A small sampler of poems taken from some of my print collections.
salt, rust
sound of machinery trapped in the cold amber silence gears clotted with old blood i spent too many years being a husband sitting at home sharpening knives never owned a gun never noticed who was driving the car watched it pull away w/ my wife, my children, and then i turned back to the problem at hand found the mask my father had given me, and it was a perfect fit wore it whenever i fucked a woman whose name i wanted to forget wore it until i no longer knew who i was felt too good to give up
permafrost
was suddenly mortal in the cold blue sunlight of my 35th winter was lost in a room w/ a stranger and her sister and both of them naked and one of them crying and we were far beyond the point where words would help explain anything i was considering rothko, wrists slashed and overdosed on his kitchen floor i was considering his daughter the ease with which pain spreads out from the core
the myth of christ
and your father isn't dead he's only sleeping with the radio on low with the candleflame finding the curtain's edge and even in the room of murdered children there's sunlight even on the edge of the storm there's the memory of the first time i saw you what matters here isn't faith but hope what i offer aren't empty promises but concrete fears this will be our last century our children will forget why they ever loved us i know i'm not the first person to tell you this
bed of nails
you are emptiness and then you're everything you sleep without violence or you drown slowly like a phone call from your father's doctor slower a car ride in december from one dying town to another seventy five miles of nothing but powerlines and crows of nothing but anger and despair and when you get to where you're going no one knows who you are when you leave again no one says good bye you call this place home and all it ever does is burn
river of ice
and this taste like copper or someone else’s blood, and these passing days as empty as something subtracted from nothing the children sick the late afternoon shadows of silent houses and whatever you’ve killed will always come back and whoever you love is already pulling away from your embrace no matter the time, it’s always too late it’s always almost dark winter coming sudden sound of trains arriving always too late to change the way the story ends
at the edge of the known world
down the back stairs to an ocean of dust across the span of fifteen years to a point you remember pure sunlight in a ghostwhite room and someone at the door saying it was too late someone saying they'd found pollock's body or was it rothko's? a child at the river's edge possibly and the fact that i never knew his name the paintings on the walls and the blood on the bathroom floor your father saying he just needed twenty bucks or mine asking to spend the night august becoming february without warning february becoming june all of us drunk and none of us happy and the killer with the dead woman's credit cards with her body in the back of his truck and all of these lives wasted in dirty motel rooms all of the times i should have but didn't my car idling in the street or my hand curled into a fist and ready to knock on the door
and what about the times that i did and the regretted everything? what about this boy with the duct tape cross across his skinny chest?
did his father tell him he loved him before he pulled the trigger? what a cruel fucking joke
and there ain’t no day and there ain’t no night
and you are tired of remembering the neverending parade of small moments that add up to your life, and they are tired of you, and all of yesterday’s suicides and all of today’s and all of tomorrow’s no gifts no promises more rope than you could possibly ever need
narcissus #2
you and shadows you and you and
i caught in the of bare trees and i naked and i lost
stoned in the tall grass behind abandoned factories bleeding at the edge of the highway and the story has only the vaguest of beginnings and the ending is blurred the days grow colder are filled with powerlines and the screams of crows ringing bells the deep blue sound of joy, despite everything
charity
remove the words from every poem and you begin to approach the truth believe in hatred because you can't defeat it listen no one saved christ the dead have never been made free we were a nation of whores before hitler we were a nation of whores after consider how many people he'd killed before we decided that he had to be stopped call the possessions you've accumulated freedom write the poem and then erase it eat what you can before the starving arrive at your door
laughter
imagine a child no one knows face mutilated body stuffed into a garbage bag garbage bag placed inside a cooler cooler left beside the freeway dead for fourteen years now and the killer still alive the rest of us writing poems blind in such a huge fucking way
poem from a distance
never told you i loved you and the days crawled by without meaning or warmth never held my father's ashes never tasted them forgot his face for my 30th birthday and remembered instead the women i'd fucked in the year before he died thought about his cup of coffee growing cold on the kitchen counter while he lay on the floor wanted to call you but you were gone wanted to touch you but the moment had passed stood in the hall while my sister said good bye
Srebrenica
It was weeping gods shitting knives into the open mouths of their lovers. It was something softer. Chagall with a machine gun while the ghettos burned. Rothko's wrists laid open and the starlings that poured out. The sunlight that tasted like ashes, and then the floods. This woman's thirteen year old son playing down by the river, and then vanished, and when she wept it was for herself. When the enemy arrived, we helped them separate the sons from their mothers. Helped them separate the husbands from their wives. 8000 men and boys altogether, and we watched them being driven off in buses. We read about their murders in the paper. Seemed like there should have been someone we could blame.
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 desperate years, over and over
fading away then which was never what i intended a lifetime of empty spaces of attempted kindness and deliberate spite a lifetime of mirrors but none of them ever spoke none of them ever asked is this what you wanted? imagine the humor of it, the bitter laughter aimed at surrealists who die only of old age who grow complacent imagine babies dead of cancer or born too deformed to live for more than a week or don’t imagine it see them for yourself breathe them in let them break over you like waves sing your bleakest song once the girl turns 15, once she’s raped for the first time, once she kills herself against a backdrop of laughter
we have nothing left to fear but each other are you willing to call this freedom?
laughing, over oceans of fear
in a darkened room with the small hiss and sputter of candles, with the suffocating weight of lullabies, the news of picasso's death, of pollock's, nothing you haven't heard before, and then the hammer is swung and the spike driven through living flesh, and there is no other way to discuss pain than in terms of itself there is the war, whether you believe in it or not, and there are the ones who will hate you either way listen to them sing while your lover crawls across the floor to where you've pile the bones listen to the cities burn, slowly and from the inside out stay away from whatever gods you've been given
sunflower
at the broken edge of everything, at the feet of st maria with the gift of empty words, the empty promise of truth, of gold, and in the last sunfilled room the final door is swinging shut at the end of the movie the hero is lost in the desert the child wanders into the forest, and not every noble idea has to be a lie not every disease can be cured look at your father look at mine understand that the truth, any truth, is a labyrinth understand that poems can only fail remember what it means to believe in silence
icarus, further upstate
through windows through walls to the emptiness on the other side through sunlight and with shadows spilled across january snow, terrible visions and gasoline air, brilliant blue like the color of hopelessness filling the lungs the eyes and this is our century, the one we will die in, the one that will devour us, and this is the moment and then it’s gone this is he moment after the future like a burning ship, like a pair of broken wings jump from the roof without considering what it means to fall fall with your heart full of the wide open sky
after the age of giants
And this is not nothing, this sky, these clouds, these hills, and it’s not the whole story because nothing ever is, but listen. Distance is an important thing. Forty feet from the bridge to the tracks below. 100 miles between the woman’s body and her husband’s faith. And have you ever tried defining yourself by something other than sorrow or fear? Will you crawl from lover to lover with nothing to offer but fading bruises and the promise of more? It’s okay to pause before you answer, to consider, to weight your options. It’s okay to accept the fact that we’ve never really meant anything to each other. This is why the sunlight casts shadows. Why time only moves in one direction. The moment arrives one hundred million times a day, and then it passes. The song is forgotten. I wanted to sing it to you, but you were married. You were crying. It was a sound just like any other.
your future is a prison but i love you anyway
here where land comes up hard against other land, where the sky is ignored where all wounds bleed white light where all of us are wounded walk across empty parking lots, across the rubble of demolished buildings, across freeways, across the river and where you end up will always be where you began weeds devour the garden and the sun is relentless the children laugh no matter how many times you punish them the minister’s wife is never found it’s been a long time since i said i was sorry and really meant it
a cage in the forest
tell the blind man there's nothing to see let the politicians fuck your daughters don't settle for the facts when the truth is what really matters don't worry about man ray dead now for 30 years in paris, and i still keep waiting for his call i stand on the edge of the porch roof, next to the hole in my house where the light pours out look the days are shorter now and all of my fears that much closer to the surface no amount of poetry will ever cure cancer no man who would ask for your vote would ever give you his in return these are things to think about while you watch dorothea undress, and when she asks if you love her, you should smile without answering
you should kiss her breasts words aren't the enemy, of course, but it's always best to act as if they are
july
in bed after the abortion with a man who says he just wants to fuck you who laughs when you talk about your husband and so you say nothing you scream out no one’s name you become human in ways you never wanted to
song for a broken bell
dying man in a bed of flames says you owe him something says art is all that matters, and what i want more than anything at 2 a.m. is to wake up my children and hold them what i want are options you can give blood or you can be crucified and, either way, the dogs still scream for more pollock knew this, and rothko, and then lennon found out the hard way and you want to mourn, of course, but there are people starving everywhere there are these men you've elected waging genocide in an effort to hang onto their wealth you can believe or you can disbelieve, and neither path alters the truth no amount of water or prayer will put out the fire twenty years after the fact the joke is never as funny once it has to be explained
the bleeding horse at sea
and then it turned out that the trick was was just to give in to depression, and of course i felt like a fool for not realizing this earlier i sat there in an empty house listening to water run down the walls sat there listening to the starlings in the attic thought about my oldest boy about all of the apologies i owed him kept wishing i was asleep until my alarm clock woke me up the next morning
edith metzger’s blues
what we do is forget the dead this is our true history the idea of creating machines that kill more efficiently than the human hand the pits that are uncovered and the ones that are never found this endless goddamn stream of names the sorrow that bleeds away to indifference these babies crying
richter
and the baby screams because this is all it knows a six month-old junkie with a pregnant mother a dead end town in upstate new york and fuck words i need hammers and nails need the comfort of guilty bodies being dragged over broken glass of pain being caused to those who cause others pain and it's a simple logic and imperfect and i am beyond the point of caring i am listening to the baby scream and to the woman whispering softly to it i am hoping for the death of every addict who would ever touch my children it's as close to mercy as i can come
st. anthony, devoured
the poem is not an apology the dogs have no understanding of any number greater than zero and what i get in the mail is a letter from a man who says he's been waiting for an apology for twelve years and what i do is throw it away walk to the back door and check the temperature four degrees below zero in the last purplegrey light of a monday afternoon and that i'm tired of the taste of these bones that i have no use for my father's ashes and were you and i in love this morning? i want to say yes but the truth is never easy to find in this house of mirrors the weight of sorrow was never meant to be a weapon we find this out too late to change what we've become
and enemies
this pale grey sunlight after six days of rain and this cancer and these wings that were yours this moment when i stop and realize what i've lost what we had when the war was just a dream was just a stack of papers in a sterile office and i can remember the song but not the words i was 22 when mcqueen died and then i was 30 and a father two jobs and a car that wouldn't start and the baby was beautiful but the fear was always there whatever i had could be taken away whoever i was could be forgotten look at how you paused before speaking my name
in the shuffling madness
it was something, anyway, a stray thought or a foolish idea, a blind idea that being touched would be enough to save you, that being held would make me human it was knowledge, but it wasn’t truth it was your father’s hands in all of your dreams, hitting or grabbing or gently caressing, and there were never enough windows when you were awake there was never enough sunlight, and the locks on every door were broken my words were like sawdust in my mouth, were like shit in yours, but i couldn’t stop talking couldn’t stop equating the act of fucking with the idea of caring wanted you, yes, but only if you were someone else
a long afternoon with no rain
you asleep and beautiful july with all of my promises scorched into bitter lies the immaculate silence of no television no airplanes no one screaming in the street the shape of the future a child waiting to be named waiting to be loved christ what a terrifying thing
In the Grip of Ecstasy
Sad piano music and the static of distant radios. Springtime, but cold. Grey. A boy pulled from the river. Candles on the sidewalk in front of the murdered girl's house. Father says he loved her. Says he didn't want to pull the trigger, and you don't believe him, and you shouldn't. I've stood in the living room, walls tacky with blood, rug black with it. I've walked along the interstate between Golgotha and Gethsemane, and what I found there were Wal-Marts, liquor stores, topless bars. The bones of fools who presumed to know the mind of God - priests, ministers, politicians, and the dogs had been there to piss on them all. The world had moved on. Names had been forgotten. Truths had been distorted. All I really wanted was the warmth of another human.
sin in the form of light as it spills from the mouth of saint rebecca
in this room w/ crooked lamp shade w/ socks piled on the floor, books, dust, ceiling cracked where moisture runs down the chimney and this is why i cannot help you this is decay mixed w/ inertia bodies tied only to themselves and i have no use for the sicknesses of holy men and no desire to receive their pain waited a few years before i found humor in my father’s death, and then i kept it to myself discussed suicide w/ people who would never try it thought no less of them for the reasons they had to live
fatima
or the way you speak with a dog's voice the flowers in autumn sunlight each day shimmering and choked with possibility and the baby alive the man who threw it onto the highway dead and was it pollock who foresaw this? were his words as empty as christ's? listen don't spend every waking hour in the house of truths don't insist on meaning the men you elected are making money from the butchered corpses of soldiers the fields your children play in have been poisoned and what if you have to choose between your wife and your lover?
what happens when the man with the bright yellow gloves turns out to be the killer? two teenage girls found chopped to pieces in the woods forty minutes from my front door and the way you can't quite remember the name of the woman beside you in bed the possibility that she can't remember yours a life yes but why? you drive home and it's gone you answer the phone and it's your father seven years dead and he tells you he never loved you he tells you you're a failure and the poem can only be what it is and the stories were never meant to have morals
the man you call the god of starving dogs is still living somewhere in this town and so is the waitress who slashed her wrists because of him and the idea of rape is what they've always had in common and the moment you consider admitting defeat is the moment you've lost you'll understand when it happens
variation on america
the rain gone and cold and the green of this place overwhelming the houses bruised grey or dirty white the boy dead in some dimly lit hallway in some vaguely remembered town overdosed while the lilacs bloom and the smell of dogwood smothers everything hands pale and stiff and the mother crying and what we need aren't reasons to live but the thing itself what we've built aren't homes but cages windows to let the light in and doors that offer no safety the atrocities of adults committed upon their children the children who grow up with nothing but the knowledge of distance and hatred or maybe it's not that simple
silence
You tell them you’re a poet and they look at you funny You tell them you’re a killer or a rapist You tell them nothing It sounds good
the well of knowledge
they kill the father and then his eight year-old son which makes sense if you want to rule out the possibility of vengeance they kill the mother but not before they rape her they save the daughter for another day
this blind fascination, these empty promises
the city you call your own was built from violent lies, is sinking in pools of poisoned blood, and the children have all been stolen. don't pretend you ever loved them. don't sing if your hands have been cut off. if your lover is on fire. what we bring you is news from, a darker age. snapshots and silent admissions. documents from the edge of the century, eyewitness accounts, fables. they are gathered here and given to you like a brutal gift. like love, and they are a holy noise. they are yours to deny. we are less than gods we are sometimes human remove the words from every poem, and you begin to approach the truth