I welcome your minute manipulations
how your simple glance causes me to rise
from my oak chair and ruminations
to fill your cup that has no more than a drop
of cold black coffee.

Grateful for your routine manipulations
of a mind muddied by past resentments,
the always blue dreams that defy explanation,
forcing my hand to stroke your lounging legs
on the way to the kitchen.

Blessed by these familiar manipulations
for it is not you that provokes a willing servitude
it is that space where our nearing breaths conspire
to spin motes of dust and sloughed off skin
displaced by a kiss and a hot cup of coffee.

Down by the mud banks of Skunk Creek,
checking out the meniscus up the water strider's legs,
waiting for the bullheads to spit stones into a Roman mosaic,
hoping the undulating green algae would flow auburn
like the hair of Venus blown by the wild gawking turkeys
in the tall grass. But that's another museum.
That's a different day in the gallery
below the bur oak bowers
where the cottonwood seed floats on a breath
as if examining the probability of falling too soon
upon the water.

The demonstration of love don't need no permit
ain't gonna be no counter-demonstration
no cops no barricades no rubber bullets twitching
in the chamber for that one yahoo that sets the whole
**** thing alight. Love in the streets is a whispering
riot with small hand-written signs in a style of smiles
and gestures not to provoke but to invoke a species
of politic bent on the destruction of judgement
stopping traffic with small recognitions that the other
is none other than oneself in a similar skin.
The demonstration of love don't need no big flags
honking horns or locking horns or riot gear
to wade baton-wielding dispersions cuz
it already spread down the side roads
and the thin avenues are thick with it.

There's a brown leather sofa on the curb marked "free"
There's an '87 Jimmy with a flat tire and rusty fenders
down on Dows marked "runs $200 or best offer"

There's a new stop sign at the bottom of Center
that nobody's shot up yet. Sure as **** county
gonna be lurking around behind the daycare around five

That wanna be a cowboy that runs the Jesse
installed some slots a few years back, now he's selling *****
where the DVD's used to be.

I don't know his name, never did anyway,
but I bought a couple ugly Bics from him today
because nobody steals ugly lighters.

Seems like things are looking up at Splitrock
a lot of boats in the driveways. I always wanted
a boat. But I got a lay-off instead in '09.

Got a hunk of plaster, though.
Just clinging to the lathe above the coffee machine.
Gonna crack my head wide open one day.

Gonna crack my head open when I pour
when I pour that first cup on a grit-eye morning
on a grit-eye morning still dreaming of boats.

The day you called me ****** lover
was the afternoon of my dissent
from the back alley boys club
and rolled dungaree territories
marked off down where the long
lines of chain link bend right
where the churchyard intervenes
between us and the snowball stand.

You might think you whipped me tight
but my decision to include a new friend
that dipped jars in the crick for tadpoles
behind the brick young family roads
was mine to make and that black eye
and ****** nose to this very day
this very night remains.

Don't be knocking on techno's door
for a shot of stale whiskey and fond golden
shots of what we were when we weren't
and will never be. Yea, you posted
that pic of the back alley boys
shirtless, hairless, rolled dungarees
all smiling like jack rabbits on the run,

But it was Michael, Michael that showed
me how a tadpole becomes a frog.
It was Michael that rode the Comet
at Hershey with me, alone, because
we couldn't or wouldn't run
with the back alley boys who still
don't know what they've done.

If by justice you mean vengeance, I,
your honor, am not to be counted.

In all this well-pressed protocol,
In this stark polished hall of justice,

There is nothing to judge, no verdict
or debate beyond a reasonable doubt

That the condemned is condemned by agreement.
Are we to haggle over the price?

You **** through we thirty coughing "peers",
this pool of citizens chosen by lot to consider one thing,

One sentence, which any reasonable soul
would hope never to be compelled to entertain,

And in so doing, twelve of us will become complicit,
will mark the furtherance of abhorrent justice

with simple "ayes", for "nays" are not permitted, no lock
allowed for the twelve that truly become his peers.

Joy and similar discontents
break wheaten on the all-weather
radial steel-reinforced sidewall hum,
on the defog rasping for a service call;

Break on the near treeless plain
stitched loose to the sky with rivets
of silos and grain bins - clouds
dive porpoise behind the rise.

Joy and similar discontents
hang like flowers on a bleach
wood cross surviving another winter
to tread sobbing on the green ditch water.

Every X and Y coordinate of the plains
etched by gravel side-ways and field
entries too rutted and ragged
to suit the conglomerate need

or the tilt houses and stripped clapboard
banging against the thistle, milkweed
and swallowed dreams in the foxgrass,
with turkey buzzards circling thermal overhead.

But the crows plunge faster into red
fresh carrion sloughs of whitetail and ****
to breach at the presence of a larger scavenging -
and each bent marker tells its own tale.

Count the bullet holes and shotgun splatter
in the stops and yields when the road was empty,
when the night was dry, when the callous boys
had time on their hands instead of hog blood

and badger-eyed girls that left after graduation
for the starless haze, crowded parades,
sidewalk shops, umbrellas on the rain side
of things keeping each at arm's length.

But it was never about the city,
never about the glitz and pizzazz
of everything running baffled into gridlock;
less about the thick dumb flannel boys.

It was always about that low fog,
the night eyes in the beams, the manure, chaff
and split seams of the midwest furrows,
the haybales that bob like rafts over the horizon.