Untitled #4

Years later I found a long strand of hair

lightly constricting the fan on my computer.

My brother had been to visit me

so she and I had slept on the floor

beneath my bed.

That breath from the past

was as bright as her hair was in the starlight.

It did not look its age,

as it had not managed to acquire dust.

I now no longer have that computer

or that lock that glowed

like an alchemically twisted harp string,

but I cannot forget that peculiar

freshness which seemed to have resulted

from just recently deciding to be gold.

Sunburn

I.

On the stairs

a wasp

(I think it is only one)

has,

on hot days,

made vicious angry

vibrations.

I had thought

that we had

an arrangement.

When the little

bastard

planted pain

onto the top of my foot,

I swore

loudly

and continued my plodding

with

my left hand around a bottle of rum

and my right hip supporting

a three liter box of wine.

They were taken to freezers

or refrigerators,

and to avoid further throbbing

I found a box of Arm and Hammer

baking soda

in the door of my kitchen

Kenmore.

I had to clean dirty dishes

out of the sink,

then prop my five small toes

and their base

under cold water,

then bathe it in

white powder.

Like a miracle

the rhythm subsides

as fault-line cracks emerge

with drying palliatives.

It does not hurt now

but tomorrow the swelling will

remain.

I won’t

hold it against

him.

I

would

probably

try to sting

me

too.

II.

There is a crack

in the seal

of the bottom right

corner of the door.

The floor

is littered

with

clothing, books,

and my movie collection

Chairs stand

and the directors

of an orchestral

voodoo rite-

they call themselves Man Man-

invoke a legendary set of gods

as the cheap speakers

pulse.

In one

(no more or less)

chair

she sits

with a book

of Bukowski

(a dead man longing for escape).

After a little while

even cheap wine

bursts through its skin

and tastes as though

it were

a masterwork.

Mine rests

in a

glass bottle,

originally made

for a low-fat, creamy

mixture of coffee and milk.

I hold it

with two fingers

in front

and a thumb behind.

Soon

I will find

it necessary to again

go to fill it,

all 13.7 fl oz.

I am quite good

at this.

It is perhaps

to be expected

after years of practice.

Her toes rock with the music.

Outside of the deep

bricked

walls

of my home

a city bus

rumbles

until the light

changes.

It will be back

at some point.

III.

They are tearing my building

down.

There was a woven welcome mat

that would be encountered

when the stairs

were ascended.

Once.

Over weeks of wind

it was buffeted,

elementally spun

to a point

slightly closer to

my door

(cracked seal)

than to hers.

A well meaning

stranger

or possible

lover or friend

kicked it,

yellow and red threads and all,

until it sat

squared to the ceiling

on that concrete

portal to my cavern.

One day I had tried

to look

out of my kitchen window.

The glass was obscured.

I’d never been curious

about the view before that point

and so I was surprised

when there wasn’t one.

My neighbor

(I don’t know her name)

one day

brought the mat back

to her doorstep.

When she moved away

she packed it

with the rest of her things

in the back of a U-Haul van.

They are tearing my building down

but there are pieces of it

that those bastards

can’t have.

Oil

It is disconcerting

to feel brilliant

when so many mad persons

appear to view themselves

in much the same way.

The schizophrenic with a sailboat fetish

the brunette with gashes on her wrists

the balding man with a love

for French existentialists.

Certain ideas perish

after reading books,

slim like prayers,

that tell the truth about doves

and the hidden cost of smiling

at the dawn.

When simple solutions

are proposed,

their appeal is palpable.

The offering of trite absolutions

often hums in the fibers of being

with a special resonance.

Everything beautiful

about the ocean

is also repugnant.

Mostly people only enjoy it

because it is not utterly

stained

with our blood.

It has instead a more relentless

decay,

the gift of a very old forest

as it turns the salt to water

and then back again.

Olive trees live two thousand years

and write so few poems.

By our typical thievery,

whereby we squeeze all

the life

and increase

from a land that time has turned

to desert,

we can understand

those gnarled trunks

and their tide-slow dance,

and the way that it feels

to be a genuine structure

in time and space;

to inflict the stricture of scripture

and re-imagine modern horrors

as near-eternal absurdities.

In some odd way it

is intimated

that moments are preserved

by painting them

to canvas

film

or darling little

binary packets.

Images are made

continuous

and etched

under the sun

and the moon

and the table lamp.

The myth of preservation

is itself

a myth

born from lies

about truth.

With a yellow flare it claims

that a photograph,

skillfully taken,

will whisper

heavy-tongued

into an unsuspecting ear.

Faint wisps of raven-worshipping hair

were emphasizing the bones

that under cloud-white skin

told bold tales of barely

hidden skeletons.

There is a chronic inflammation of the soul

which Pascal

(no great anatomist)

has placed in the midst

of every man;

and presumably every woman,

although he didn’t specify:

it devoured Nietzsche from tail to head

and left gashes in Keats,

made Vonnegut ask horrifying questions in public

and told bad jokes

to Thompson

from the depths of drained shot glasses.

He said that they were searching for God.

Her eyes had the look

of the doe caught unaware

in the early morning.

Her iris,

with the palette

of Gilgamesh’s Hell,

was standing as a tantalizing

query

as to what

the morning mirror

shed its light

upon.

She was looking

elsewhere.

Out in that distance

were the worries

that die in the spring air

when the land rises up

to choke the empty threat

of snow.

It is

impossible to tell

if she is

full of breath

or dying of a hollow chest,

but perhaps she is neither

and is instead

laying at an odd angle

for repose.

This dart of intimacy

finds its own end.

In the morning birds will

sing outside of my window

at the sight of the sun,

or else

the airy touch

of one another.

What do they know that we don’t know?

What are they singing of?

But you cannot take a picture,

with point-and-shoot or purist’s rig,

of grass weaving itself to the wind,

or old warriors nodding their heads

at the rare few who have managed

to live through these many years,

and say that you have given

the story of what went on before.

Although we know this, we expect

them to explain

the crushing death of a nation

with a boy,

face bloodied,

being pulled from under rubble,

or else the legacy of murder

from above

in fields where

only children and mothers

found their graves.

She is digging salt in the world beneath a world.

She is in the bed of a man she’d like to burn.

She is saying that she’d rather not.

She is sleeping in the marshes and waiting for a ghost.

What does she know that we don’t know?

What does she know

that we don’t know?

Which dark secrets

has she laid under stones

in the shadows?

Does she know why she’s alone?

Two Poems

Atlanta


there are chimneys
like exclamations
of existence
as if to claim that
Sherman
had never come.

So I sit with a
cotton ball
being spun in my hands,
the seeds like
hail
as they
are robbed of their homes
and rendered desolate.

Still there are trees
bearing the scars
of their ferric
bowties,
steel ablaze
in the time of war.

and on the floor
are jars of clay
that protect
bourbon,
that close eyes
with a solemn
X X,
that provide
respite
from the summer heat.

If there were
instead
children huddled
inside of corners,
or girls of fifteen
condemned to loosened
corsets
and the brutal touch
of a stranger
clad in blue,

then those that
clap their hands
to call the attention
of the dead
would understand
the savage grace
of bricks
crumbling in flame

and know why
there are those that
cannot bear to
look at the land
unless they weep.



#2 Dzerzhinsky

Beria’s office
once was blocked
by a heavy armoire.

The lair of those
Lords
of
the sword and shield
has
at long last
with
the help of blood
made fertile
the soil
of that barren land.

In Rome
the parapets soar.
Miters rest
with considerable élan.
The shoes of the pontiff
are dyed a deep crimson.
It is a great
fortunate
occurrence.
It prevents
his environs
from causing stains.

A Poem I (mostly) stole from someone else

Grape tomatoes are not extremely pricey
but I have never had one.

I am told that something in them
gives the illusion of gently lapping
at a rubber tree with a liquid core,
a latex bomb with water inside,
always about to burst.

In those moments no taste emerges
except that sugared savor of expectation and tension,
like the first time of reaching for a hand to hold
or the icy rush of saying goodbye and then
reaching for the door:
that escape from solitude
or else its wintry pole.

A wise person, I am told,
will sometimes nearly
bite
into
a grape tomato
only to place it back in its carton
at the last second.

Strawberries and
cherry tomatoes
also do not cost very much.
They too come in little cartons.
I suppose they do much
of the same kind of thing,
although they may be less expensive.

On Home Schooling and the Offering of Political Asylum

The Romeike family was recently extended political asylum by the United States government. The New York Times reports: “In a harshly worded decision, the judge, Lawrence O. Burman, denounced the German policy, calling it “utterly repellent to everything we believe as Americans,” and expressed shock at the heavy fines and other penalties the government has levied…”

What policy could raise such ire? What could be so horribly repellent to everything embodied in our country and our people? The end result of the sad truth of the German society will scandalize the weak of spirit. In Germany, it’s illegal for you to not put your children in school. Home schooling is not only looked at as a means to create socially challenged individuals, but is even further punished by means of fines and even the threat of having one’s children taken away. Luckily, this monstrous injustice has been set to rights.

Instructive to the political groups of the day are certain observations: from 2005-2007, the U.S. government extended political asylum to about 40,000 individuals per year. Taking a low estimate of the casualties inflicted by the state-sponsored violence in Darfur, 300,000, which would only count death and not the widespread rape and many other nightmares of everyday life in the Sudan, from 2003 (the “start” of the current phase of the conflict) to today you end up with ~50,000 people every year who are dying because of the ethnic group that they are in: more than the whole of asylum spots offered for the whole year.

Clearly, something is missing. Happily, it has been cleared up for us. Mass murder and pandemic rape are not enough to summon the fury of a Southern judge: home schooling appears to be.
The Third World needs to swiftly move to ban home schooling in all portions of their country. That the bans should be enforced with brutality and callousness to human life goes without saying: it will in any case largely be par for the course. Perhaps it would further move judges in asylum cases to reflect that a country, that didn’t even provide education services would criminalize and marginalize people for DARING to education their own children in the ways that they saw it, surely constituted a clear and present threat (especially with current violence, the world is after all an unsavory place) to life, liberty, and human rights.

Certain rights must be held to be sacrosanct, and people coming from lands writ in the tongue of a nightmare will benefit from the proposals to ban home schooling in impressive and quantifiable ways: a child with kwashiorkor whose parents just wanted to teach morality properly will be embraced by a country that values its education. A woman who has been raped many times, living in an area where gathering firewood is a high risk activity, will finally have the security to shake off the shackles of her government and teach her children the history of Christianity in Africa, a subject not even offered in area schools.

Children, after all, are the world’s most precious resource. The Esteemed Judge’s acknowledgement of this is merely the first step towards ensuring that all children, be they healthy and well-fed or in the throes of vitamin deficiency and infectious disease, have the things that we as Americans most value.

Just as this European, evangelical Christian family now have earned a place in this last bastion of freedom and recognition of human rights: through blind justice.