Will you be able to shut off the sound of the mad ramblings

Of the drunk and insane; will you live comfortably day after day

Witness to their struggles, prisoner in their wars,

Will your compassion save them?

Will you be strong enough (sexy enough, fit enough)

To put your body between a son and his father when things

Go too far?

Are you strong enough, moral enough,

Woman enough

To appear at least to be what they need, what they want,

And expect,

While rearing a boy who need never be that man?

What happens, when you realize these men are only adjacent;

And despite their promises, their desperate need to provide,

They’ll never be able to keep you safe?
How will you keep from killing these men?

When you feel them wearing you down, ready to feed

On what’s left of your vitality

In their struggle to win at King of the Hill –

How will you keep from throwing away the little bit

That you own

To escape their madness, the infantile hunger of their damaged souls,

The devilish charm of their decay?

How will you last one more day

Without bundling your child into a cab

And running far, running fast. 

I saw the van pull abruptly to the curb

Across from the church, where I stood at the side door,

Keys in hand

“You want to fuck with me?” he roared, leaping

From the driver’s side, door ajar, as his wife likewise did

He raced her to the passenger side, “I’ll fuck you up,

Just like I did your brother!” And reaching inside he beat

The boy in the backseat, while his wife flailed her arms,

And swallowed her screams

We heard as one, that other day, the screams

That transcended five brick stories, up the echoing shaft

The shock and keening pain, the horror of a mother and

A father, as they beheld

The battered body of their son

A young man, who crawled, as a lark, through the ceiling

Hatch to the top of the freight elevator, to take a ride

And went missing for a weekend

And there were others.

My mother’s wail, beating the car window

While I stood in the front yard, where I’d just told

My stepdad, that Grandpa had died, and she heard

And they left, seconds after they had arrived

And I stood with my sister and brother, and probably

Did not cry

But now

It’s just the children in adjacent yards

And their games.

I hear, and tell myself

They are not being beaten

They are not in despair

They are not dying

It is drama only, they play at suffering

Practicing, though they mustn’t know,

For what awaits them. 

"You know, Sir, this looks much better with my glasses off." 
"You put your glasses back on, Euchariah, and face facts!"
~ Dr. Seuss 


There is no differentiation between, say,
strands of dark hair, in the dark,
or on the high terrace, tree-tops
in the gulfs between the night-lamps --
So many stars of unknown origin,
seen from light-years ahead in time.

Hours of glowing dawn,
of day's unyielding scrutiny,
no more than footlights' glare;
when you realize you're standing just inside
the momentary flare, and looking out
perceive no difference in the shadows
of the crowd, no breath,
and no distinction there:

Come down to earth
and lose the scale of it.

I don't think I can stand on your high terrace
in the night, with the darkened room behind,
and cool air breathing all around 
without each time considering
the way the sky's black paint bleeds
and blurs the lines
between the spaces of the room, and 
that greater space outside.
Where each obscurity becomes
a possibility.

Close your eyes:
what you can't see is limitless.

Good Friday

I have failed at Lent except to name my failings
have drunken reeled and stumbled blind to facts
and fallen down

Prayed with bishops, and lusted even as I prayed
"Simul iustus et Peccator"
the smoke and mirrors long since broken, blown


Brought up to go it alone

And now they tell me, sin is the failure to trust
in God; we're to assume the manna rain, fulfillment
and release

When all along I thought sin was to say too much,
to take too much; to murder and
disturb the peace.

Even if you make the right choice, you're forgiven
so why not yearn, why not want, to hunger
for the dangling fruit upon the tree?

Somehow the apple branch becomes the Cross,
and I the man who kneels to steady the spike;
the bludgeon wield

And all my heart that hungers blindly bleeds
into the hollow soundless void of ages,
upon the gilded pages

oblivion; the twilight grass illuminates the small-town eve with hope
and she in apron gleaning crumbs of praise will wait
to see what God will offer in exchange for joy
the mark, the plain, the measure of the frame, and the ancestral freight

i would joyfully shred a thousand (or two)
newspaper hearts over you,
i'd throw myself away
and call it passion;
the unoriginal sin.

but i have counseled those who crawl
love's muck of flood-strewn wrack,
who paw at memories, and lick the leather uppers
of reproach,
i've held the heads of wounded men
and kissed away the tears of some,
and so i know
too much.

poem for Dean

Banging on an empty kettle,
and stretching rubber binders
across a candy tin

A wind-up bear beats
a snare, a whistle-bird to tweet
the treble,
surgeon's hands to
pluck the strings

What register emotion:
an onion for devotion,
a vaccination's dart;
none replace
what's been missing,
not the hugging or the kissing.

If I only had a heart.

Sing to me a symphony
of blood and bone and flesh;
the pleasure at the end
of a long and lonely stretch.

Nevermind the violins.

Tap the time it takes to meddle
in Nature's careless miracle;
to change a thumping tire

Soon enough, there'll be grandeur
where the pillows used to languish
and we'll dance the lovers' part;
here the lyre, here the oboe
Prop our grins upon our elbows,
when we finish as we start

Soon enough, you'll awaken
where you find your life's been taken
Now you finally
have a heart.