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

closer to mercy

an eye

all poems starve in

the desert
of your mind

all wars begin with

the idea of god or the
concept of greed

this need to kill

the enemy
which
leads to the need to
create enemies

to become one

 

some stranger in a

windowless room
smiling in antici
pation of the
day i die

giacometti, softly

 

 

you can't talk about christ

at four in the morning

and you can't talk about love

 

you can talk about light despite

the absence of it and so you do

 

you walk from room to room

watching your family sleep

and you try to remember their names

 

you look at the phone

 

at the front door

 

and at some point you realize

that money tastes like rust and that

all you can do is choke

 

at some point the sky fades from

black to grey and the baby wakes up

 

begins to cry

 

believes in you only because

he has yet to learn
anything else

 

abandon

the faint illumination of yr 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

an interview

 

 

PENMEN REVIEW

 

 

 

 

expressionist landscape 1

save us all from love and hope

was breathing in the tarnished weight of silver skies,

was trapped there between forgetting and forgotten,
21 years of pointless starvation,
air thick with the approach of rain,
distant pulse of passing trains,
and the child in the back seat made no sound

had no hands

looked a little like me, but i no longer took

responsibility for any of the pain in the world
 

i no longer walked

when it was easier to crawl

had finally become my father

 

 

 

Sisyphus, Further Upstate

Nothing new, nothing you haven't discovered

yet, only America, only I will make you sing
it louder, will make you scream it, scream
AMERICA!! like it's the answer to a question
you can't imagine, like you're hanging from a
rope of used needles, hanging from a rope of
spent time, and it's a man in the back of the
room who asks the question, and it's a man
jumping from a bridge and onto the freeway
who answers it, only not with words because
words are too easy to misinterpret. Words are
too human. Humans are too careless. Just ask
the man his fucking name already, before it's
too late.

the brilliant light of godless hearts

kingdom of heaven

had hands of rage, had the

soft glow of a martyr

debated god with the

sick and the crippled

everything is within your reach,

you see, and
then you piss it all away

you stay fucked up for so long

that the idea of getting clean
scares the hell out of you

look in the mirror and

the poem is about me

stare at the sun long enough

and the infinite becomes visible

don’t trust in words

don’t put your faith

in the intangible

not all absence is an

emptiness waiting to be filled

if and only

the city without hesitation

where the forest ends and if
god can only exist in empty
spaces, then what?

ask kay in her final

moment of blindness

ask her again after

her suicide

understand that nothing
you and i do can ever
be defined as love
 

let autumn leaves spin

gently down into your
river of poisoned blood

let the children you’ve

lost crawl through your
back yard gnawing on
whatever bones they
can find

salvation is nothing any

of us ever approaches
with open eyes

days of hopeless wonder

ernst, lost in the forest