morning-heroes,
these four men, the beach combers.

My friends, have we appreciated the fruit of their labor?
the outcome of their edge-of-morning-efforts?

It was because of them that I was there, because of them
that the great lake was enjoyable, swimmable, because of them
that my heart had become a poem whose first stanza opened
with a young man staring off into the open, ocean-blue horizon,

water birds skipping, circling open-winged with webbed
feet behind him, his brown legs nestled firmly in the swash,
where to the left of him, a couple, neck-deep, was making love
between the familiar crest and trough of a wave, making love

between the familiar beginning and end of something
– going deeper, under still as a plane hummed overhead.

My friends, will the future appreciate the fruit of their labor?
the outcome of their edge-of-morning-efforts?