Chaser

Chaser 8/15

Was literature never enough – it seemed like a rib removed
Sitting in plain sight on the top shelf
            – was it keeping its dust well?

Bones become air-filled as they age
Lighter and lighter they become kindling

In your room – late at night – watching this part of you
It never seemed important enough to keep inside

You scratch up the walls trying to locate a femur of emotion

Does the formaldehyde smell of the funeral home lock night terror
A jarred finger-bone – a puce of some dead saint even
            – do these things make you more?

I know that you wanted to be a serious writer – your face tells
That you thought it would be romantic and pious

Romantic piety looks like shimmering frustration
            – how could you know that?

Beaner

Beaner 8/13

Standing on the corner they are sitting and waiting for the trucks to come up and then they jump in the back and they go pick oranges or lettuce or put up a building or take one down or they paint something or maybe they have a party I’m not even sure but they are dropped off as the sun sets out over the flat spaces

He worked in the kitchen and cooked and he was pretty nice tall and thin like a pole or someone who doesn’t eat well enough but is doing OK and when they came we thought it was immigration but it was just the regular cops and it was because he was hitting his wife none of us even knew he was married

Oiling

Oiling 8/12

The little candles tinker in the dark of Westminster
Each a hope-prayer against something that could fill the room
            stuff out the boxed seats            parade by Mary, Queen of Scots’ cinder block
And in the font the old hands are dipping
The folds of skin smoothing with held waters

After a storm the potholes become just as mirrored as the rest

These folds are running aligning themselves and pressing
            they are wringing out themselves over the basin
In the shadows of flickering red old skin is onion-skin is paper in high illumination
Over the room the ceiling arches in bowed eyebrows
            each a painted expression of surprise            awe

Multi-gym

Multi-gym 8/11

Bend me down to my knees and enter me by force
Split me open - melon - I spoil as your thighs run
Hair on hair you are rubber banding bone against rail
Tell me - can hear my tendons harping

Peal

Peal 8/10

There are not enough angels

Realty

Realty

The lot across the street is being cut down
                        Weeds have been grown for three months
They suck at the air, choking in the humidity
                        A soft plastic thread spinning becomes a hack
It is watching dominos, they fall so gently
                        Like a sudden narcolepsy of grasses
From across the street behind glass there is no sound
                        Just the falling, the clumping
The sparrows hopping madly in the sidewalk

Noisome

This is based in the memory of a 19 year-old being beaten not far from where I lived in Santa Fe.

The papers filled with how he was gay. His business, etc... The opinion of the city was very much in his favor, but there was a strange homophobic underlay.


Noisome 8/8

There is that bloodstain again
Why doesn’t monsoon rain wash away faggot blood?
My street is dust filled and the arroyos are filling too
            but this stain is dark and wet looking

The violence of the gunshot the head kick the hand to jaw
They are painting the street again
Yellow lines and white lines over pooling congeal
            but the dust is too much makes it go brown

I watch them smooth out the black asphalt
Cover everything over again and again
The pain is so new that it reflects and pains the eyes
            but it is no mirror