Chapel

The church towers over the
neighborhood. It
is a constant reminder
that you are being watched.
Over your shoulder, peeking
at you between buildings,
always the center
your line of sight.

Maniac street sweeper does
not care about your life
or property. He is an urban
glacier, remaking the
landscape.

Ticket puncher or token taker,
squeezed into her daily costume
tries to shake off her skin.
She is tightly packed gunpowder.
Her hair is her is glowing
and her walk impresses concrete.

An
old man drags a dolly down
the street and stops
in front of the church. He
genuflects and bows his head.

He crosses himself. He lets
go of his cargo because
the church doors are open on
this August morning and he
has a direct view across the street
and up the stairs and over the pews
to the tabernacle.

His mother leaning over his shoulder
--
“Mostrar respeto. Es su lugar
de ser humilde.”
She fears brick and
placates mortar. She raised
masonry missionaries.
This city is a church
built on bones.
The earth is too much, you
must place your faith
into what is cut into it.

The first word is the hardest

Be a first word poet.

Compress the whole poem

into a tight little ball

along with your sketches

from memory,

a microphone chord,

a ukulele,

the Cats Eye Nebula,

and the clang of a free game 

of pinball.

Also your last letter home,

the Heart Sutra,

an awkward hand job,

Kansas at sun up,

buying a girl a shot of

Southern Comfort,

rusted batteries eating

through an old camera,

and the smell of Atlantic City,

squeeze all those things into

the first word of your poem

because it is infinite

and everything else is emptyness

Weather Report

Woody Guthrie wrote This Land Is Your Land
in February of 1938,
hitchhiking through Pennsylvania
on his way to New York. He felt
the mountain range wind laughing.
Over lean miles, he lay on his back,
feeling for the rumble on coming traffic
to disturb the unstirring wilderness.
There was no road but his road,
as I-80 dreamt him along.

If you look for America there, you'll see it
passing you in scenes, standing like billboards on the highway,
moving pictures of the great, empty
Sunday supper.
The oak doorway straining in the
weather. The toll road charming your
last few dollars. The chyrons pronouncing that
the corners have been turned. It's like the
bookmark melting into the page. The field
slowly becoming forest.

My father brought pieces of America with him
when he left. There was the dirt on his boots.
He held onto the sky in his pockets.
He could throw it on the wall, and it would
slowly drip into a mess on the floor.
This was not something he would worry about.

Remember, these roads are still holding
a space for you. Remember that Woody Guthrie
stood
in the middle of Pennsylvania
in February
and he saw beauty.

Smile

When we were young
we climbed onto swings
and tightly wound the chain
until the world started
spinning, and we lay immobile
at the center of creation
leaning back with arms spread
hoping to catch
and be caught

we had pocket cameras
and worried about the shots
dragging friends and drugs and
cars and loves into and out of
frame.

I would love to be in that
picture on the grass
in the April sun. I would
cut the river out and put
it in a scrap book. I
would have dug
into the snow
for pixels with sharp
edges
and maybe the smell
of chemicals from old fashioned
film, because light
doesn't hit a diode
quite the way it does
a piece of dried out
Kodachrome, does it?

Maybe the posing
was more important
than the picture

you are who you are when you are who you are for who you are

you who are are who are

I am as I am to you

following movement creates
the illusion of moment
creates the illusion of
existence
creates
a whole world
and understanding this
you smile brighter

A still shot torn
left on the cutting room floor
cigarettes on your voice

They had their chance
to clip yr wings

It's a Saturday
in June
and the sun scorched the
brightest parts of the sky.
I felt my way along
the cold, splintered ground.

It's morning and yr blood pumps
thick into this weighted tissue.
Your limbs jerk in pneumatic motion.
The sun is beautiful but deadly,
wreaking havoc over
the morning commute.

It's noon and I'm begging for change.
Just today's worth. Just to get me
through until I can maintain.
This is the end of the world,
what better time to stand
on ceremony. You may still
have a flag to raise. You may
still see heights to
ratchet yourself up
towards. I'm a civil
servant struggling to keep
the peace.
I'm a box truck driver, loaded
with jewels being smuggled
in the pocket, then right towards
the river.

Some of these guns are loaded
and others just feel heavy.
Next door they're taking
side bets on Judgment Day.
The sun keeps bleeding a little
farther down the line.

My Mother The Mountain

I drive along
pushing from 60 to 70 up to 80
mph
and I close my eyes

I am driving by sound
and the feel of my tires running
in the tracks worn into the
highway

my arms lock in front of me
and I feel the cool air blowing
of the mountain I am gliding down,
and I wish I was the mountain

eternal and eroding
solid and fragile
and I honk my horn occasionally
to warn any drivers nearby

I slide the car into neutral
and my right hand fumbles
on the steering column
and slides the key out

then I coast to your street
and your window is open
with that sad mystic music
dispersing into the neighborhood

I let my arms fall
but I don't open my eyes
and I think about that mountain
and its enduring wait

the sand is cool and damp
and stillness condenses on the
bottle

the ocean
the churning, tidal,
moon licked mad
ocean of our collective
dreams even stops
mid lap

We got off with
half the time
and all the gold
and songs are
still sung about
us I'm told

glittering tea-lights fill
the sea, and soon it's
brilliantly lit as
a vanity mirror
and I feel my face being washed out
in the glow and the warm
beer and tonight's expectations

sunset high over Chinatown
as linens dance on rooftops
and the next street over is empty, save
for a lone bicyclist leisurely weaving
down the silent movie brownstone engulfed streets
and on the next block men walk beneath babeling signs
while high above

pamphleters calmly pamphlet
and strangers hearts are tugged
while the streets hiss like burning tungsten
and a man bangs his fist on the table
upstairs a woman is undressing in the thick summer air

America is blanketed in thick licks of purple and orange
and the poetry sings from the recesses of this city

I realized I always see the city against the crisp sky
which means it's never just the city itself,
only it's role as foreground
while the world spins drunkenly
towards the morning's glow.

Because the world is round
round, and nothing is real,
nothing has to be real,
no one is looking
so everything
is
all right
right here
but next door
a few feet over
the stress
factors

I always see the city against the crisp sky
which means it's never just the city itself,
only it's role as foreground
while the world spins drunkenly
towards the morning's glow.

Some nights I’m the air
slightly turbulent
near yr wings

Some nights I’m blue air currents
hanging
silently waiting for motion

The purest thoughts, and the most dangerous thoughts, occur entwined on the ROAD

Weapon of Choice

You've always looked
to the moon
for target practice,
looking to shoot
straight through its
cast white face

man invented gunpowder
two thousand years ago
in China
looking to fire
rockets
to puncture the waiting
insistent
moon

the sky arches rhythmically
and we gotta want to blow
a damn hole it in,
pierce through from
this world in to the next
somewhere in our DNA
there's instructions
to fire wildly at the sky
and hope you can tear right
through it
and you were always more gunpowder
than nicotine and damn I think I felt the blood rush to my head again and it looks like I'm outta whiskey so I wonder if I can't draw this drunk out till sunrise

Sometimes I think I'm just
possibility

a hypothetical scenario
played out by the universe

and her eyes
are theoretical

not really seen, just
postulated

and this madness is really
a thought experiment


Sometimes I think
this all played out

over and over, in an
infinite film

tiny variables changing
various permutations

the sand on the beach
rearranging

the karaoke dying down,
I snuck out to bum a
cigarette off my Senator shouting
obsenities while the
last train pulled away
somewhere nearby

the old-dirt cowboy stood grinning
in his sharp pressed shirt and stetson,
which hid his gleaming white hair

he was somehow floating
slightly above the ground,
full of dharma, saying to me
"What's important is the Joy

That
Is
Why
We
Are
Here"

then he took a drag on his Marlboro, burning
it down to the filter, and inside
a whiskey drunk bodisattva
was singing for the lonely

You are
like the frost
dancing up
the window pane

delicate
and
intricate

The 15 Year Rule

Rolling Stone called it
"The 15 Year Rule",
that pop culture goes in
15 year cycles, once kids
have their own kids,
and those kids get older,
leaving their parents with
time and money
to get nostalgic

and now I'm stuck sitting
in a coffee house listing to
Hootie and the Blowfish
and remembering that a
wise man once said
"same as it ever was"

You Are Your Promised Land

we drank Black and Tans against
the old-forest night
like a lost tribe, without
toaster ovens or fix-a-flat
or the notion of instantaneous
and we moved slowly
on the down beat, and for
a moment I gave praise to
Jah who had delivered us
to Zion, looking down
from the mountain top,
the trees were towers and
the air was thin enough
that you could almost forget
it was even there

my home looked like
a mass of votives,
some, lit in prayer,
some, burnt out in silence,

it sits in an empty space
while the world collapses
around it
like Joe said
we're waiting for the flames
and I can feel my skin
slowly singe

sometimes all there is
is yellow and black,
fire and not fire,
everything that is pure in the world
and not everything that is not pure