Dreams
All around us
they are hunting God
but we sleep so deeply
we discover the prints
in the morning
& it’s as if time
has become a crowd
gathering to watch us fail,
but in the forest
it’s enough to dream
of the possibilities
the way a child
dreams of fairies—
yet who are we to dream,
we are a group
of impatient falconers
Blackbirds
Pause for a second
before the rain shapes
a past that beckons
to dissipate
amongst the blackbirds
of our fate
& listen to the secret
of our children
amongst the thorns
carving a reminder
of the light
that tears our bodies
into the shards
from which we were born
from nightmares
that also beckon
the doctor & the nurse
to give up & bring us
the hearse
Homage
Take a moment
to receive injury from this place
because of what’s next—
we call it escape violence,
how we’re caged by fear
& cannot meditate
on a horse or a sunset
or a guy on the bus
who inspires us
because he looks
like another guy who reminds us
of a guy who is part bird,
part lizard, part man,
so we ask our friend
to stand on the temple steps
& shoot us in the arm
in homage
The Sky Tonight
The sky tonight
is no reason to believe
an absence of flesh
is cause for arson,
the night already alight
with so many fireflies
we can see
ourselves clearly
in the darkness—
ask yourself again
if it’s worthwhile
to walk the streets
of twenty years ago
as if the stars
had never been there
in the first place
but you hadn’t noticed
To Our Once Dear Friends
The menace of a messenger
carrying news from the portrait
of our brilliant scars
is as childless
as the dying tanager
within our polestar,
a palliation we mask
to maintain a resemblance
to those poets whose thicket
of bodies & thought
echo with stories
broken by couplets & lines
that waltz through their towns
as if we forgot
the dismembered art
laid to rest in the pines—
the vines of our passion
through a wood of despair
remember a time we believed
our friends were there
reading our poems
& not tossing them aside
to drown themselves
in pesticide
or write the same letter
over & over
about part time work
& a busy Passover
indifferent that God’s house
was already in foreclosure—
how we thought they’d see
the burdens we carried
within the jasmine
in our satchels
tucked between our knees
or that our glass frames
had grown too fragile & wary
to hold ourselves together
for another journey
through the prairie—
to our once dear friends
for whom we’d have died,
witnesseth what has become
of our exquisite, sorry lives
Most of us Riot
Most of us riot
with supreme brightness
but when people nod
& motion to an esplanade
we have no idea
what’s going on,
we’ve never known
true friendship,
we are bad at basketball
& we are obsessed
with the statistics
of our failures,
so we eat the toes
of our porcelain dolls
& declare our faith
to our cats
by ingesting aerosols,
the lanterns in the river
blacken with ash
as principals scream at us
when our children
can’t use chopsticks
to pick up dice
& run to the cafeteria
to cry under a table
because the gym teachers
of the world believe
they have no rights
Quarterly Reports from a Plateau
Quarterly reports
from a plateau of willows
reveal the breadth
of wilting flowers,
lilies & peonies
mere yellowing outlines of figures
carefully painting a triptych
adapted for everyone
who has become a human shield
posing with sugar
& surrendering to the violence
of their dreams to see—
do they writhe sideways
in pain?
Are their bodies covered
in chain?
Are there any songs
left to be sang?
How quickly they grow silent
in the little league baseball games
of their hearts,
like an eruption of sorrow
from a balcony
many stories above the city
waiting in vain
for some bird of prey
to carry them away
to someplace bright
where their children can run free
without fear of any blight
of teachers pinning them to linoleum
to twist their arms behind their backs
until they hurt so bad—
every time we see a pear
we must now recall
those years pressed into a wall
staring into an eclipse
of the harshest of enmities
with nothing to protect our eyes at all
The Owls Beneath Our Skin
When the owls beneath our skin
fall asleep,
what becomes of night
can only be dreamt comfortably
by apostles delighting
upon their dramatic exit
from New Jersey
years before Catholic dormitories
burn to the ground
& the smell of twisted satisfaction
remains with us forever,
like friends of dead hawks
ruining the old religion
while we hide in the library
to avoid our wives
returning to tell us
everything about our lives
is terrible, a morgue of dark secrets
nicknamed homosexual slurs
emerging from years past
when the woman who one day
would harm our child
was young, bearing witness
to her father beat a dog,
beat a horse
& brandish a shotgun
before she inhabited his body
in deference to someone’s mother
who once gave us
homosexual nicknames for fun
Like the Dragonfly
Like the dragonfly
who mistakes a helicopter
for its mother
the river curves
into another
with little satiety
& the secret society
of chosen ones
who lack empathy
for those of us stimming
along the bank
are nothing
but undeserving
of sympathy—
orchids scattered
amongst the pavilion’s
decorative fountains
will forever remain
out of touch
for people like us,
shamed into ourselves
by schoolteachers
so disturbed
by their own fictions
about mental illness
they file civil cases
against us as if court
is a church & they deliver
the benedictions
