Medley

When my heart begins to freeze,
I don my Sunday morning jacket.
I sleep in shade of screaming trees,
finding peace amidst the racket.

I don my Sunday morning jacket,
as I count the dimming stars:
finding peace amidst the racket,
making cots of hard-top cars.

As I count the dimming stars
I am also counting crows.
Making cots of hard-top cars,
their squawking grows a bit verbose.

I am also counting crows
whose speech is modest as a mouse.
Though their squawking grows verbose
when playing to a crowded house.

Whose speech is modest as a mouse?
Ask my friends Elliott and Kurt.
When playing to a crowded house
they found a cure to all their hurt.

I ask my friends Elliott and Kurt
when my heart begins to freeze.
They found a cure to all their hurt,
asleep in shade of screaming trees.

The Strange

I have stories for you,
Which I have believed without seeing:

A woman and a man fall in love.
They were drunk, high on
the Spirit that binds us all,
which they fed to each other
with silver teaspoons
out of a brown leather bottle.

A woman is raped.
They were looking for her husband
but her husband wasn’t home.
He was out, tending to his flock.
When she came home
she was naked, bloody and
covered in glass.
Her husband came to America
to ask for prayers.

A woman asks for food,
but she calls God
a different name.
And so she starves,
along with her child.

A woman weeps
as a criminal dies,
whose only crime
is to be born whole
and love those who could not
love him in return.
He asks her later,
“Why are you crying?”
And so she stops;
and learns to shrug
her shoulders instead.

Which of these stories is strangest?
On my best behavior
I wish it were stranger to be so cruel.

Passion

They say it burns, like fire,
but I have seen blazes, and
this isn’t like them at all.

The strike-anywhere matchsticks we struck
against the soles of our boots,
held in our hands until we yelped,
throwing them down on the dirt floor,
crushing them into soot.

The first cigars we lit on the porch,
The soft click of the lighter,
the smell of searing flesh
hissing as I set my jaw against
the firebrand I held in my clenched fist.

The campfires we built in the Gila,
where we would roast marshmallows
And toss the skittish salamanders we found
into the white heat, until their scales shriveled
and their eyes popped like roman candles.

The bonfire we set out on the mesa
under the ancient heat of the stars.
You were coked up, liquored up
and thought you could vault the damn thing.
I never could look at your face again.

Every prayer, every kiss,
Every stroke of the pen
stays the tipping hand.

Eulogy

What a maddening, unknowable pair you are.
You bought me shoes that never fit,
that I began to outgrow the moment they touched my feet.
When I asked you for a roadmap, you handed me a globe.

I never knew you.

I met your cousins last night, Anguish and Exaltation.
Not quite as put together as you, perhaps, but who can be?
You’re The All-American Couple, with stars and stripes
adorning your carefully starched lapels.
They said you kicked them out of the house for being too rowdy.
They make off-color jokes and smell like Ten High, so what?
At least they know how to have a good time.
I woke up with three broken knuckles
and a four-Advil headache, which may not be
the greatest souvenir, but it’s more than you’ve ever given me.

Last month I went out to the country
to stay with your Aunt Euphoria and Uncle Melancholy.
Phoria still loves to talk, but Mel
just sat on the porch all weekend,
muttering to himself and counting the rings
on the fallen trees in the backyard.
Auntie asks how you are doing, and I say
“Perfectly well,” because that’s exactly what you always tell me.
So it’s not exactly a lie, though I don’t believe it myself.
Auntie sends me home with a batch of homemade brownies.
Uncle leaves me with some choice words of wisdom,
and a smile that means more for the effort involved.

I’ve heard you used to be King and Queen
in a time when there were only three primary colors in the world.
Your ultimatums and decrees were the law back then,
but these days I leave your house hungry and fluent in platitudes
after all my visits, which are increasingly less frequent.

Happiness and Sadness;
When I finally hear the news
(which I’m expecting any day now)
I won’t shed a tear and I won’t crack a smile.
I’ve made all the effort I could, but
there is nothing left to celebrate,
nothing there to mourn.

Soapbox Moments

“Lift your head and look out the window
Stay that way for the rest of the day and watch the time go
Listen! The birds sing! Listen! The bells ring!
All the living are dead, and the dead are all living
The war is over and we are beginning...”

-Stars, “In Our Bedroom After the War”

When you accused Sea World of losing its integrity,
I laughed into your ear, soft and low and too long like
A widow-that-could-have-been on the morning after the war.

I think you thought I was mocking you, but I mostly wasn’t.
I don’t think you know how much I like to watch you live,
your life laid out before you like a minefield

that you run through day after day, laughing as the earth
shudders and erupts behind you, maybe hoping for the one
that takes pity on you and gives you sleep. It’s the way

you watch movies like each impending scene might
open its mouth and swallow you whole, as if the world
might finally make sense looking out from the depths of its belly.

I delight in the silly, girlish things that excite you, and I hang
on every note of the symphony you may or may not be
trying to conduct with your flourishing hands. I can hear it

when you whisper in my ear, soft and low, saying something
about phony magicians and delicately carved salt-shakers.
They are words that keep my heart doing its thankless work,

knowing that someone still cares about the simple,
majestic arc of a breeching whale.

I knew a boy once, whom I thought dead,
who used to pick onion grass and play roller hockey
and feed ants to antlions. Imagine my surprise when
later that afternoon I spied you dancing with him,
outside your bedroom window.