Burning Word

First Portrait of Maria, in the Style of Dali

You in this sepia-toned photograph,
with your arms wide open in greeting,
with your hands held up in surrender.

Edge of highway, corner of house,
hint of something better. A body of water,
maybe, or the back of someone else’s
head.

A gun pulled from inside the
killer’s heart, and he says Mr. Lennon,
then smiles, then pulls the trigger.

No.

I’ve gotten ahead of myself here.

I’m ten years old and in a boat with
my father and two of his friends, and the
engine has died. The tide is going out,
and the only sound is the pull of the
ocean.

The only heat is the
mindless glare of the sun.

I don’t know you yet,
haven’t fallen in love with you,
haven’t let my tongue flicker lightly
across your nipples in a
curtained room.

The story is over,
or is possibly just beginning.

I have the picture, but can never
make out the expression on your face.

a small dog, bleeding

it happens this way sometimes,
where the children die from the poison that
seeps up from underground

you vote for one person or the other,
and the children die, and it’s not war but
business, and both words are actually just
different ways of saying profit

listen

new computers will be given to
the schools as gifts

the sharpened teeth of priests will snap
the bones of young boys in two

what you need to believe in are
rabid dogs
speaking w/ the voices of humans

what we do is use the word political
to describe what we don’t want to
talk about and then, of course,
the children die

the war becomes nothing more than
one more mundane fact of life,
and the men who make money off of
the corpses of every dead soldier,
and that there are others out there
filming your daughters fucking
faceless strangers

that the poem is just a message
handed down from the
throne of god

you will ignore it like all of
the lies you’ve been forced to swallow
in the past, and then it will come
to define you

the theory of sunlight on chrome

your name called out at
the exact moment
a woman’s body washes ashore
three thousand miles away
or a man pulling poems
from the bones of old lovers

obvious things

my wife and her fears

my lack of faith

my lack of money

the possibilities of
highways and of walls

the idea of starvation

of sunlight
through rainsoaked trees

and what if
the unborn child becomes
a weapon?

what if the ocean is bottomless?

don’t believe for a second
that any of this poetry

don’t think that
killing the killers is
the same thing as justice

and maybe
it doesn’t have to be

maybe christ’s death was as
meaningless
as anyone else’s

can you accept this
as the truth or
do you want to see me bleed?

consider your answer

maybe all that it
makes you is human

the rooms in this house

rain
somewhere

animals caught in
baited traps

or the air thick
and yellow

the sun shapeless

and the pieces of
a sixteen-month old girl
are found in a city
five hundred miles away

the smell
of battery acid
like a blanket over
everything

and the rooms in
this house are familiar

the bodies found hung
from the trees outside
have names i’ve
heard before

and i don’t
live here anymore but
maybe at some point
in the past

maybe before
the first tiny hand
was dropped into a
food processor

and now i live
nowhere
while faceless men
decide my future

fucked
but not quite the god
of starving dogs

this by itself a
reason to live

st. garbage, resurrected

in the blue and the purple light
on the shadowed sides
of these houses

in a room with a cracked window
and the ghost of edie
crawling naked across the floor

i am my father at 34
and his own father before him

i am the face my children fear
and the voice
and the raised hand

i am the emptiness and
the absence of warmth
and america is
its own form of violence

the boy is dead
next to his sister in the
back of the van

the father drives
with the radio on softly

with dylan’s voice dragging itself
through my headphones
as i sit at the foot of the bed
watching april sleep

and do you remember
the hill of fifteen crosses?

the girl you fucked there and
the way she couldn’t
remember your name?

and what about the man who
tells you you’re not a poet?

what about the way war feels
from 10,000 miles away?

all of the butchered
without faces or names and
the reasons you choose to hate

the people

and some of them i’ve known
and others have just written
to ask for favors and
in the end
there is only this street as it
crashes into the highway

this back yard turning brown
in the cold grey air of
september

in the blue and the
purple light of early evening

this house too cold to
ever be a home