the poet confesses

your child is dying
in some version of america
i never wanted to know

the poem slips into my blood
at five in the morning
without a sound

we were closer to
something beautiful at one point
i think

were alive in a different way
that couldn’t last
and my voice gets too loud here

my son is asleep in the next room
the kitten curled up on his pillow
and the edges of this day
have begun to drag themselves
out of the darkness

what i wanted
wasn’t to be someone else
but maybe someone
better

not a priest
but a conquistador

a phoenix

and i am tired of feeling
gravity’s pull and i am crawling
towards the year of
crucifixion

belief in nothing is still
belief
but april refuses to see this

what grows between us
becomes something more complex
than war

approaching the age of christ

this will be my year

blood and famine
and small crucifixions
and there is nothing i can do
to stop any of it

the shadows of birds
across
the walls of this room

the names of the dead
written on tiny scraps of paper

buried by the water’s edge
but nothing grows and
nothing grows and
nothing grows

and it’s october
and the wind cries all night

tears your face from my mind
and then it’s november

the missing girl turns
seventeen

her parents walk away
from their religion

let the flowers
fall from their hands and
gather up whatever bones
they can and i have no
words of comfort

i have prayers
but no god

that the sounds are made
at all
is the important thing

Smokes

It’s a matter of timing, you see,
Whether one survives. Survival is
Related to whether one zigs, or zags,
Or pirouettes perfectly, or just
Hunkers down at
Exactly the right instant
By accident.
You take Jimbo, for instance.
Thirty-five years ago a pack of cigarettes
Cost eleven cents in the Ship’s Store
Outside CONUS.
That’s a buck ten a carton,
Any brand you like.
Lucky Strike was the favorite,
Short, sweet, harsh.
Pall Mall was a coffin nail,
Second only to king Camel –
Shredded bullshit –
Smoked only by the bravest.
No one smoked filter tips,
Which were for pussies;
They did not serve up that one
Sweet, raw cut of tobacco
Which you could spit out
Cool as Bogart.
Winstons were acceptable,
Even though they were filtered.
I don’t know why.
Maybe because Winston-Salem is in Carolina,
In the South,
Where everybody smokes.
Menthols (Kool, Salem)
Were for pimps and benny-boys.
The US Navy expected us to smoke.
Boys are manlike,
Susceptible to man things,
Which the Navy knows.
The best way to control a man
Is to control his vices.
Why else would they stock the Ship’s Store
With smokes less than cost,
Or perpetuate a myth as salty as the “Smoking Lamp,”
Or slip four-butt mini-packs
Into each and every C-rat carton in the Fleet?
Smokes were General Issue,
Like Beans and Weenies, and Fruit Cocktail,
And Undersized Asswipe.
The Navy wanted us to smoke
So we smoked.
We were good at it, too.
Gung Ho.
Squared away.
I knew one Texas boy who could blow
A humongous smoke ring clear across the compartment,
Then, with the same lungful,
Blow a second smoke ring right
Through the middle of the first one!
He was held in high regard.
A bosun striker with buck teeth
Could blow SQUARE smoke rings!
(Two dimensional ones, of course,
Not cubes; Not even a bosun’s mate
Is THAT clever).
Every hand smoked his own style.
Some smoked fast – hot boxing, we called it.
Others lipped ’em, wetting the mouth end with their spit
And making it hard to bum a drag
If you were squeamish.
No one held his cigarette like a damned Civilian,
Between his fingers, hot end up.
Sailors learn early to cup the burning coal
In the palm of the hand
To shield it from the spray and the wind
And the eyes of the lookout.
Everyone smoked while the eagle shit,
Except the college boys,
Who never amounted to much anyway.
If you ran out, you bummed:
“Borrow a smoke?”
“Got a fag?”
“Bum a weed?
“Gimme a nail!”
“Catch you payday,”
“Chief owes me 7 for 5,”
“Man, I’m havin’ a nicotine fit!”
If they had jacked the price up to
Ten bucks a butt, we
Would still have smoked, because
That’s what the Navy wanted us to do,
And that’s what we did.
Even if they had passed a reg against smoking,
We would still have smoked –
Bootlegged them, or growed our own,
(Like the applejack we brewed
In the paint locker),
Or smoked broom straws or worn out swabs…
The skipper didn’t like the look of cigarette packs
Rolled up in our skivvie shirt sleeves, like James Dean,
Or in our dungaree shirt pockets,
Or in the breast pocket of our dress blues.
Petty officers would dress us down
And Shore Patrol would stop us on the street.
So we carried our cigarettes in our socks,
Where they sometimes got sweaty
If we didn’t carry them in one of those
Plastic cigarette case things that
No self-respecting Bosun’s Mate would use,
Only Cooks and Steward’s Mates
And other bottom feeders.
One time in the South China Sea in 1962,
When Laos erupted the first time,
Me and my mates were chipping paint
Around the Main Deck cloverleafs,
Sweating in the 120-degree sun,
Laboring hard and loving/hating it.
A tenderhearted OOD passed the word
“Now Hear This: The Smoking Lamp is Lighted!”
Bless you, sir.
I reached in my socks for my pack of
Genuine, Unfiltered, King Size, Coffin Nail,
Lung-searing, God Bless You Pall Malls
(The same as Jimbo smoked).
You guessed it:
They were soaked clear through from
The sweat running down
From my balls into my shoes,
Sogging my smokes on the way by.
In polite society, my shipmates might have
Declined my kind offer of a refreshing smoke,
But not in the South China Sea,
Not on that ol’ tub of a ship,
Not in that heat, and
Not at that time.
Nobody didn’t smoke ’em clear down
To the fingertips.
I guess it must have been the right thing to do, too,
Because, so far as I know, not one of us
Who smoked those ball-sweat butts
That day ever caught cancer.
Jimbo was discharged from the Navy in that same year
And I never even met him until 23 years later
When we’d both been out of the Navy so long we
Almost weren’t sailors anymore.
If Jimbo had joined the Navy maybe one year later
Than he did, he might – just might – have got stationed
On that same ol’ crock tub as I was on.
He might have been my shipmate,
Chipping paint off the cloverleafs
Right beside me,
And he might – just might –
Have smoked one of those ball-sweat Pall Malls
That day, and maybe he
Wouldn’t be dead now of lung cancer.
It’s all a matter of timing, you see.

swimming through the blood of history

and i am tired of reading
all of these words i wrote as if
i thought i might actually
know something

i am tired
of these empty notebooks
like mute accusations

if you were in this room
right now
you would smell desperation

would feel a small cool breeze as
the storm pushes its way north

picture it

three years in this house
and i know none of my neighbors

ten years in this town
and i refuse to call it home

and did i pray
at my father’s bedside
in the last days before his death?

no

and does this
make me a bad person?

i’ve been told that it does

and there is a man
who returns what i send him with
a note that says
“these are not poems”
and there is the possibility that
he’s right

there are my hands
crippled with self-doubt

burned and then healed
and then burned again until
they refuse to acknowledge the
simple pain of passing days

and if i don’t call myself
an artist
then i can’t be crucified
as a witch

the logic is subtle
but it’s there

think of war

this is the ghost

this is the hand that
cuts the moon
in two

this is the ghost

do you
remember these myths
or are you someone who
believes in the soft
sweet purity of
childhood?

you can only be one
or the other

you can only be living
or dead

for fifteen years
i had the dream of the
burning house
and then i married
the woman who
grew up in it

i give you this as
final proof
of the lack of god and
you turn away

one of us sees
the ghost
the other a shadow

in between the two is
the desert of our pasts
and the scattered ashes
of old lovers

this is the land
where
the myths were planted

these are
the bones of lost
sailors

there are better things
to be built here
than religion

poem written, then left untitled

sunlight in
an empty room
changes nothing

the mirrors are all blind
the windows slowly melting
and i believe
in the burning girl

i believe in the boy
buried among the redwoods
by his father

these are the myths
my son will inherit
and this is the country
and the politics of fear are not
politics at all

what i call silence
in this house
is actually the sound of
clocks running backwards

what i call sorrow is
actually guilt
despite the fact that i have always
maintained my innocence

and on the day i give up
the last of my teenage heroes
my oldest friend writes
to tell me he won’t be
writing again

a minister’s wife from the
town i grew up in
is found naked and dead on
a stretch of railroad tracks
eighty-five miles to
the north

we are always spending
too much time
measuring distances that
can never be crossed

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