this rape or that one

and any day in any year with

the starving and the oppressed and the
sound that money makes fucking
                                 other money

the silence of the crowd

before the first shot is fired

not every massacre has

a name and not every problem
has a solution but
listen

every solution will

become the next problem

it’s okay to hate

yourself for being human

it’s human to justify your failures

to make others bleed

for your cowardice

understand this

and then move on

 

 

 

& you & i, higher

and then late afternoon sunlight

across concrete courtyards
and then the shadows of strangers

the taste of dust settling on flawed glass

and then one hundred thousand
miles of silence

the weight of christ

the dreams of children

almost autumn and hawks circling

 

sweat from yr lover’s breasts

sweet on someone else’s lips

and it’s only a small jump from the

third story window but she lands
wrong and then it’s only the
arrival of lesser truths

the tears we waste for people

we no longer know

for diane, who i will never meet

and you call

not from the other side of the world
but from only two hours down the highway and
i have nothing to offer but transparent
                                                excuses

my poems are only poems

my truck is leaking oil

february gets beneath the skin

                                    you see
               gets into the blood, cowardice and
               fear and no safety but the safety of
               digging deeper into our burrows
 

and there is no point in mourning

these fatally wounded animals that
show up on our doorsteps,
but we do

we weep

and we read about the men making
crystal meth in trailers on the far sides of
anonymous hills and we read about
the cops that they shoot
and i talk to you for a few minutes
in small, uncomfortable sentences, in
single words and brutal silences

i close my eyes against this

winter sunlight and the
smell of gasoline

against my own cracked and

bleeding hands

maybe next time you say

and i agree and we leave it at that
and five years pass and then ten, a decade
of februaries, of murders and suicides,
of the bodies of newborn babies found in
airport toilets and hotel dumpsters

i stay up too late

 

i yell at my children for minor things and

                                    then apologize and
                          they tell me they love me
 

we walk down to the river and try to

break the ice with whatever rocks we can
pry from the frozen ground

we drive west to the

museum of uncertain blessings

find the doors all locked when we get there,

the windows boarded over
and we can’t think of anywhere else to go,
but i was talking about you, diane,
and i was talking about us

i was talking about ghosts

about the twin histories of

fear and failure

i was waiting for the phone to ring again

so i could have the simple miserable
joy of not answering it

dawn, inverted

NU WORK

 

 

 

 

 

wasted lives in january rooms

and on the phone she says

she’s going to kill herself, grey sky and
snow and on the phone she asks you
to come and get the baby, silver sun
smudged just above the treeline,
end of november and too cold to
worry about christ, too late to lament
his obvious failures, and on the phone she
says she’s tired of the pills, says she’s
tired of the broken windows and
dead batteries, burnt smell of dead
engines grinding against the frozen air
and on the phone she says love is a
lie and then she talks about
                              betrayal

says she had a reason for calling

says you were the only one

who answered

laughs and then tells you

she has to go