Just Wrought

Food for the Minotaur

The city is white.
The strand is white.
The sky is blue paler
than the ocean is blue.

The sail that just broke 
the horizon is white. 
It’s white, right? 
Tell me it’s white.

The king will tell you 
The same damned thing: 
You are the king. 
We are… everything.

The sail is black. 
It’s always been black, 
going all the way back. 
It’s black

*

“Evil” is a shorthand:
a convenient knot on a string
Every day we dress the children
in white cotton for the king.

We say, “children”, but we mean 
something else, surge of protein:
most will survive. 
When was the last sail you’ve seen 
that wasn’t white?

It’s white, right?

The sail is white. 
The sail is white. 
And life is woven light. 
Monsters are movies. 
Life is mood.

Face down on the sand 
is a what not a who.

And whos that are whats 
are food.

*

Your heart is a labyrinth
where the minotaur lives.
The bull-king's heart is weak and wormy,
compromised by compromise.
But this is only what must be
because this is what you want.
You're free.

* 

You cannot be forgiven. 
I cannot be absolved. 
Ours hearts are ash, lungs 
saltwater, and stomachs stuffed 
with children seethed in belief.

Our labyrinth is formed in curves not angles.
That singing is sirens, not angels.
All the forever we’ve lost is now.

Promise

When you look me in the eye,
(promise me you’ll lie)
and figure out who I really am
(promise me you’ll promise me)

When you finally decide—
(you'll lie) 
—to kiss me 
(promise me)

When you total up the stars 
(promise me you’ll lie) 
as I fall asleep beside you 
(lie to the sky)

When you work up the nerve 
(to lie) 
to leave me 
(promise me won't)

When you finally say good-bye 
(lie)

Wherever I go without you 
(promise me there you’ll lie) 
whenever within you I come 
(lie lie lie)

This wickedness through which we wend 
(this promise) 
is simply who we are 
(I promise)

don’t bother to deny 
(you’ll lie)

(Just promise me) 
you might as well 
always do the impossible 
(promise me you will)

That Friend

You gamble wrong, hoping
I’m like the others. I ain’t.

I’m the one who’ll kill you, 
make you better, or abandon you; 
but never hope you’ll care.

I’m the one who’ll make you 
bigger than both of us, lift you 
thriving above surviving.  I’m the friend 
circling your heart’s winter with fire.

We Can All Die like This

 

Swimming in slanting light
the sky’s blue scrubbed
pale of summer’s fullness.

Don’t imagine these blazing leaves
are grieving. Don’t imagine
you will be either.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Only Took Me 22 Years to Get My Poetry on Buses

 

Poetry on Buses is a program currently hosted by King County Metro and curated by 4Culture. It began in 1992 as a presentation of poetry from the Seattle community on the placards found above the bus seats. Says the  website, “The poems are written by that person across the aisle, that kid in the back, or the professional poet.”

I remember being a young man and new to Seattle and seeing these poems on the buses I rode, my sole mode of transportation at the time. Back then, in the early 1990s, I was so impressed and enamored of the verse I read just above the heads of my fellow riders sitting across from me that I rushed to send in some of my own work. This I did again and again; and again and again I received polite rejection letters from the program. Here is a couple of the poems I sent in through the years: 

After Rumi

Don’t struggle, just struggle. 
Don’t just be, be. 

On second thought, forget I said anything.

You’re perfect. Be that.
Just don’t be perfect.

 

 

 

Scratch for B-Sides

A liar speaks the truth. Trust me.
It’s dark out there. You need to know this stuff.
Every particle knows every other, position and momentum,
since that very First Charlie Brown Christmas Big Bang.
Don’t let that uncertain German snow you.

It’s cool, actually. Nothing but solipsism.
You. Carving yourself out of nothingness. Me.

And I can’t just give you my love, my love.
I have to watch it roll on edge, spinning tighter
and faster round the black hole it’s headed for,
until at last it’s just a levitating flash
a moment before it—winking—drops
apparently forever. But physicists know shit
poets don’t: postulate white holes,
which spit instead of swallow.

I stumble. You stumble. You hope I hope.
You fall, I’m lost: both spinning ellipses.
A penny’s a good as a quarter.
It doesn’t matter how much the coins are worth.
A Sacajawea no better/worse than a washer,
or a slug forged to fool the washing machine.

It’s the spin and the ellipses. It’s the arc
you trace and the flash and the drop.
I can’t describe why to you. No kid could.
A kid would say what I’m saying now:
Give me a nickel. I’ll show you. It’s cool.

Trust me.

The Naked Truth

We come East again, but this time leave you behind
to join us in a week for the beach piece. I fill time
taking the boys to Lincoln’s lap, and a DC city pool, where
they hold their own, elbows and knees, with the laughing
black kids, playing Marco Polo, diving for a torn goggles’ strap.
Two days later we wander a vast strutted cavern crammed
with the spent super-toys of a spent super-nation:
Black Bird, Discovery, Enola Gay. Then we head north. 

Driving towards it on roller coaster roads, the younger one
says he can smell my brother’s farm, meaning some tumbler
turns in this kid’s wild heart from my life as a kid: thick summer
crunching into color come Fall. And he being born across the country
in a city awed by mountains; and the other one grunting
his blue naked way into a megalopolis once awed only by itself,
but hushed, over the months he grew alive inside you, by towers
of anguished empty light. I can’t help but be grateful something rises
in these two to this air which smothered  my blood for so long, even
when the older boy barfs a mile shy of the farm, and I have to pull
over to sluice the puke from the plastic bag into a corn field.

That night I drink with my brother in a country bar not completely
different from the one we grew up in as stock boys, though this
one feels like the future: fluorescent and empty, safer and ugly.
He preaches to me, sipping whiskey from a cup made for cough syrup,
how my work needs to change the world in a big way for the better; but
I deflect him with my best Mother Teresa: We can do no great things,
only small things with great love. And I half-believe it, too.

Two days later, coming on midnight, the kids crashed in
their grandmom’s living room, my niece and my boys,
gunshot-sprawled across the sofa and blown-up air mattress. 
Me stretched on a futon in my Mom’s extra room calculating
days  till you join us, thoughts finally weirding into dreams
when a quiet note chimes and the phone purrs vibration.
Glowing at my touch a text, a picture, makes no sense at first
but then I see them: full and perfect, nipples piqued:

“The girls miss you.”

The bonfire my brother builds the next night back at the farm
seems hopeless at first after that day’s thunderstorms, but
my brother doesn’t truck in hope, never has.  He works at it.
Big things for the better make a life worth living, and a few flashes
of gasoline will burn the dampness from the ground, such that
careful application of kindling brings, within half an hour, an inferno
roaring higher than anything we dare encourage in the tinderbox West. 
Hunks of smoldering float above the trees, open letters to parts of the world
where hope still waits for gasoline and my brother’s good intentions.

Let this Mason-Dixon humidness set free what, two nights ago,
your dry Seattle skies took up, radio riddling the ether (though
there is no ether: turns out there’s no need.) Let them hum to me
an image (though there is no hum: photons keep mum till we
teach them to speak) joyful, girly gift to thrill me, and feed,
as I grow old and older, my sulking need— when I can’t have
you when I want you, and I think it’s your fault.
If that’s not a child’s heart, whose is?

Nature abhors a vacuum, and so fills herself up with all this us.
Time hates a naked singularity: and so everything is just nothing
wearing knickers. These are the laws, described by men as blind
as me; yet somehow you flaunt them. With a chime and a purr
and a gleam you give, playfully, teasingly, everything; but also
somehow hold so much more back; because you know the truth
is never naked enough, and neither are you.

Off Written

 

But you can’t write off a writer much
as you’d like. We do as we seek, please
as we might: trees, ideas, people!

When we fail you breathe, and watch, you’ll see:
love-lighted, we’re always coming
for you, though — true — benighted we be.

I feel you though: be nice to have some quiet.
Plenty of that though, fear nought, where we’re headed,
always together, writers each, off and oft, you and we.

The rain writes Hebrew on the concrete stairs.