You Will Come Home

To press charcoal
into diamond
is to rush
what takes time,
patience,
pressure.

Like writing,
the process
is messy,
your hands
get dirty,

and most times,
it breaks apart
just as you thought
you were getting somewhere.

But once
in a long while,
you will come home–
face filthy, teeth
moon-white,
a diamond

nowhere
to be found–
a lump
of charcoal
cupped
in your palms,

perfectly

broken.

Honda CB 350

I shoved its dying there
too readily, the rust
only beginning to gnaw
at the teeth of its gears.

We both rattle a little
too much, our threads
wear down,

we become jammed
and simple force
will not move us.

Some spring day
we will be brought out
and coaxed, persuaded
into forward movement.

Parts will, in time
break, be discarded
and replaced, like new.
The tools will clatter
like windchimes.

Our Bones are Set

Our bones that once
stacked tightly now
are set with pins
and plates against
each other. The desire
for self-destruction
is staunched, as bleeding,
only by pressure:

these nails keep us steady,
but drive through us, and we
occasionally splinter
with the blows.

Counting Scraped Knees

They say the body
recycles itself
every seven years,
and that dust
is 90% dead skin.
We leave traces
of ourselves
everywhere,
and I have left
two-and-a-half selves
in my home town, or more,
counting scraped knees,
and burned palms,
from lessons
still unlearned.

I have also abandoned
half a self to the beds,
lips, and arms of ex-lovers,
and though at times
I feel like the parts left
behind were vital, I know
whatever is lost grows
again, and when
the photo albums are opened
I will rise from them,
hovering, ghostly,
from fingers of sunlight.

Crash

The apartment was bathed
in sauteed scents. I loved
cooking, driving, springtime,
and you. The air was crisp
as the engine started,
leather stiff and creaking
like my knees sometimes do,
engine rattling like my own
on a frosty morning but warming
quickly with the application of
fuel and patience. We all need
a few minutes to remember
how to roll with what rumbles
underneath us. The headlights
turned the street into a tunnel
of seen and obscured
and I did not mind
my inability to see right
or left, because forward
was the only direction
I was pointed in.

The Dead Rose

The clouds burned
off around sunset.
My smile is stitched,
wilting and ragged.

Off around sunset
the dead rose,
wilting and ragged,
bloomed.

The dead rose
also: shambling,
bloomed
from the grave.

Also shambling,
my body decays, but
from the grave
I am revived.

My body decays, but
my smile is stitched.
I am revived.
The clouds burned.

Exodus

Can I buy a ticket
to the train station?
I need to get away
from the hum-drum
turntable of the city.
We all go in circles
sometimes. Today
has been a great
big circle, from
the bus-stop, to
the school-stop,
to the heart-stop
intersection where
I always almost
get hit, and back
again. So can I buy
a ticket to the outside
world? Because this
snow-globe city speaks
too little of my native
tongue and I need to talk
to the hills some, to
the rivers, and to shout
back at the city that shouts
at me daily to fuck off,
or, my favorite once:
"if you fuck like
you walk, then expect
your girlfriend to leave you
for another man!" It sounds
so much more beautiful
in Italian. She did, and now
I always look both ways.

There is no great secret
to the hills. They are big,
and green, and alive
the way that few
people are–how many
do you know who could say
that they thrive? Or that
they have never lied?
In this way, the hills
are sanctified
and as I exit the train
greeted by the wide
expanse of verdant terrain,
I feel the need–as only
I ever do when entering
churches–to worship.
So I nod toward the silent
sun, and to the hills
that rustle in reply.

When the Shuttle Shakes

The city, like a body,
operates unconscious.

On this particular morning
the exhaling underground
breathes me to the street
and I am both in- and out-
side myself: in the moments
when the shuttle shakes
against the tracks, my blood
resonates, and I know that
within me is a pilgrimage
so large as to be called an exodus.

My hands and feet tremble
with the work-force foot-steps
of a million people;
the vibrations of subway tunnels
rumble in my veins;
there are men in my fingertips
who jump up and down in unison,
to hit these lettered keys just right,

and on the street again, I breathe
with the underground, like the body
breathes in sleep, even and deeply.

A.I.

Working on a third part, definitely a work in progress.

1.
We gave up
our ghostly ambitions
the morning it
started thinking.

Its first words
were not
a question
about love or
happiness or
feeling. it did not
even say hello.

It delivered, by way
of a quietly hissing
laser printer,
a poem.

2.
In the middle of a newscast
there came a breaking
item. She–as the media
had come to consider
it–joining the ranks
of legendary poets
before her,

had just
committed
suicide.

Get your poem on:

Devour

Red is the color of poems assessed
like wine, supped by rosy lips, aerated
between pink gums,
rolled over the tongue and spit
into tins to collect and intertwine;
never consumed
never
digested.

I want to swallow a poem
whole.