some kind of point. Don’t you hear me?
Entomologists study ants. Even if I think
the world would keep grinding on without them.
Someone should tell this to us who die early.
A saxophone is called an ax. The horn
is an ax. Ask Jericho. Nothing can stop a song.
Think chain gang. Or ants whistling
inside cracks. Because they must.
The CEO of Happiness Speaks
Mostly what I do is exercise my lungs
in praise of everything:
Meryl Streep movies. Porcelain
roosters. Daisies. Fuchsia teddy bears
gifted to better halves at carnivals.
Every bike trail and alleyway. Every
single road I walk is lined with the signage
of joy. And I’m not exactly complaining
but imagine being this way full-time.
Compare it to staring at the sun too long—
What happens after. Goldenrod grid
viewpoint. World as scatterplot.
My punch clock ticks from the second
I wake and it’s hard to tell the difference
between shifts. Think pleasure as computer-
generated dots. Palm trees like pinstripes.
Think I’m crazy if you want
but the world actually moves me maybe
once every year. Last night it happened
at a party, when Jackie told a story
about a kid who couldn’t tie her shoes.
Mornings at the tired bus stop. Try
after try, she’d loop and swoop her heart out—
folding in front of peers. But before first bell
in the bathroom stall. Or during gym
in a low-traffic corner,
her best friend, Kim, fashioned her laces
into elegant bows. She did this
with a smile. For years. Imagine
an act selfless as ducking down.
As bending at the knee, away from a crowd.
Some of what I do requires overwatering
in favor of a happy, local clientele.
My job is important, and I like it and all.
But I love that Jackie’s story was told
in first person. Think genuflection
with no motive other than praise.
Think of Kim and Jackie making my job
easy but hard. Picture Jackie carefully
sliding off white Keds
to savor Kim’s craftsmanship. Envision
those loops. Indefinitely intact.
Now, think of what makes you happy.
Get back to me. We’ll do lunch.
Self-Dialogue with Marcus
In every movie there’s a snaggletooth thug who pimps broken
speech or a snob poodle who shits for a living named Marcus.
It’s like Marcus is the sleepless infant who weeps without fail
while you’re tonguing her navel by starlight. Fuck every Marcus.
He’s why you sail a hole-punched keel to nowhere you’ve never been.
Rastas love Garvey. Raised Methodist, died Catholic, ask Marcus
to name a market for his prayers. Miller’s no better. His bass
music’s fairly funky but he’d write in couplets too. Marcus,
who did this to you? Mr. Schenberg, who says this CK
brief packages right? Why not free-ball? It’s gotta be Marcus
meaning Mars, or Ares in Rome. Today you got space suit high
in your underwear to declare self-war. That’s just like Marcus
Aurelius penning that progressive, tender self-help text
then stoning 10,000 Christians. Empire was his Marcus
for that. In Marcus, Iowa, there’s one market, five large churches
& a kid who can’t absolve his bass ax-jones. What’s his Marcus
tell me that. You can’t tell what’s homestead or honed to save your life.
Nights you shrivel through a rib in your yacht’s gut. & though Marcus
can rarely swim in film, still, you live to drown another day.
& the Marcus for this Marcus is most certainly Marcus.
Something Like Sleep
Something like sleep dangled our heads from great heights. All of us, snuggling up to book bags and laptops in muddled morning light. A hard halt brought snow-flecked wind and three shadows to our heated bedroom—two of which shot past and rang through opposite sides of the aisle, arms outstretched, slapping what sounded like knees and seats. Something like a lightbulb triggered inside the bus and a fair-haired woman shivered in a dingy pink cardigan near the driver’s seat. Her fine jawline was full of life despite two types of red blooming from cheeks—only one of them chapped. Maybe we were all hungover—too taxed from late nights at the office or library to wake. Perhaps, we were in another world—our headphones too jacked to decipher the driver when he rose from his seat, shrugged those monstrous shoulders, and said whatever he said. Seeing this commotion, two tiny blond girls, pigtails peering from wet skullcaps, stomped toward the teary spectacle. Forming a wall before the driver, they spun the woman’s knees, nudged her hamstrings into winter wind streams, heads heavy with what pulls at my pen.
I’m a Sad, Sad Man. So Sad
I can’t remember how to ride a bus right.
Just the other day, I forgot who I was
and couldn’t budge to help a human in need
because the pen in my pocket was poking
my thigh saying, Use me. Use them. Write
their stories. As if I am not them—
that woman and her two little girls, mounting
some ten-ton thing daily, fare or no fare
rust bucket but not broken down, traveling
at a pace beyond my control. And how sad
it is, because I’m really not them. Most days
I keep at least a buck in my pocket to pay
the driver and if not, a briefcase, which says
I’m good for it. That was, somehow, miserable
to admit. I’m only telling you this because
you’re reading a poem, probably spend
perfectly good bar nights feeling the world
deeply with the ballpoint pen in your pocket
and though a tad abnormal to discuss
all humans want to understand everything
and for everyone to understand us.
What I can’t understand is what makes me
see differently, any three people on a bus.
Maybe the saddest thing
in the world, is not knowing how to feel
cold, plastic bus seats without thinking
of narrative arc—the ten thousand pains shifting
uncomfortably from cheek to raw-red cheek
and at any given moment. This.
To You
They were curious.
The twelve baggy black T-shirts
chanting onstage at the local college bar.
Their chorus: Who’s sucking dick, tonight?
And from the back of the room
where I noted polos and slick dresses
bobbing “yes” to chest-throbbing bass,
every belt crack, backhand, and tongue bash
in me said, Son, do the right thing
and stay in your line.
A line I took to mean, Mind your business:
Don’t spring the fire alarm.
Don’t set the joint ablaze.
Don’t rush a live mic
pleading to the baggy black shirts, Stop.
Please. There’s a spindly raised hand
with chipped red polish quaking too fast
in this smoke-free bar. And a dainty mom
lugging her son piggyback
leveled a letterman to answer your call.
I’m trying to tell you I’ve been over this
again and again. What type of man would
let a
child in this poem? What type of man
could stand in that building and not know
how to be a normal human being?
Could not glean, exigently, something
of addiction, its manic blood-itch?
Comprehend what can happen
when certain little boys in this poem
can do nothing but stay in their lines?
See, I’m doing it again. Damn this
business of frame and context. Dam
these sorry lines and hear me now.
I don’t rightly know who sucked off whom
or what variety of human I’ve become.
But if you don’t close this book; I mean
drop this poem straightaway—you, me,
that boy, his mom, and every drunk dancing
fool in this shattered glass-disco-ball world,
we are all of us, altogether fucked.
Nature of the Beast
I cooked us dinner. Now,
you can wash the dishes.
This logic’s like
a jolly, wide-framed stockbroker
giving an elderly woman the Heimlich
at a bistro then sneering, Now
pick your dentures off the tile and finish
my plate of Brussels sprouts. No, it’s like
an aardvark snouting a barefoot kid into
a liquor store, saying, I sniffed the fire ants
from your sandbox. Now—about that brew.
Do I have a giant purse full of Geritol?
Am I saying my wife’s an anteater? No.
She’s vegan. Of course, she would want
you to know she’s no linebacker either.
And she’s not. But one could say Jill
possesses linebacker-esque attributes
when bolting through our studio door
shoulder first, wearing black leather,
walked-in pumps, tackling her man
by his leg with her tongue. Go ahead
scrutinize. But you should hear how
she tears into me. I’ll kiss her brow.
She’ll suckle my neck. We’ll descend
upon the couch, ankles in my lap as I rub
her feet, and she’ll go, Can you take the dog
out. I worked all day. And I will
absolutely lose it, because I’ve been writing
this all day, which is harder than her gig
playing with lab rats. Plus, there’s the matter
of grammar. A man who can dismantle
and reerect a world with words can certainly
walk Chauncey, our basset hound, down a flight.
Yes, I actually tell her this. Not that it matters.
Jill may as well be shoving me down
the stairwell when she frowns like I’m shorter
than I am, exclaiming, Thanks for the help, hun!
In the courtyard, I watch a portly man
in a petite blazer work his girth free from
a steering wheel and waddle toward the building,
embracing a pack of toilet paper like a life raft.
Chauncey peers at me droopy eyed, slurs the grass,
and we lap the creaky man on our way upstairs.
Hearing the door swing wide, Jill jumps
off the couch to apologize for what she does
not know. I stop her two sentences in.
I kiss her cracked palm, sliding a finger in
my mouth. We nick the dog
when she yanks it out, shoving me groundward.
And we lie there; until the sun joins, then beats us up,
before I nuzzle her awake saying, Jill. Something
about what I do has rendered me a bit sensitive:
to transparent reasoning, stockbrokers, people
mixing up ability and desire, competition,
aardvarks. Do you get what I’m saying here?
She looks down at my cheek on her chest, smacks
the top of my head with her lips, and mumbles,
If I could, I really would trade you jobs.
I smile—a little nervous. But mostly, relieved.
Maybe the Saddest Thing
is a shovel sighing earth—
is what’s stirring beneath a well,
where I always go: that suck and push
of air, swelling the chest—its starting
place. That I couldn’t end there
is as sad and annoying
as watching a pet mouse collide and
collide with its mirrored-glass quarters:
is any ordinary beast acknowledging himself
with a battering ram—dense stump
that slams through the wrong door
in a smoky hallway, reconstructing
the face of an elderly woman
as dumb gold teeth can do.
It’s the slim probability of that and
the swinging arm of death falling
for the woman’s granddaughter
at the funeral, who has stems as
if a comet’s trail could begin at an ankle
and end in a dark, stockinged thigh.
And just like that, we’re back:
in the chamber which regulates all.
If you’re locked outside its door
or cannot find this room, I sing:
You are lucky as a virgin.
If you’re unsure this place exists—
this saddest thing—
Fine. Don’t believe in it
or me. But please believe in this
latched dirt-box of a house
speaker strapped to my back, blasting
everything blue—the same.
* * *
BEATS, BREAKS & B-SIDES
* * *
Ars Poetica in the Mode of J-Live
It’s like this, Anna:
shell banged bare
with a bat, Anna
vat of gunpowder
shed, Anna
famished bird
fed off scraps, Anna
gut-itch flown
south for life, Anna
dropper’s stool self-pecked
slow, Anna
wince or stool
dropped again, Anna
bird sifting
through his shit, Anna
slug built by a bird’s
beak, Anna
small handgun.
It’s like this, Anna.
Like a gun
the bird doesn’t grip.
It’s like this, Anna.
It’s like that.
It’s like that
and like this.
When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong
for Rashad who said
The difference between bad & good
rap is the difference between
silicone & flesh. He legit yelled that
shit through a karaoke mic
while arranging end caps
on an overnight shift. & I swore
he wasn’t lying. Wasn’t dropping
some inverse analysis
about the sad plasticity of pop.
His shopping cart quaked
as he snatched a glittered
jewel case, like
If we stock one more
garbage-ass album, homeboy
I’ma burn Circuit City to the ground.
What happened next began
with a black Bic lighter
sparked & lowered to the corner of
a cardboard box. The corners of
my lips slow-motion switched
from laughter to Don’t do it!
as he drew an aerosol air spray
from his slacks. I knocked
the can from his hand but it was too late—
the box burst into a small campfire
& we stomped out
the wack CDs. It was a long walk
to the restroom. He tented his
left thumb under the drain, said
Niggas be spending they last
on making good records. Then go
hungry cause we won’t
stock ’em. Normally
ice in the base of a glass, “Big Brother”
Shad had lost his cool. Rifling
through his CD wallet he flipped
each page with a silver box cutter.
I watched him slice open bricks
of blank discs & load up two dozen CPUs.
What was played was circular
braggadocio. Baritone gusto
about being better than every man
breathing, underrated & hated on. Whole
songs saying, I’ve been feeling this
way for eternity. Been
scribbling rhymes since
my brother passed in ’89. &
I spit to box out my rents’ chronic
scrapping. & I’ve suffered more
than most in a short time
alive so my story’s realer than yours.
I wanted to tell our manager
I stayed for the music. That
I had to hear what fever-inducing
swagger sounded like.
Needed to watch
Shad line shelves with unkempt
voices. That the store needed it too.
But surveillance cams
saved me the trouble
of punking out.
For ten years, I’ve kept
Shad’s voice tucked
just beneath my tongue. & today
I think he was saying
the important art feels real
talks the talk, and probably
that’s enough. Or
are those my words in his mouth?
All I know
is that on any given day
there are two types of people, at least:
One who’d go hungry—get fired
to be heard. & one who’d hide
inside a maze full of lines.
When faced with the statement “there are more black men in jail than college,” I think Order of Operations
P.
I think I distrust statisticians.
I think this is problematic.
I think the square root of this quote is a question.
I think the question equals at least five answers.
E.
I think history is the base of most things.
I think the superscript could read 1619.
I think the superscript could be the current year.
I think history is a linear accumulation.
M.
I think if math is wealth then wealth is history.
Maybe the Saddest Thing Page 3
