shaping the future with broken hands

quiet again in the
room of empty chairs
except for maybe
the sound of dust

maybe the absence of
your boyfriend
or the memory of his fists

the way that
drawing blood can be
called love

the names of
your children

their small
perfect mouths filled
with broken glass

sea of tears

reach yr empty 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

abstract excavation

Parable

Sitting in a freshly painted room, thinking
that I should be leaving, thinking that it
smells like rain. I have left my son's globe
on the living room table. I have left too
many bills unpaid, too many windows open,
and the truck is almost out of gas. The
woman walking down the stairs knows my
name, smiles like we're old friends, says
she lost everything in the flood. Says her
husband left her for a younger woman,
but she can't be more than twenty-two,
twenty-three. She can't stop crying, and
I can't think of anything to say. I need to
get home in case there's a fire. In case the
phone rings. I am tired of waiting for
disaster.  

mark tobey

an ephemeral silence

a gunman opens fire

when all you want to do is sing,
or maybe
be told you’re beautiful,
a baby falls from the sunfilled sky,
a rain of weeping hawks, of
angels with broken wings,
and do you remember the
sound of me holding your hand?


were we actually ever in love w/
anything more
than the idea of escape?


i need to believe
that we were.

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

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
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

2nd wish

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

NEW BROADSIDES FROM 48TH STREET PRESS

deeper into joy and sorrow

you know you want it.....

BE THERE OR DIE LIKE THE DIRTY DOG THAT YOU ARE

halcyon

so tell it straight
then,
without the false romance of
distance and loss



you were in love
and then you weren’t



you lost each other
found each other again maybe
then waited to see what
would happen



got by for a while on
sex and fear and memories
and then it wasn’t enough



closed your eyes and
when the morning light forced
them open again
ten years had passed



you were both
married to strangers



you were both lost in
the forest



the edges had already
begun to burn




a statement of sorts

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
suddenly shown to be
inseparable

the collapse

believe in a sky both

silver and bruised, in the

dizzy spin of the sun, and believe not

in true love but in the possibility

of it, and then wait for the
rain to arrive

fall between the bodies

of christ and pilate
 

breathe in the smell of

new-mown grass
 

breathe in the smell of corpses
burned with gasoline
 

the walls you build are temporary

at best, and your hatreds are all cliché
 

ask this woman next to you

in bed for her name
 

tell her something

both small and meaningless
 

and what those of us born with the

knowledge of space and of distance,

and what about the ones who

learn it by force?
 

do you ever get sick of being

defined only by what you’ve lost?

 

pick the point in your life

where you think everything

began to fall apart
 

tell your wife exactly when it

was you stopped loving her

 

wallow in the pain you cause

just like it was your

last day on earth