Part God.
Part Daughter.
whole fish.
and bone sacrifice.
WE.
must swim. for a living.
After Birth
is the new After Life.
when you don’t remember how.
yes YOU.
remember?
there was water in her bodies.
way before there were all these bodies in her water.
SHE.
who reflects THE INVISIBLE.
is temptress
to Sea Men
those who could not foresee us
from their Big Ships
and britches
And bridges;
we burn them.
who needs them
when we are them?
THEY.
who cross us all the time,
forget that the passion of the ocean
raises her children
to be
volcanoes of the sea
watch the lava in our eyes
come to a slow boiling point.
Her next wave will be high
and THEY.
who Love Bait
more than Fish
will never discover us.
remember.
they.
only discovered
drowning
76
Independent thoughts
drowned out
machine gun fire and
car bombs exploding
colorful sparks.
A crimson flame
igniting the soul.
Violent forces
that destroy tranquility.
A war for freedom
puts us in chains.
Slavery of the mind.
A forcefulness upon the spirit.
My name has been added
to the list.
Barbed wire dreams
that result in
split cells,
split atoms,
a clone of humanity.
Brainwashed and burdened,
a flock thrown into slaughter.
A whimper clinging to hope
echoing on mother’s flesh.
Upon the mountains
the rocks slide.
Upon the islands
the rain pours.
Upon the deserts
the sun blazes.
Always a fight,
a pursuit of unhappiness.
A pursuit of misery is
a pursuit of the unjust.
And I am to raise a glass
to an unforgiving land
that feeds on the blood
and tears of us all?
77
1.
Self-immolation.
Freedom spreads like fire. Burn the names of martyrs into the lawns of your governments. Each day is a revolution of the planets.
2.
Taking up arms that hold you in the night. Clicking bullets against your heels. Piercing a statue of a dictator in the heart with an arrow.
3.
Sleepless dictators in their palaces watching Home Shopping Network marathons and buying water features that will run blood.
4.
Ailing dictators running out of veins. Veins collapsing like borders.
5.
Their war crimes on YouTube.
6.
Waking up without fear.
Black to black uniformed riot police.
Back to back revolutionaries.
Bodies bending under water cannons, like cards in the hands of a dealer. The valentine saints offering roses,
that soldiers forgot.
Kneel and pray. Kneel and pray.
7.
Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, Côte d’Ivoire, Palestine, Syria. I wish I could give you my blood for your wounded. I wish I could give you anything.
78
I.
everyone has cried a wall of tears witnessed brutal massacre watched countless others mourn their precious freedom. trusting that when we awoke we would still be among the living. we felt so helpless here on a level of compassion for one manifests itself in gestures as daring as saying they are no longer citizen. compassion for those must be practiced, to demand an end to the absurdity being fed to us by daily papers, stand with people the world. self interest exists in the reflections we are proud to be equals with the globe
II.
vocabulary fades, ghostlike in the world of last week. the date admitting is eternal describes those to draw a circle of definition. holding our breath waiting for the time for new sets to define the limits. it allows meaning to emerge retroactively to take shape in light of everything. some say it’s a hinge turning open to wait and see proliferation of the impossible means it’s possible. we pour out into the world from a cloud of dust and debris the unstoppable waits suspended, wondering what will take place.
III.
in the first days there was talk about using the unthinkable to dissolve into possibility. more people called to name themselves making it easier to contemplate. in the first days after it became clear that nothing could be ruled out. another act in another place took form: (an uneven wave of devastation moved outward & the immeasurable happened). we find ourselves at a remove that widens as the day passes. wanting to speak and care for those who are far but here our throats are closed. we listen to talk of unity as if debate and dissent were on the freeway. in brilliant sunlight blowing on the beat we pore over the details until the details proved too much to handle. moments when people meet consciously sudden as it was thought was too important to talk and be aware of what happened. we are at home together out of silence. we are fifty billion
IV.
there is a meditation on dying on evenings when a photo framed of peace is the only weeping. bitter tears that linger. i spoke to people who wanted to jump into suicides but couldn’t see the sorrow that i had felt. it was a logical thing to hold their hands. there is a meditation on dying on mornings when a song is played and the only crying of bitter pain is pressed into pillows. i laid in their sorrow and tried to understand their discomfort but i couldn’t see the sorrow they had felt. it was a logical thing to hug them. there is a meditation on dying in the afternoon when the world goes on with their day and i stand in the middle of crowded streets trying to ask people about their loss and they walk past me like ghosts. i extend my hand and only one woman takes my hand and she said it was a logical thing to shake my hand.
79
I am holding my friend Gino’s hand
and asking the army recruiter for more information –
About the Marines, please I say. He fidgets with his
cuff links, paws at his first communion crucifix through
his shirt, drags the back of his hand across the close-shaven
sandpaper of his chin. Gino is staring
him down through the eyeliner he wears
like a middle finger.
We watch this stranger. Caught between the trained
movements of a machine and the churned butter in his body.
Just like mine two months before when I said hell no
to a trip to the gay club.
I just don’t want to lead anyone on. It’d be, like, colonizing the space
I said. Which sounds a lot better than I’m uncomfortable. I wouldn’t
know how to stand.
What do I do when a song I like comes on?
In east Africa, I walked the dirt roads of a violent slum, my pinky finger
intimately wrapped around the smallest digit of the most infamous thug
on the block. He was my friend. It is how friends walk the streets.
When I greet my Iranian friend’s father, we embrace cheeks, twice.
In Thailand, my host casually patted my leg at the first family dinner.
I nearly jumped through the window, thinking he was reaching for something
else. Everyone la
ughed. Probably confused as to why this strange foreigner
had been trained to be so foreign to the gentle touch of a man.
A passerby gives Gino and I matching names. I tongue the word around in my
mouth. Feel the tender sting make a home in my torso. Stare at the word
Brotherhood splayed across a camouflage banner.
The recruiter stares down at the table, as though it holds the secret
code to life’s great questions. His corrected stutter and slightly overcompensating
stance, blends into the decorations behind him. So much so that I can barely even
tell he is still there. He pretends as if we are not. Begins sorting and then resorting
the three lonely pamphlets dwarfed by the large rectangular table where they now sit.
Boys, seriously, I’m just doing my job. Please . . . his mouth begs in a voice so small
and so human it makes me feel like I have just blurted out a secret this man has given
his life to guard, like freedom.
80
The seventy-nine-year-old American war hero, a Medal of Honor recipient, a pilot once known among his troops as ‘Striker’ or sometimes simply ‘Ace,’ sat alone in a retirement home, diapered, morbidly obese, in bed, in the corner of his dim lit room, before a closed window, beneath the projection of a muted TV, crying, his thick thighs chafed and rife with broken, cold blue veins, his gelid eyes leaden and weary—a soldier who was among the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a recipient of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star award, the Bronze Star, the Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal and the WWII Victory Medal—now seventy-nine, at 2300 hours on 23 August 2009, crying into the quiet, holding his chest, stooped on a stiff mattress in the corner beside the window, 5'10", 275 lbs., his wizened pallor transparent and flecked with blood-dry ulcers, also bald except for the thin strands of white matted from ear to ear at the bottom of his pasty scalp, his brows beaded with sweat, the hair on his back white and curling out of wan red scales of psoriasis, the joints of his arthritic fingers bent and inflamed, his left hand shaking and clutching a Colt, his right hand also trembling and loading the chamber, a box of bullets strewn between his heavy legs, his small wrinkled penis soaked inside the moist diaper, his sore shins aching, his bare toes curled in angst against the cool wooden floor—a recipient of the Flying Cross, the Air Medal and the Purple Heart—now fallen to his knees, hysterical, mumbling for God, and occasionally inserting the cold barrel of the revolver into his mouth beneath the muted TV before the closed window in his bedroom, alone; he, himself: a trigger down in the lean, desperate hours.
81
I met my grandfather for the first time
when I was spoiled
and thirteen
at a Central Valley IHOP.
We had driven four hours to meet him
I wondered all the while where he had been
and when his arrested presence
would begin to rot
like breakfast for dinner
The year 2001 was littered with Y2K wonder
and the world was becoming
red-cheeked
by its wet dreams for change
thirteen, for me,
was a pile of bloodied boy-shorts,
Columbine clippings without context
hidden beneath my trundle bed--
a time of pay phones at PJHS and
Collect Calls for changes
of clothing to cover
over-stuffed chests and greased new thighs and
all of this was just a tribute
to the roll-your-eyes “dittos” of my days
and my incapacity to
open my throat and
swallow Kahlua
made me a cross-legged
sitting duck
amongst long-legged,
deep-throated swans
and when my grandpa pulled up that day
(left-footed on the brake)
with his girlfriend, Evie, and
the six of us crammed into a booth built for four, I lied
and said I had never tasted poached eggs
(or booze,
or cock)
or turkey bacon
“can you imagine?”
and assumed the position
of the child I thought fit
for this smelly relic
of my father’s dine and dash father.
And amidst this screeching introduction,
I pushed the hypothesis around on my plate
that change is a convention and
that forgetting is “growing up”
that forgiveness is a sloppy mess of scrambled sides.
And I wondered when my poached,
baby self would finally return
my calls
and agree to drive with her family to
breakfast--
to make small talk
with our mouths full of cracked times
to declare them over and easy.
82
The trick of any city is to find who gives the free toast and eggs hot water for coffee and
if they’ll let you bathe by them
it’s a good thing, but if not there is always the Pilot.
In Portland it’s Sisters of the Road,
they will make you a meal if you’ll promise to clean something
but everyone promises to clean and there’s really always nothing
that needs to be done, so they’ll give you a rag and tell you
to clean the walls for a while.
In Santa Cruz there’s Subrosa where they’ll trade you any book
if you’ll act like you care about the coming revolution.
And they’re all such good people.
And they’re always doing something.
They’ll make you really hope their silly dream might come true.
There’s the Star House in Columbus,
where they won’t let you curse
and everyone’s got a baby and the babies are very rude.
And in Pittsburgh I forget the name but they’ll put you to work.
They’ve got hammers and nails there, I forget what it’s called.
Any time you leave a place,
you will speak a lot more often to the people you’ve left.
For a week or a month, you will know that you’ve gone
and you’ve ruined everything.
All the good memories seem to resolve themselves
in mistaken eternities. We’re always thinking
we’ve destroyed a forever.
But all of God’s creatures deserve to be eaten, or
even without Him, we’re all lackeys for something.
In one small evaluation, that’s what all of this is:
the acceptance of “creature,” giving up the claim to “god,”
bopping between homes because you know you’re not the story,
you hope only now to become a worthy trope,
a messenger of something,
where “the medium is . . .”
In Missoula, in a place at the base of Mt. Jumbo, there is
a girl named Kate. I want to tell you I know her but that’s the thing
with knowing. It’s more wish than fact more times than we like.
Anyway, Kate will write you a song, and you can crash
on her floor, and some time in the day she’ll curl next to you,
and together from the bed you’ll watch something bad, Nick Jr. or
some dopey movie you’ve both already seen.
And she doesn’t seem to mind
if you suck up the smell from the crooks of her arms,
She doesn’t seem to mind if you use her for finding:
some taciturn love in her unlaundered bed,
or infinite summer
in the daytime cartoons
and the big strokes of sunlight
breaking in
through the glas
s, or whatever it is
that you needed to see. For every moment, there is a past tense
version, a place further up
with boring banjo music, with a new brand of cigarettes
(whatever’s on sale),
an unboxed bag of wine, and talking in circles
about what happened before.
Like, I had a train-friend once who preached
the Word of God to his dog
vis-à-vis hunger by way of his own.
I met his folks once. They said “the Word of God”
more often than anyone
and condemned us to damnation or something.
My friend’s folks, you might guess, were really fine people
as leads in a different morality play, but what I need for my spiel
is bit hypocrite parts. This is called story (what can you do?
We’re still terrible messengers)
and aside from subsistence (the eggs and the toast; the sun
and the earth and the air),
it’s the only thing a human
can really say he needs. What the fuck is a latte?
What’s consumer reporting,
or what was it that morning, with the sun breaking in?
When the sacred, muted laps of small chores began again,
the way the place hums
with people like blood cells, the coffee beginning
to gurgle, the guy who can’t stand you cutting the bread thick,
and the truce he’d called by passing you the
High Life bottle filled
with hot sauce before you’d even asked. The big rock candy
mountain of it all. And some guy in some room
probably at the same time,
was flipping his shit about the President’s birth.
“Don’t be that guy” is the advice we’re always offering.
Don’t be that guy, and definitely don’t be his wife.
At all times, there is something better to do,
memories to be having
or making—the way, that small morning,
that everyone mostly just looked and didn’t talk,
except every few minutes about what they might do,
what time the library opened and where the fish bite,
and the girl in the corner who only spoke to the dog
like a bona fide adult.
She asked him, “What do you think, Petey?” like she planned
to use the answer,
or like she really just honestly wanted to know.
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