A selection of published work from 2001-2007. Thanks to the edirots of the following journals, where these pieces first appeared:
Pig Iron Malt Sundress Publications Off Course Moria Identity Theory Strange Horizons Thick with Conviction Turbula Eclectic Underground Voices
This collection Š2016 Wall of Noise Press
thinking of two friends dead of cancer this thing that eats you like cancer but slower three years of unreturned phone calls growing into five of unopened letters until you finally have shed your past can wake up to a grey sky reflected in deep water and know there is no one left to hate but yourself and even this is a gradual decay the fingers have to begin to bleed and the words that fall from them should all sound hollow should all become tiny graves filled with dust you have the rest of your life to bury all of your failures beneath bitter lies
rumors of war you wake up twelve years later in a nameless town and everything you know has turned to dust the child has a stranger's face the mother an addiction she crawls to the hand that beats her and there is the potential here for love or at least for something that passes for love and you cannot call these people home cannot call your scar tissue beautiful when every mirror reflects the past do you remember the day your father died?
you were twenty-seven and hungover with the blood of a lover's abortion still staining your hands you cried for yourself made pointless promises to an empty room and refused to answer the phone there were rumors of war but they came to nothing the killing remained personal as you aged a year and then another found yourself married and mortgaged and you were afraid of the baby were afraid of failing it fell asleep at night knowing the air around you couldn't last forever
in these holy days but what god do i pray to in these holy days of january? my voice is rust my hands bitter claws and why do the children scream? not all of us have known starvation not all of us speak of crucifixion in hushed tones the days are what worry us instead money owed and lovers lost and how each cigarette can be reduced to a scar on a young girl's body how yellowgrey light falls from any afternoon sky to press against the spines of the hills and i have spent five years now trying to explain wilderness trying to map the spaces between us but they are always shifting blackened bones in fields of dirty snow suddenly gone only to be replaced by houses that are never warm enough and i am sometimes finding you down these luminous hallways a stranger i've known all my life and you are looking for what you've lost are crying while the baby sleeps a sound like any ocean the drowning call home and what i finally know is that i'll never save us both
the faint illumination of your heart the sky at this late date huge and raw above these snow-covered roofs and what is space but some simple thing between us? i know your name your skin your lips and would gladly place any part of you on the tip of my tongue even as our secrets all dissolve into smoke and ash i would trace my way through dark rooms just to watch the faint illumination of your heart and you call this love and the taste it leaves is thick bitter but addictive and the doors refuse to close completely
the phone rings at awkward moments or the baby falls and draws blood and if i take this one last step towards you what am i forcing aside? does it have or even need a name? and when we touch i finally understand the futility of language
myself a father what my father never lived to see was myself a father what the moon fails to illuminate is the drowning boy's face you will find his name written in chalk on the walls of these abandoned factories and you will caress it like your lover's breast will repeat it like a litany of broken glass and will understand that no one is saved that no one is safe not even my son and for this reason alone i place my foot on the throat of god and press
in the room of empty chairs tuesday morning in the room of empty chairs and does it matter what color the walls are? can you speak a magic phrase and go back to a time in your life when you thought you were happy? i'll tell you this much there are days when i wake up and understand that all of the poems i've ever written are meaningless that my marriage is sinking beneath its own grim weight and what can i do in this land of burning crosses when the only way to fight violence is with violence? how do i tell my son that all i have to give him are empty ideals? and i cannot say for sure that nothing is worth dying for i cannot remember the reason these chairs all face the open window it was a mistake thinking the sky might ever care enough to offer forgiveness
there is a girl there is a girl who has had her hand caught in the machinery who has had her arm pulled into the blades then torn off and she will live for two more weeks and then she will die and there is a house down the street from mine where the children write JESUS RULES on the sidewalk in pastel chalk and then the next day it rains and summer is over my fingers crack and bleed my need for language fades away and the silence in this place becomes a tangible thing my wife and son sleep in the next room my childhood keeps an uneasy distance what i remember is my father drunk not on any particular occasion but always and at some point we became strangers and then enemies no reasons were asked for and none given and i can't seem to stop whipping myself for these things i can't change the sky has no color and nothing i hold casts a shadow nothing i love is permanent and what the hell can i do with these facts but drown?
words scratched quickly into the skin do you remember cobain? some unwilling spokesman for a generation of feral dogs and all it got him was dead and gorky and rothko and hemingway and all i'm asking for today is rain all i want is for the crows to blot out the sun these are words scratched quickly into the skin even as the baby begins to move in the next room these are small prayers from a man who will always turn his back on god who among you has the need to hear them?
waiting for rain late afternoon
a small breeze like maybe the storm will be here soon the streets empty the children disappeared or worse a toy forgotten on a burnt lawn and it is against all of these things that i try to hold you and you ask what time it is but we have chosen a room without clocks in a house without mirrors understand exile isn't freedom your ghosts will exist no matter how much you try to starve them gorky knew this and dali and a man i spoke to only four hours before he went home and ended his life
there are always husbands and wives and sleeping babies there is hopefully the taste of fresh air through an open window do you see where the difference lies between love and rape? not everyone can
the human cathedral in darkness cold yes and afraid of jesus christ afraid of the patron saint of starving dogs in this season of crucifixions and that my past will rise up to swallow me whole and poems are only walls that offer no safety silence is not a weapon and what the fuck do i do with all of this worthless anger that still clings to me fourteen years later? i stand in the kitchen in the cold fluorescent glow of five a.m. with the knives and the bread box and the mindless efficient hum of the refrigerator and i can't remember how i came to be here i don't know how to stop hurting the people i love or maybe i just don't want to there is a man from michigan who writes to tell me that i've lost my edge and to him i will give the tiny body of an ex-girlfriend's dead baby i will peel the labels from my wife's bottles of prozac and place them over my eyes and none of the starving will care and what exactly is my responsibility to all of the battered women in the western world? how many lives am i expected to save and who on the other side of this thin sheet of paper has the balls to give me an answer? what matters is that the mortgage is due is that my son has an ear infection and that his lunch needs to be packed
and wars don't alter this or the suicide bombings of religious zealots the final number will be five thousand murdered in the name of fear and most of the bodies will never be found and the sun on this day will rise but will fail to warm my hands i will sit for eight hours in a windowless room and think about the sky no one ever warned me how much its weight would matter
resurrecting kasmir malevich in the age of despair not white as in clean but as in empty the sky for example or the streets beneath their skin of salt and grime the smell of something reduced to its core a man tied to a truck with a length of chain and dragged until his skin peels from his bones maybe maybe a young girl found in the desert after the animals have been at her not vanished but devoured negated and the wind moves without effort through these walls and the windows rattle against the sound of the freeway
i offer the same bitter stories over and over with the hope that they will eventually catch fire i refuse to define myself as either innocent or guilty others are waiting to make this decision for me
IN WHICH DALI TRANSFORMS THE IMAGE OF DEATH INTO MY SON'S BEAUTIFUL FACE
three days of rain until i can no longer get warm a woman i know sent home with her cancer and a week later she is dead and anger is not a profound thing and the sky at six in the morning can never be called beautiful. and fear i think is the root of inertia twelve years in this town is all the proof i need the buildings i've stood in while holding the fingerbones of christ that have since been torn down and paved over the dark rooms i've walked out of without a word and all of the people i have left in them it adds up to a life yes but not the one i'd hoped for not the one i want to give my son when he's old enough to know the truth what i picture more than anything is his look of bitter disappointment
these dreaming houses early morning with the sky hung like some forgotten war over these dreaming houses pale light and no shadows and all of my old poems seen clearly as lies and art is not her problem but artists not the woman who dreams she's a nun but the boyfriend tying her to the corners of the bed her sister shaking and dropping the baby to the cold kitchen floor and all it does anymore is cry
where the sounds go when they escape our throats my gift to you is the rapid fluttering of wings you hold it briefly then let it go and i was young when gorky locked the door and secured the rope younger still when lennon's blood was washed away and i've become a man who hates his job become a son without a father we have maps you see but no real idea where we are no idea where the sounds go when they escape our throats we are whatever it is that comes after lost
poet waiting for the season of despair rain just after midnight and the sound of geese moving south my own quiet breathing in a dark room the fact of 20,000 innocent people brutally murdered cannot stop the slow approach of winter there is always something stronger than this luminous shell of faith
the poet avoiding confessions awake and mostly blind at two in the morning in a house where nothing fits quite right cold ashamed of my twenty-two years spent feeding a pointless addiction but unable to quit unwilling maybe or maybe afraid nothing is ever gained by putting the truth on paper
words like black blood from the frozen ground: a psalm and twenty years later you still dream of your childhood house on fire you turn to me for all of the things i can no longer give you the names of streets or of old lovers or the reassuring weight of lies and everything we breathe is poison because there are no other choices are only dead trees lining the edges of empty fields and then the town i grew up in with its stench of dead factories and desperate bars and somewhere in this poem there is an afternoon of blinding sunlight without heat the sound of engines grinding hopelessly against a sky-blue sky the shadows of hills crawling towards highways and what i forget in august is the broken glass pain of december the feeling of skin cracked and peeling away from the bone the taste of road salt smeared across any flesh i might hope to kiss nothing built on the ashes of your past
man drowning in a second story room sunlight in january but no shadows a young boy left to die in a locked room i speak of this too often i know but can’t shake the image
can do nothing but spit on the idea of god and listen to my son’s quiet breathing as he sleeps beside me and i have walked away from all of my friends or they have walked away from whoever i was at the time i have spent too many hours reading atwood’s morning in the burned house in the darkening light of early evening with all of my small bitter possessions gathered tight around me "we make noise for a reason" i say but quietly and st maria kisses my forehead she understands how easily faith leads to desperation
holy poem, after the death of god snow all afternoon but nothing is made beautiful no one is considered holy at some point the last city is built and then there is only slow decay sons are shot and daughters raped and all of the missing are given names and some of them come home while others are martyred and there is always the threat of another religion of the crippled leading the blind and of a war that everyone can believe in a way to kill only the truly deserving how much of your life are you willing to waste making these decisions?
not the dream, but everything that comes after sunday afternoon as grey as the bones of christ while the burning girl’s bones grow cold while the sidewalks crawl to the edge of town and then all of the names for whatever lies beyond all of the ways love might turn to violence and i’ve given you the myth a hundred times now and what you’re hungry for is the truth the reason a person might open their mouth then burst into flames and all i can show you is how easily an extended hand becomes a fist can you picture a man chained to the back of a truck then dragged to his death? do you remember the two young boys left to drown while their mother watched? i offer you nothing in place of your god show me where there’s any difference
the blood factory, revisited or maybe the failure is mine diane maybe the words are only words and exist without blame and maybe none of the battered wives give a shit about poetry this needs to be considered
the girl on fire tells you what she knows about love which isn’t much which when written down looks like a blank sheet of paper like a prayer offered up to a god who isn’t there the ideas of religion and brutality inseparable
map of false desire said the man is dead
says the river is frozen all of us nothing more than pointless stories w/ sad, obvious endings a certain moment and then the next name the silence of clean white hallways find shadows in abandoned parking lots this is time measured by decay, by isolation and loss sorrow is not despair, but give it time the future is a liar, just like any good soldier the past gets muddied w/ broken bones and corruption these small towns are the opposite of everything we should ever believe in these cities are worse keep driving north to the house of this woman i’m not supposed to love stay home and pull all the shades no one ever promised you a war you could win
sea of tears reach yr dead hands up to the surface teach them to burn flags to assassinate kings all solutions create new problems, and so the trick is selective blindness
sat there in the back yard and pointed out jupiter and venus to my sons spent most of my time worrying that i was failing them days got colder until we ended up at zero sick at christmas sky of dirty glass say to her i am not you and then say you are not wakoski
say you are not atwood it helps to be alone it helps to believe in redemption we will all end up dead no matter how many gods clutter our rooms waiting for conviction deal in sorrow, like all great gods pound on unyielding doors with broken fists the moment is alive with possibility until it passes, and then all it is is wasted the truth is barren trees beneath a bright blue sky stand in the place where you last saw your daughter alive, and sing create art from the filth of your ancestors believe yourself to be hopeful, despite the overwhelming testimony of those who know you
against the sun and we are not poets we are dogs we are fools and whores and the words that spill from our lips taste like shit they have no meaning no power and if no one ever hears them will it really matter? look in the mirror for an answer run your hands down your lover's body fill your mouth with ashes this is only the present and the future holds no power the past is a weight i will nail to your shoulders the minister's daughter is lying naked in the field and the field is on fire the factories give birth to hungry machines the machines run on human blood you will love your children but it won't be enough
dakota or the first time i taste her or the first time i make her cry the days in between spent waiting spent listening to the ghost of black coyote
to the sound of rifle fire ripping through small children and newborn babies the sound of america taking shape bone by bone medals pinned to the bloodstained uniforms of drunken soldiers the book of days rewritten to make the killers seem like monsters to make them seem more like you
abandon this idea of god pinned to your heart these trees rising up dead out of black water not quite piercing the sky and not quite touching it and the child found murdered in the tall weeds behind a liquor store the song you sing in the pure yellow light of an october afternoon your past which is a burning house and then your future which is a tentative form of faith your scars and the reasons you choose to hide them this voice you recognize from a room down the hall someone's child or someone else's lover his hands in your hair pulling you down his hands on your skin his teeth through your flesh one hundred miles of emptiness in every direction
poem for you man found dead in his car nine days after the fact in a large town or a small city a blonde girl and her boyfriend arrested and the man who crushes the skulls of newborn babies is never far from my mind this is his land and these are his people and if there are any myths to be passed on they will be written in blood across the backs of teenage daughters and what if i tell you that this is the way christ would have wanted it? what if i refuse to believe that his crucifixion held more weight than any of the others? we have come to a place where words are truly meaningless where ideas crush the actions they represent think about god think about war
the fact that you have no control over anything
dreaming america the streets all smeared white on sunday morning and the sunlight without end the names of the dead written down then forgotten what they sound like is silence like human bones falling from the sky the shadows they cast on empty fields bare trees rising up out of black water on the edges of all the worthless towns i've ever lived in all of the people i've left behind the ones i've been left behind by and what our words eventually form are maps but none of the missing are found and none of the beaten none of them are comforted and your sister finds a new lover
forgets the names of her children their faces mistakes desperation for love nothing any of us haven't done at some point
kirchner's suicide, and mine, and yours yrself beautiful in this grey october sunlight and everything i say distorted by fear every wall hung with a cross the windows broken or thick with dust or looking out over a million tiny bones this woman in the bathroom crying this baby found floating in the tub an old story and that i tell you i'm sorry fifteen years too late that i dream about the accident then wake up whole visit the house of my father's ashes can remember nothing about him but his anger
1987 ford mustang with a FOR SALE sign in the rear window and the skinny girl who gets out of it the price of a pack of cigarettes (or the name of a baby who will never know her father who will be dead before his fifth birthday) and what she does is smile and ask if you're interested says she needs twenty bucks says the kid probably won't even wake up and the only thing you know how to be is human
burying the sun late september and the cold is sudden and each day shaped like a fist and every moment defined by the disasters that have brought us to it do i move too fast here?
there is only a certain amount of peace to be found sitting alone in an empty house all afternoon there is only one song to be sung when de chirico calls with the news that he has discovered god and at some point the shadows eclipse the objects they spill from five o'clock becomes six and the sky begins to darken the voices of those who discuss beauty begin to fade are replaced by the sound of a crying child or maybe only by the silence after a door is kicked down four minutes too late after a tiny body breaks the water's surface far beyond the sight of land its eyes open and staring not at god but to an empty sky
room filled with broken objects a room filled with broken objects in a house waiting to burn is this what you dreamt of as a child? a man wearing his funeral shoes and an insincere smile an empty bird cage a sun without heat any number of meaningless objects that add up to the same life your mother lived and all the baby does is cry all the man does is read the words of dead south american poets and pretend to understand and the difference between cold and numb is a subtle one when everything you hold falls through your fingers to the floor and the weight of the sky is brutal but necessary you have spent your life believing this lie without question
a pale yellow sun in a plain white house the word is god and she has been making her blood holy she has been eating the poisoned heart of her unborn child has been spreading her scabbed legs in the name of religion and will you glorify the smell of death that clings to an eighteen year-old junkie? will you love her if i call her christine or allison or tami or have we moved too far from the sun? and imagine she has parents a pale yellow room in a plain white house somewhere in the midwest to call her own and yet here she is a thin girl just beginning to show her pregnancy a damaged smile filled with too many teeth as she walks towards you with one dirty hand held out you will kiss it and taste only pain
poem as deconstruction caught somewhere between the act of writing and the act of not writing the simple violence of sitting in a silent room with nothing but my life lies mixed with truths and all of the scars and harsh angles that define my face a letter from a man who says that my work shows promise who doesn't understand what a fucking waste of time poetry is all of these frightened bleeding words and still the days fall apart
north, past dryden, past cortland or the way the sky refuses to give up its light in july the way the disappeared are forgotten their faces first and then their names and then the fact that they were ever loved at all small crosses planted on the side of the highway and the way they rot the way nothing grows around them but weeds and not everyone tires of blaming god for their pain not every deserving tongue is cut out look at you look at me all of the addicts that fill the miles between us all of the children learning how to inflict pain or receive it at what point do we tell them that these are their only choices?
ash wilderness and when you can no longer win the war you start raping the prisoners start shooting them dead in their cells or hanging them in the courtyards letting the crows have their eyes small victories to give to your children and what your breath smells of is rancid meat what your lover becomes is a whore the barrel of your gun pressed hard between her legs and the way that you smile at her pain the way that being human is all you can ever do these failures that add up to your life
4 p.m raped every day for seven months and no one believes you because maybe you're overweight or maybe unattractive maybe your pain is irrelevant and i've been told that poetry is a shitty substitute for the truth and i've been told that the holocaust never happened i've seen pictures of kim phuc smiling like she'd never been set on fire and what about the man who took the picture? did he help put the flames out? does he understand the mind of god? or maybe what i want to talk about is this man who buys crack at the edge of some country road while his grandchildren watch from the kitchen window while his son fucks a fourteen year old girl in a motel room fifty miles away and none of this is your fault i know and none of it's mine and so we sleep the sleep of the just we make noises that are mistaken for prayer they save no one but they sound so fucking good
crazy horse you need to spill a lot of fucking blood before anything will grow you need to have the ability to rewrite history whores turned into gods and idiots into saints and you need to forget about the sand creek massacre about the children butchered in their sleep and then the ones sold as slaves and then the pregnant women kept in cages for the safety of the nation and twenty years later i still remember the look of contempt on the face of this kid when i told him i had no interest in dying for my country and i am still far from perfect and i still have no use for god but i think that there may be some truth at the heart of our myths i think that my father's death was no more or less important than the death of christ i believe in the space that exists between honesty and faith
tremolo you grow thin eating the bones of ghosts and no one loves you no one speaks when you walk into the room am i close here? being killed for your beliefs doesn't make you christ and being christ never helped anyone and listen i am sitting in a cold fluorescent glare when april calls to tell me that a friend of hers has died i am thinking about rothko's suicide and about the brakes on the car the way the house is falling apart at its own relentless pace and i am thinking about nikolay soltys and the unflinching ease with which he murdered his child and his pregnant wife and admit it what you want to die is watch his die slowly and in excruciating pain what you don't talk about is the fact that it would solve nothing there is always a point where the truth no longer matters there is always a dog chained to a tree in front of an empty house a woman bound and gagged on her lover's bedroom floor his hands curled into fists and his wife out of town and the way that none of them are happy whatever reasons they have for arriving at this point the objects that will need to be broken before any of our pain can be left in the past
memory (2) thinking last night that i was twenty two and that you were still alive and then waking up to the sound of rain and the baby crying sitting in a dark room measuring the distance from the bridge to the train tracks below considering the simplicity of cancer of someone being dropped naked and screaming almost fifty feet and the way you cried as i got in the car and drove away the weight of the phone for the next two weeks and then months and then years the ghost of kay sage and the memory of gorky the beauty of the space between them
and there is a place where the mountains pull apart and the road seems to almost have direction there are the trailer parks and the cars rusting on blocks and the empty buildings without purpose the mother who drinks drano on her kitchen floor and the one who murders her oldest daughter walls filled with fading pictures
always more and always more of the same names and faces and minor acts of violence the news of a war that can't be won
the president's smile as he grows fat on the meat of butchered children and the way i sat up in bed with a name i hadn't spoken in fifteen years falling from my lips the sounds the house made around me all of the ways in which silence isn't
kirchner, approaching a mirror on the morning of his suicide all of this shit that feels like talking all of these words that are wasted indians and slaves and the bones of runaways and always the weight of lennon's pain always the ashes of pollock's fear art which is a lie and lies which are the maps that guide us home and what if you know this man who drags his wife naked into some november field and murders her? what if all you have to teach your children is sorrow and anger? and what i think i'm talking about here is sunlight without heat roads that end at burned-out gas stations or in the parking lots of abandoned factories and where i am is in a tired at the edge of a barren field in the room where your mother's boyfriend rapes your sister in a closet as it fills with smoke screaming maybe but with no one left to hear
poem left untitled in an anonymous room lennon's bloodstained glasses set against a grey december sky the desert which is anywhere you call home myself at 35 with nothing left to give a job that i hate and a house i never wanted and the shadow it casts on the one next door a ghostwhite sun scratched into a dirty yellow sky all of the people i've known who no longer talk to me and all of their reasons all of their pain the sounds we make while drowning
a darker room not the storm but the waiting pale yellow sunlight falling from a dirty silver sky and the shadows of branches the idea of starvation which should never be confused with the reality of it the way you crawl either towards or away from whoever says they love you no words only actions broken glass and the way it tastes being forced down your throat the way your children see everything your daughter pulling away from your touch the marks on her back what they finally mean
crawl (2) the simplicity of the act your children dead and your boyfriend's hand between your legs the way his words taste like poison the way you beg for more always some addiction needing to be fed
the face of god, burned what i am is an asshole
a father and a son and a man standing at a window watching september rain pool in the driveway a ghost with teeth and what i hate is poetry
poets politicians the way we all become whores at some point and maybe i'm moving too fast here maybe cobain was concerned with more than his own pain and misery i've heard this kind of talk before have listened to a junkie father explain why he was a victim and when he was asked if he knew where his children were he said that wasn't the point said the past has nothing to do with the present and in the morning i walk jonathon to the bus stop and feel the last good heat of summer wash over me in the evening i drive past the apartment where a woman i never knew was murdered by her lover i consider how far faith can take any of us i consider the idea of fear as a weapon the idea of hope as a bottomless pit the way that nothing we say is ever exactly the truth
gira the yards filled with weeds and broken toys cigarette butts dirty needles the hammer of god held by the clenched fist of government fear an animal caught in a trap dying slowly crushed bone and mangled flesh laughter cold wind blowing through an empty room through the ribcages of starving children the same fucking poem written again and again the same 500 million people it will never save this baby screaming until the father crushes its skull
the truth is a length of rope, the past a tightening noose fifteen years later and the memory of this dog again chained to a tree in front of an empty house and the noises it made in its throat while i stood at the edge of the road and watched
the name of the girl who said she'd always love me my eyes closed in a dark room all of the hours i've wasted waiting to feel this pure again
small moment of ascension in the desperate season sunday afternoon in this house of dead mouths with my wife and son asleep my faith questioned by a stranger while my left hand crawls slowly across the prophecies laid down by the right
and there is a moment where the sun finds a gap between the clouds and the hills and the ordinary decay of this dead-end street is suddenly transformed into something beautiful and there are the swaying bodies of all the witches hung in the name of god history is meant to be ugly what we learn from the crucifixions and the massacres is an addiction to power a contempt for the poor and i am not a believer in poetry or in the ability of words to function as weapons i was there when the bleeding horse was brought to its knees i understand why the weakest are chosen as sacrifices what i don't want to know are their names
footnote to bleeding horse sonnet no. 1 the shadows of ordinary objects at the end of august the weight of houses and of hills and the subtle threat of empty factories the idea of blood pooling at the edges of barren fields and abandoned parking lots of a president who hates you who would have the poor eat the shit of an idiot god who would have the dissidents shot dead and their bodies burned in public squares and who is i that poisoned the ground you stand on and how much money have they made from the bodies of these teenage girls dying of cancer? why would i want my sons sent off to fight a war waged in the name of greed and petty vengeance?
the list of people i'd like to see dead is already long enough
wilderness rain at six a.m. on the edge of a dying city
rust on the machines and the tired hands of lovers and the dogs gone wild a woman attacked in her front yard the starving without names a baby left behind and a vulture at its face and the angels caught in wires the neon light of god shot out by a junkie with a gun the shallow graves dug at the edge of the highway a shovel and a roll of duct tape a son and a daughter and you pray with a mouth full of ashes you sing with a rope around your neck and your feet not quite touching the ground and faith is a desert and desire a pool of tar the house has been on fire since the day you were born none of this anything more than the truth
judas you crawling lost in a blind room or this you blind in a sunfilled room in a room where the windows explode blinded naked when the door is opened smiling or asleep when the hand is placed over your mouth or the gun to your head someone you know and he says beg and you do gladly at first and then not and the way your sister's boyfriend says he'll kill you if you tell anyone
puts the tip of his cigarette against your breast and says cry and you do and i have nothing as useless as answers to offer i understand the twin gods of money and power the one who lets his friends have you for a price the way he tells you he loves you tells you to smile and you do one of you the sun and the other one blind
one of you locked in a room and the other one laughing like the shadow of god
both of you naked and betrayed both of you stoned and desperate all of us willing to lie to get whatever it is we want
a poem on leaving a building burning at the ocean's edge a woman you don't know naked in a chalkwhite room waits with her hands nailed to the walls believes in violence but calls it love the same sad fucking song you've finally learned to call home
laughter what you are is dead in someone else's war and who you are is god's child and does it help knowing this? fuck no a corpse is a corpse and a poem is just a poem until it begins to choke on its own useless anger until it begins to sound like a sharp blade hacking through the base of the skull and what i mean when i say religion is retaliation what happens is that the killers cannot be identified and so everyone needs to be slaughtered and every corpse defiled every church burned to the ground the future reduced to ashes before we even arrive
faith or your door kicked in at four in the morning and the way he tells you he loves you as he slams your head against the wall the way he screams it
this constant need to be believed
landscape, without apology and this is not my home but i'm unable to shake it dead trees rising up out of black water and the sounds of trains always moving away a sky so blue and empty it leaves no place for any god to hide and there is a woman three thousand miles away who insists i cannot write about things i don't understand and there is the man she loves between us we make an uncertain triangle and she is sometimes distracted by the sound of the ocean and i am constantly afraid of hearing my son cry out in pain he's too small to know anything but unconditional love and too beautiful to remain unscarred he is always on the edge of whatever landscape i'm describing i need this to be a hopeful thing
the sun, the clouds, the bottomless sky this desperation and this age of silence these corpses found with their hands tied behind their backs these nameless women and these laughing holy men and these children and if some of them are yours the world won't end if the war is won it doesn't mean it's over can you even imagine how many people don't give a shit whether you live or die? do you really believe that any of these whores you've elected would sacrifice their own lives to save yours? or this he was getting high when his girlfriend came over and he was laughing at something she'd said when the guy she was fucking shot him in the chest
he was found behind the wheel of a stolen car in a bus station parking lot and i remember smiling when i heard the news and i have no use for god have no faith in poetry no patience for the sad desperate scribblings of the weak and the lame and i number myself among them i love my wife and my sons but it means nothing in the world of money and weapons it means nothing in the rape camps or in the shallow ditches where the decapitated bodies of pregnant teenage girls are dumped
and no one ever told lorca this and look where it got him no one promised you salvation but you still believe it will arrive you lock your doors while the soldiers smash in your windows you run naked and burning down some pitted dirt road towards a man who wants nothing but to take your picture the war is lost without any of us ever knowing it had begun
say what you want the sound of crows at six a.m. and then the filthy hands of priests your children devoured by god fucked by dogs and what i believe in is the loss of faith and what i preach is the inevitability of addiction the bleeding horse dragging himself down these sleeping streets through these back yards filled with weeds and broken toys and what matters aren't the cities and towns but the spaces between them the highways like scars through the emptiness over the bones of indians past rusting trailers and burned-out gas stations until all that's left is the point where the hills touch the sky
until all that's left is the moment where your voice fades into memory dissolves from words into sound my lungs filled with the poison of it
effigy 2 but you cannot be beautiful in the room of mirrors you cannot discuss belief on a dead-end street look
the face of god is everywhere the pain of christ is everyone's and i think the burning girl knew this if only for the last few terrified seconds of her life and i think that her death was probably meaningless and i think that yours will be too and mine when it comes and i have all of history to back me up on this i have the names of every vanished child of the fathers who murdered them and the mothers who held their hands to lit burners and i would make these fuckers suffer if i could i would let the dogs lick the blood from their corpses would piss on their graves and i'll agree with you when you tell me that violence is not the solution to violence and then i'll tell you about the couple who filmed themselves raping a four year-old paraplegic girl i'll tell you again if you want me to and even if you don't it's not a thing that should ever be forgotten
and the oceans are all black poison, and the deserts spread slowly and there is this but it's never enough sunlit roofs and silver wires against an indigo sky the river on fire the child's body found in the tall weeds behind the gas station grace but no joy joy but no beauty and i remember running through the woods with the sound of footsteps coming up fast behind me i remember one of them holding my arms while the other hit me my mother angry but motionless at the kitchen table
the taste of my own blood my father's absence and the first time i say your name it's a question and the next time prayer the days are empty and go nowhere and the child's body is found beneath the bathroom sink the child's body is never found and at some point i'm fifteen and a virgin and at some point there is nothing left but to swim or drown in the sea of knowledge
the woman at the door says her husband doesn't love her the cop reaches for his gun but too late dies in the dirt and the weeds in front of a trailer less than thirty miles from where i sit and i remember how hard the rock was thrown
how it caught me just below my right eye and i remember holding a knife to someone's throat remember smiling into his fear laughing at the idea of becoming everything i had ever hated
in a phone booth, the sky pissing rain we were calling home but the house was on fire we were drunk and cold and waiting for an answer were thinking of names for the baby only a week before the day you left me for good
5.20.05 this baby born so horribly deformed that its death six weeks later is almost a relief this house empty but with no room inside for anything else with no walls that will hold the weight of a cross no sounds that you would ever consider human
notes on freedom he says there has to be something more than anger and despair says a poem should be a mirror not a jagged shard of glass not a broken window in a burning house but let’s face it neither of us has ever had to jump from the 98th floor we never knew black kettle never found the corpse of the woman we love dumped like so much trash on the outskirts of juarez and it’s not america i hate but the fuckers making their fortunes off the butchered bodies of soldiers and children and i refuse to call it democracy if every politician is for sale look at these men who would rape your daughters look at their wives smiling naked and wet up into the light of god consider how much shit you’ve ever had to eat for the good of the many
poem to hide from my children or something as simple as young girls left to die in windowless rooms something as american as wealth for the chosen few the indians kicked out of their trailers and the mothers arrested in front of their children nothing as obvious as a massacre no wasted motion in the back of the hand across the face and what i’ve said from the beginning is that equality is a lie what i refuse to do is lick the ass of any self-proclaimed king and i don’t believe in violence but i understand the attraction picture your teenage daughter on her hands and knees being fucked by a politician your eight year-old son raped by a priest or what about the men who would protect the predators? can you picture their throats slashed wide open or their houses in flames? there are so many deaths i will never weep for
in a room, blindly Not lies, really, but truths that can't be proven. The ghosts of Aztecs, of lncas. Parking lots. Palaces.
Man rolls the dice to see which of the children will starve, and then the bomb goes off. Seventeen dead, blood everywhere, the pews of the church on fire. The runoff from the mill dumped into the river. Close your eyes and picture it. The first time we met and then, two years later, the first time we made love. Oceans on every side of us, wars to the south, to the east, and I told you you were beautiful. Had no words beyond that, only abstractions. Only need. Thirty seven years old and suddenly no longer blind and, in the mountains, the killers were making new plans. In town, the streetlights were coming on. It seemed almost possible we would find our way home.
indigenous poem this place that we call the age of beliefs these days that push and pull that bleed into one another until all i can remember is the silent glare of sunlight on chrome the shadows of trees as they stutter across the windshield not lost but never quite anywhere and then the simple fact of this poet found dead behind the wheel of a borrowed car these streets that begin to resemble de chirico's doors locked against our arrival and children locked in cages their tentative smiles or their useless screams the smell of burning flesh your faith in humanity
in the dream of ordinary shame you should believe in messiahs conceived by man you should believe there will be an end to poets an end to words and to politicians and we will be here in this empty house with nothing between us but the corpses of the disappeared we will consider the moment where christ clenches his hands into bleeding fists the moment where the sun reaches its highest point and the power fails and the prisons are all filled with nothing but priests and widows and i have seen myself reflected in the windows of abandoned buildings and i have turned away i have called my lovers by the wrong name and then laughed and listen whatever you write is meaningless you save no one but yourself and even this is questionable
remember god isn't a lie but a punishment think about whatever it is you've done wrong
the sun is god's face bleeding down six a.m. in the age of rain and the streets of someone else's city flooded and filled with corpses and this is what it takes to make us forget the war this is a woman shot dead by her brother someone's mother raped in a room filled with broken glass and what i'm waiting for is to either be forgiven or forgotten i have spent too many years dragging the people i love through the filth of priests and politicians i have turned away from my children have slammed doors in their beautiful faces but wait christ was never meant to be a weapon the truth is only a less direct form of lying without a an obvious enemy we have only each other to hate
cage some minor ghost in another room some forgotten act of violence a fifteen year old boy in the woods his girlfriend who he's just beaten to death with a length of rusty pipe and what the earth looks like from where i sit is flat what my wife cries herself to sleep about at night is my blindness and listen jesus christ was the original navajo the idea of slavery can never be separated from the idea of america or what about my son? four years old and beautiful and already well-versed in the concept of hatred
or what about phil ochs? found at the end of a rope in his sister's house and the fact that there was nowhere for any of us to go from there the fact that the government believes in nothing beyond itself ask ronald reagan if he lost any sleep over those first few thousand aids victims ask all of the dead orphans in all of the ruined churches if it felt good to burn say what you want until some fucker with a gun decides it's time for you to die
manifest destiny: a literal translation or this man who kills a priest the priest who rapes young boys and we were never promised beauty and were only offered hope by liars we built our houses on the bones of the slaughtered called it democracy waited for the first walmart to open
opened her arms, said come home And here along the river wall where the teenage dogs spray paint FUCK in bright grey letters, where the truth is nothing more than what it pretends to be, is the same here as anywhere else, and the stench rising from the water, the abandoned shopping carts, rusting bones of small animals, plastic bags caught in the underbrush, and then what? The city can only spread like a cancer or die like a victim. The future is only a single crumbling wall holding up a collapsing roof. I can’t remember a time in this place when I wasn’t afraid. the necessity of pain and fear beautiful and high in the pure white light of the sun and never anything to eat but broken glass never anything to break but promises and then the small white flowers that blossom where the pieces fall the filth that we bathe our children in
the men of god who would have us beg for more who would have us lose all sight of joy
the written word disguised as truth the women are raped silently beneath a blue sky in rooms with or without windows this is always a part of someone's history the smell of burning flesh and the photographs of the slaughtered and in the here and now i am cupping your breasts in my sweatslicked hands i am naming the stars and blessing the spaces between them and there is a day where i realize i will no longer live forever where my son will see for the first time the man i truly am and turn away in shame there are pages in history that cannot be rewritten but i have yet to see one i include my own life here the events that actually happened and the ways they were changed in the retelling and i am no different from any of you about this much at least i can be honest it costs me nothing to point out that we will all drown together