i dreamt of a presidential state of the union where the union suddenly mattered in the aftermath of catastrophic war and dismal economic projections and white old men with yellowed teeth stood and applauded and sat back down and stood and applauded again and again until the dreaming stopped and black women stooped over onto their hands and knees to let the wives of these men with their wide hips and taut faces step over them into gnarled waiting hands and in the dark i reach over to her because i am afraid of the world i have found myself in where the state of my own union with her is barely keeping me together
Category Archives: words
when someone you love steps
you have to crack at it lest it crack you into porcelain shards falling from a wall that’s been plastered over and over and you become the scratches the pieces make on the floor when someone you love steps on them and slips and you become the wound in that thin patch of the sole and the chips of paint from the crack in the plaster and the sound she makes as she lands on her elbows to keep her head from splitting
been one of meat forks
i had always been one of meat forks and bludgeoned lips and badly healed scar tissue an internal rage expressed through a foul mouth and an affinity for mortal disaster that fell on my knees weeping for something to break this seal of thick skin while my thoughts snow balled into dark and wet masses of moss and mud and shit i had always been a pin point of the roar that hummed in my bones and crackled around the edges of my ears until i screamed until i coughed out my tongue and stamped it into the dirt lest it wiggle itself free and find someone to tell all this to lest it escape and make sense to someone other than me
monarch
and in the shower i had the idea if only i had seen it in a dream and it would’ve been better but i was naked and the water finally turning hot and i split-imagined a river of ants coming out of my penis, a stream of roaches and bugs crawling out, snuggling out, dripping out, marching out and down and around my scrotum and thigh, pulling free, pushing through, one over another, until at the very end, and the only moment i felt any pain, a monarch butterfly struggled free, as if from a cocoon, and spread its wings and fluttered away
more or less likely
the less likely you on harps, the less likely you strumming along a note slammed sideways through your fingers, the less likely you had been an adam’s apple bitten by an eve entrenched by the river where factories dump sludge and remains, her ankles cut by tin cans and an admirable achilles heel before a bloody calf, the less likely you would remember, the less likely you perched with fishing hooks and throwing a line, the less likely you would pitch yourself forward, more than ever you towing out to past the river banks, unsteady but sure, broken glass and the stench of leaving, or arriving, whatever is more likely.
sudden harvest
suddenly angry welts on my back and just behind my ear, a throbbing walnut tucked under my jaw, embers just where my throat downturns and escapes my tongue. i am suddenly over and over again, highly aware and improbable, my skin reminds me, my body fails me, large boulders rumble from side to side within my skull. and she says in front of our daughter, do you want me to laugh like your bimbo? and there aren’t enough hours of sleep to put myself behind me, to put this behind me, to repair, undo, past due, time’s up, perhaps the body is finally taking it’s toll, stealing a pound of its own flesh, harvesting itself for i owe, for the damage i’ve done
orange killing
and the moon was this haunting orange looming over the horizon and i was driving towards it unstoppable undeterred and i thought of her how she wept of her father’s death how she held my hand and then kissed my lips and the night seemed to catch up with us and we were too far away to ever return home and all there was one empty gas station after another one abandoned motel after another and her skin was dusty and my eyes burned and i wonder now if he hadn’t died if she hadn’t asked me to bury him if she hadn’t asked anything of me at all would i have delivered the killing blow would i have begged for her forgiveness eventhough i had done exactly what she had wanted me to do?
real trick
the trick is, he says, is that there is no trick at all. it’s real because it simply is.
weekend snuck out
cross-eyed and stinky toed my son wraps one hand around the other like an evil mastermind and i am his henchman, i am his fool. how astute and he cajoles us all into carrying him around in front of our bellies as if he was directing us this way and that. the cold settles in and seeps around cracks and under doorways a chill that snakes ups calves and tongues the back of our knees. my daughter lunges herself from thing to thing, from watercolor crayons to dvds to the couch to chips to the bathroom before she poops in her pants. undeterred my wife goes through chores with a wariness reserved for those of us whose weekend has ended and the work week has snuck up on us. and i lounge and lounge with my music, with my wife, with my children, with my computers and do a little writing before the day ends.
he says, you need this as well, you need this to keep the madness at bay, this is yet another thing that makes you who you are.
always have been
the beauty of her, the slight dark within her, the pureness of her, desire and kindness, lust and forgiveness, a day alone, a day of skin on skin, without children, without interruption, to talk in the light, to talk of brownstones and empty rooms, to talk of then in the here and now, to begin again in the here and now, to dream again, to be living again, to be with her again, here and in the past, to begin again at the beginning, to fit the fragments to make as whole as we were, as we could be, as we always have been