food shelf (draft)

a young mother
listens with wide, careful eyes
to the new rules:
if you woke up before 7
with 2 kids under 4
and no man,
you must present yourself here
between 11 and 3.
bring proof of address.
you get 15 pounds
per adult 18 to 54; and another 15
for each child over 10,
and whatever we can find
for the babies.
get here early.

people who come for food in pairs
and small groups
stand straight, make eye contact -- together they are the people.
it's better if they front me a little, count the cans.
it's better if they say, beans again?
I don't need these -- no peanut butter either,
no instant potatoes and no damned rice.

this is what i eat at home;
but what i give
the people leaves them hungry,
because they have
no choice --
and we call that empty place
in their stomachs
incentive.

by the way

I've recently posted a handful of poems written over the past 3 years. Many have been edited several times, others not at all. Over time, these poems, some of them, will be culled entirely.
JS

north (draft)

To the conundrum of love and its bearing on faith,
To the point of lost bearings, in proximity
To truth, to home, to vast ignorance and cruelty –

Two idiots in motion, and the space between;
I know that there’s a God behind this somewhere,
And I tremble.

things unseen

Talk to me.
Fill up the empty Why
And bridge the dust-shot void.
Maybe a thousand words replace a gesture,
Millions to approximate a touch,
But try.
Breathe on my hands;
There’s nothing written to prevent this.

tell me anything,
even what you saw on TV last night
and as you speak I’ll see it all:
like the blind see
in every increment but one
so that
like a chair wedged against the door
the Why is yet held back
by facts surmised
the longing filled by faith
in things unseen

birthday poem

Pry up the pavement
From the darkened seedbeds, to loosen summer grasses –
Yellowed white where light’s forgotten –
Under stones’ dank smell of soil;
Where yearning life
Awaits new eyes.

Plant something in the well-trod turf
Named “OURS” in all the city’s languages –
Some gone ahead, gone down
And yellowed, pale,
Where all men (grass) must go.
That new sod
Sprung from mind’s eye
Where all new life begins.

Make something real, that breathes and grows,
And sure enough
You have to reach into the dirt
With hands once white,
And play a song on honored bones –

Sneeze in the dust of long-dead ashes –

And undo the weedy tethers of Spring’s
Sleeping dream.

metes and bounds

I walk every day.
I’ve measured the city by metes and bounds:
If eyes over surfaces scoured, like skateboard wheels,
Curbstones and benches (avoiding eye contact)
Pavements and mailboxes, manholes and bus stops,
All would be pockmarked and powdered
With scrutiny.

My maps head-height like most;
No sense gawking upward.
Yet more often I’m hunting for paper:
The torn leaves of writing that sting of rejection,
Balled wads of notebook-ruled, tossed aside litter
The carefully folded reminders, now lost.

Grocery store -- parents' notes --
Red-faced looseleaf naming names,
Passed in class; directionless missives
In eye-gutters clinging:
Can you discern
Class from handwriting,
parse out the prude, the perverted,
the passionless lists in mechanical pencil --

Or love.
The broken rarely keep their cold dismissals,
Though they’re worn, from prying hard between the lines;
Hand-creased, palm printed, the ink absorbed to bone.
The pleading scratch, cross out,
To spin what’s futile into hope.

Love notes are rarely lost.
Burning in breast pockets, everyone keeps their proof
From prying eyes.

I gather to me the unwanted.
Hardly anyone scatters the ashes of what they desire.
No one lucky ever goes unloved;
No unlucky bastard has a pocket that’s secure
Or a hand uncramped from cold
Or a moment on the street to pause,
And look ahead –
His shoes pinch and his bus runs late,
His nerveless fingers lose their hope
And paper parts from memory, dormant
Til resurrected and re-read.

the line (revised)

what it means to be a sinner:
i suppose

it's not answering the phone when your sister calls, from Texas,
because you're busy thinking about someone else's man;
and glancing around near your feet for the line
that marks the crossing:
here I'm thinking wrong
here I'm doing wrong,
as if there were a difference.

suppose that Janus were the God of choice, or even just
the Pope;
this sinning-by-numbers,
and the difference between right and wrong no more complex
than the line where one county meets the next.
suppose our boundaries in common,
and we could meet there, you and I, like
neighbors
leaning on the fence --

whereas the word is not so easily fooled;
forget the law.
it's the song, as Stevie Smith once wrote,
and Christ the singer,
the one-hit-wonder of all time.
the song you woke up with, chipping away
at your transgressions.

so sinning goes on anywhere the song can reach;
and like a certain acid sinks to bone,
so does the sweet truth of your crime;
and someone else's man can feel it too,
as does your sister in Texas, right now:

the wound, desire --
the song that binds the wound;
and the thin red scar of longing for him
anyway,
a cross on the palm, an incision
in the heart.