478 Identity poems

We is gator teeth hanging from the rear- view mirror as sickle cells suckle at Big Momma’s teats. We is dragonfly choppers hovering above Walden Pond. We is spinal cords shedding like the skin of a cottonmouth. We is Psalm 23 and the Pastor’s chattering chicklets. We is a good problem to have. We is throats constricting and the grape juice of Jesus. We is Roach and Mingus in Birdland. We is body electric, eyes watering with moonshine, glossy lips sticky with lard. We is half brothers in headlock, arm-wrestling in the dirt. We is Vaseline rubbed into knocked knees and cracked elbows. We is ham hocks making love to kidney beans. We is Orpheus, lute in hand, asking do we have a problem

An assumption,a pejorative,an honest language, an honorable death. In grade school, I refused to accept the mayor’s handshake; he smiled at everyone except people with names like mine. I was born here. I didn’t have to adopt America, but I adapted to it. You understand: a man must be averse to opinions that have adverse impacts on whether he lives or dies. “Before taking any advice, know the language of those who seek to advise you.” Certain words affected me. Sand nigger, I was called. Camel jockey. What was the effect? While I already muttered under my breath, I did so even more. I am not altogether sure we can all together come. Everything was not all right. Everything is not all right. Imagine poetry without allusions to Shakespeare, Greek mythology, the Bible; or allusions without the adjectives “fanatical,” “extremist,” “Islamic,” “right,” “left,” “Christian,” “conservative,” “liberal.” Language written or translated into a single tongue gives the illusion of tradition.A lot of people murder language—a lot fully aware.Among all the dead, choose between“us” and “them.”Among all the names for the dead—mother, father, brother, sister, husband, wife, child, friend, colleague, neighbor, teacher, student, stranger—choose between “citizen” and “terrorist.” And poet?Immoral, yes, but never amoral? Large amounts, the number between 75 and 90 percent of the estimated 150 million to 1 billion—civilians—killed during wars, over all of recorded human history.Anxious is “worried” or “apprehensive.” American poetry, Americans. Young, I learned anyone born here could become President. Older, I can point to any one of a hundred reasons why this is a lie.Anyway, I don’t want to be President, not of a country, or club, not here or there, not anywhere. He said, “I turned the car around because it began raining bombs.” There’s no chance of ambiguity— an as here could mean “because” or “when”; it makes no difference—he saw the sky, felt the ground, knew what would come next; it matters little when the heart rate in less than a second jumps from 70 to 200 beats per minute. What they did to my grandfather was awful—its wretchedness, awe-inspiring; its cruelty, terrible; it was awfully hard to forget. Just after 8:46 AM, I wondered awhile what would happen next. At 9:03 AM, I knew there was going to be trouble for a while to come. When in her grief the woman said, “We’re going to hurt them bad,” she meant to say, “We’re going to hurt them badly.” For seventeen days, during air strikes, my grandfather slept on a cot beside a kerosene lamp in the basement of his house.Besides a few days worth of pills, and a gallon of water, he had nothing else to eat or drink. Given these conditions, none of us were surprised that on the eighteenth day, he died.Besides, he was eighty-two years old. I can write what I please. I don’t need to ask,May I? Like a song: men with capital meet in the Capitol in the nation’s capital. Any disagreements,censored; those making them—poets, dissenters, activists— censured. The aftermath, approximately 655,000 people killed. “The Human Cost of War in Iraq: A Mortality Study, 2002-2006,” Bloomsburg School of Public Health, Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, Maryland); School of Medicine, Al Mustansiriya University (Baghdad, Iraq); in cooperation with the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Cambridge, Massachusetts). The figure just cited—655,000 dead—resulted from a household survey conducted at actual sites, in Iraq, not the Pentagon, or White House, or a newsroom, or someone’s imagination. Of course, language has been corrupted. Look, the President, who speaks coarsely, says, “We must stay the course.” The problem with “Let your conscience be your guide” is you must first be aware,conscious, of the fact that a moral principle is a subjective thing. I wonder: when one “smokes ’em out of a hole,” if the person doing the smoking is conscious of his conscience at work. Am I fully conscious of how I arrived at this? The continual dissemination of similar images and ideas. The continual aired footage of planes striking the towers, the towers crumbling to the streets, dust, screams, a continuous reel of destruction, fear, as if the attacks were happening twenty-four hours a day, every day, any time. For a while, I couldn’t care less about war. Then I saw corpses, of boys, who looked just like me. This was 1982, at age ten. Ever since, I couldn’t care less why anyone would want it. In 1982, any one of those boys could have been me. Now, it’s any one of those dead men could be me. The Secretary of State offered such counsel to the ambassadors of the world that the United Nations Security Council nodded in favor of war.Criterion easily becomes criteria. Even easier: to no longer require either. The data turned out false. The doctrine of preemption ultimately negated its need. While we both speak English, our languages are so different from each other, yours might as well be Greek to me. When the black man in the park asked, “Are you Mexican, Puerto Rican, or are you Pakistani?” and I said, “I’m Arab,” and he replied, “Damn. Someone don’t like you very much,” I understood perfectly what he meant. The President alluded to the Crusades because of (not due to) a lack of knowledge. Later, he retracted the statement, worried it might offend the Middle East; it never occurred to him the offense taken was due to the bombs shredding them to bits and pieces. “You are either with us or with the terrorists” (September 20, 2001). “You’re either with us or against us” (November 6, 2001). The day after, the disc jockey advocated, on air, a thirty-three cent solution (the cost of a bullet) to the problem of terrorists in our midst—he meant in New York; also, by terrorists, I wonder did he know he meant cab drivers, hot dog vendors, students, bankers, neighbors, passersby, New Yorkers, Americans; did he know he also meant Sikhs, Hindus, Iranians, Africans, Asians; did he know, too, he meant Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Atheists; did he realize he was eliciting a violent response, on the radio, in the afternoon? Among those who did not find the remark at all illicit: the owners of the radio station, the FCC, the mayor, the governor, members of the House, the Senate, the President of the United States.Emigrate is better than immigrate. Proof: no such thing as illegal emigration. Further proof: emigration is never an election issue. I heard enthusiastic speeches. They hate our freedoms, our way of life, our this, that, and the other,and so on (not etc). Not everyone agreed every one not “with us” was “against us.” Detroit was farther from home than my father ever imagined. He convinced himself soon after arriving here he had ventured further than he should have.Fewer people live in his hometown than when he left, in 1966. The number, even less, following thirty-four straight days of aerial bombardment. First(not firstly) my father spoke Arabic;second (not secondly) he spoke broken English;third(not thirdly) he spoke Arabic at home and English at work; fourth(not fourthly) he refused to speak English anymore. Not every poem is good. Not every poem does well. Not every poem is well, either. Nor does every poem do good.“To grow the economy” is more than jargon. Can a democracy grow without violence? Ours didn’t. They still plan to grow tomatoes this year, despite what was done. Several men, civilian workers, identified as enemies, were hanged on a bridge, bodies torched, corpses swaying in the breeze. Photographs of the dead were hung with care. I can hardly describe what is going on. Day after day, he told himself,“I am an American. I eat apple pie. I watch baseball. I speak American English. I read American poetry. I was born in Detroit, a city as American as it gets. I vote. I work. I pay taxes, too many taxes. I own a car. I make mortgage payments. I am not hungry. I worry less than the rest of the world. I could stand to lose a few pounds. I eat several types of cuisine on a regular basis. I flush toilets. I let the faucet drip. I have central air conditioning. I will never starve to death or experience famine. I will never die of malaria. I can say whatever the fuck I please.” Even words succumbed;hopefully turned into a kind of joke;hopeful, a slur.However, I use the words, but less, with more care. The President implied compassion; but inferred otherwise. This is not meant to be ingenious. Nor is it ingenuous. The more he got into it, the more he saw poetry, like language, was in a constant state of becoming. Regardless, or because of this, he welcomed the misuse of language. Language is its own worst enemy— it’s the snake devouring its own tail. They thought of us not kind of or sort of but as somewhat American. Lie: “To recline or rest on a surface?” No. “To put or place something?” No. Depleted uranium, heavy like lead; its use—uranium shells—led to birth defects. When in his anger the man said, “We’re going to teach them a lesson,” I wonder what he thought they would learn. In a war, a soldier is less likely to die than a civilian. He looks like he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them like I do. He looks as if he hates our freedoms. You don’t know them as I do. When in his sorrow my father said, “Everybody loose in war,” I knew exactly what he meant. It may be poets should fight wars.Maybe then, metaphors— not bodies, not hillsides, not hospitals, not schools— will explode. I might have watched the popular sitcom if not for my family—they were under attack, they might have died. Others may have been laughing at jokes while bodies were being torn apart. I could not risk that kind of laughter. Of all the media covering war, which medium best abolishes the truth? I deceive myself. I will deceive you myself. In the Bronx, I passed as Puerto Rican. I passed as Greek in Queens, also Brazilian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, even a famous, good-looking American movie actor. As Iranian in Manhattan. At the mall in New Jersey, the sales clerk guessed Italian. Where Henry Ford was born, my hometown, I always pass as Arab. I may look like the men in the great paintings of the Near East but their lives, their ways, I assure you, are in the past. Plus, except in those paintings, or at the movies, I never saw Arabs with multiple wives, or who rode camels, lived in silk tents, drank from desert wells;moreover, it’s time to move past that. Did language precede violence? Can violence proceed without language? It broke my father’s heart to talk about the principle of equal justice. The news aired several quotations from the airline passengers, one of whom was a middle-aged man with children, who said, “I didn’t feel safe with them on board.” He used the word “them” though only one, an Arab, was on the plane. Being from Detroit, I couldn’t help but think of Rosa Parks. Then I got angry. I said to the TV, to no one in particular, “If you don’t feel safe, then you get off the goddamn plane.” You can quote me on that. I was really angry—not real angry, but really angry. The reason? A poet asked me why I didn’t write poems about Muslim and Arab violence against others, and I said I did. And then he said he meant violence against Americans and Israelis, respectively, and I said I did, and before I could go on he interrupted to ask why I didn’t write poems about mothers who sent their sons and daughters on suicide missions. As if, as if, as if. I respectfully decline to answer any more questions. Write your own goddamn poem! Does this poem gratify the physical senses? Does it use sensuous language? It certainly does not attempt to gratify those senses associated with sexual pleasure. In this way, it may not be a sensual poem. However, men have been known to experience sexual gratification in situations involving power, especially over women, other men, life, and language. My father said, “No matter how angry they make you, invite the agents in the house, offer them coffee, be polite. If they stay long, ask them to sit. Otherwise, they will try to set you straight.” When in his frustration he said, “Should of, could of, would of,” he meant, “Stop, leave me alone, I refuse to examine the problem further.” Because (not since) the terrorists attacked us, we became more like the rest of the world than ever before. This is supposed to be a poem; it is supposed to be in a conversation with you. Be sure to participate. “No language is more violent than another,” he said.Then he laughed, and said, “Except the one you use.” Do conflicts of interest exist when governments award wartime contracts to companies that have close ties to government officials? From 1995 to 2000, Dick Cheney, Vice President of the United States, was CEO of Halliburton, which is headquartered in Houston, Texas, near Bush International Airport. Would they benefit themselves by declaring war? Please send those men back home. My grandfather lay there unconscious. For days,there was no water, no medicine, nothing to eat. The soldiers left their footprints at the doorstep. His sons and daughters,they’re now grieving him. “Try not to make too much of it” was the advice given after two Homeland Security agents visited my house, not once, not twice, but three times. I’m waiting for my right mind. The language is a long ways from here. After the bombs fell, I called every night to find out whether my father was alive or dead. He always asked, “How’s the weather there?” Soon enough, he assured me, things would return to normal,that(not where) a ceasefire was on the way.Although(not while) I spoke English with my father, he replied in Arabic. Then I wondered,who’s to decide whose language it is anyway—you, me?your mother, father, books, perspective, sky, earth, ground, dirt, dearly departed, customs, energy, sadness, fear, spirit, poetry, God, dog, cat, sister, brother, daughter, family,you, poems, nights, thoughts, secrets, habits, lines, grievances, breaks, memories, nightmares, mornings, faith, desire, sex, funerals, metaphors, histories, names, tongues, syntax, coffee, smoke, eyes, addiction, witness, paper, fingers, skin,you,your,you’re here, there, the sky, the rain, the past, sleep, rest, live, stop, go, breathe

I am a girl who sees the world in everything. I wonder in a 100 years if the world will just flip. I upload the roar of children, chop cauliflower because I want to see the ones I love as loving me forever. I see colorful daisies as the children of lawns swaying unfruitfully in the wind. I want the ones who pretend they are without wings to protect me touch sun, feel hearts— in that instant I understand almost everything Pretending I am flying over the worry and loss of this city into the warm sun, to touch who l can. I worry, making canapés over the sink, that nothing will be easy, ever if all of this is happening for reasons, that that family is my family, crying out in pain, thin daisies bent flat in a summer wind. I understand that almost, when they cry why nothing is easy in this world with its reasons. I pretend I am without wings to protect me— I dream one day of a city that’s at peace. I see something good that is in everyone. In a 100 years I wonder will the world just flip.

Walking home I feel a presence following and realize he is always there that Native man with coal-black-hair who is my grandfather. In my first memories he is present, mostly wordless, resident in the house where I was born. My mother shows him the cleft in my chin identical to his. I am swaddled and blinking in the kitchen light. So we are introduced. We never part. Sometimes I forget he lodges in my house still the bone-house where my heart beats. I carry his mother’s framework a sturdy structure. I learn his birthright. I hear his mother’s teachings through what my mother said of her: She kept a pot of stew on the stove all day for anyone to eat. She never went to church but said you could be a good person anyway. She fed hoboes during the ‘30s, her back porch a regular stop-over. Every person has rights no matter what color. Be respectful. This son of hers, my grandfather, still walks the streets with me. Some twist of blood and heat still spark across the time bridge. Here, listen: Air draws through these lungs made from his. His blood still pulses through this hand.

in my mouth is as fat as a cow’s tongue, still I want to ask the woman at the next table what she’s saying into her phone. A tongue, a cow’s tongue tastes like the rest of the cow.Cow tastes like cow, an aunt once said in an accent as sweet as Arkansas dirt. Someone, in English, told me I don’t carry my vowels like anyone they know. I’ve tried, but my tongue won’t move like my aunt’s nor like anyone else’s in my family. I ain’t makin’ sense, they’d say if they were me. Why don’t I talk like us anymore? Anyway...Every other word, the woman slips into English. The way a train window trades a dead city for a dead suburb; a posh row for a cow pasture.Duct cleaning, Thai Bistro,

Tell a child she is composed of parts (her Ojibway quarters, her German half-heart) she'll find the existence of harpies easy to swallow. Storybook children never come close to her mix, but manticores make great uncles, Sphinx a cousin she'll allow, centaurs better to love than boys—the horse part, at least, she can ride. With a bestiary for a family album she's proud. Her heap of blankets, her garbage grin, prove she's descended of bears, her totem, it's true. And that German witch with the candy roof, that was her ancestor too. If swans can rain white rape from heaven, then what is a girl to do? Believe her Indian eyes, her sly French smile, her breast with its veins skim milk blue— She is the myth that is true.

What a fuckup you are. What dumbshit you do. Your father's voice still whispers in you, despite the joys that sweeten each day. Your Genius it isn't until, dying away, it worms back through the sparkling dream where you drown him in an inch-deep stream: your knee in his back, your strength on his skull, it begins singing praise for your skill.

I’m oblivious to half the things going on, and when I hear my name it’s like, Oh, hey, let’s go. — TIM LINCECUM San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 24, 2012 ❖ A weeknight baseball game pledges its ticket holders a variety of extravagant processions and dalliances, and I am only one of its frequent enthusiasts spinning the turnstiles. Evenings here become lessons in piety, a refrain reduced to the simplest expression of worthier hungers. Troublesome, splendid concerns—how to carry myself like and through the city, how to enclose myself within some private calm—engage me at every level in the open-air stadium, and I ascend each level because I sit within the cheapest. Among the wind-whipped flags, I carry out a similar lashing upon myself with my mind’s tongue, albeit with good humor since I have yet to arrive at a serious period of my life. But of all cities, this one understands bouts of seriousness, and whether someone in the clutches of such crisis decides to change his life, there will be no objection among the ticket holders. Litter swirls and sweeps itself past them. Wildly customized hats aslant on children’s heads orbit the condiment table. A bearded boy stands haloed by the glowing hoard of cut spuds sitting beneath heat lamps. Like a cascade of song, endless beverages pour from trumpetlike spouts. I am still fair-skinned, perhaps a bit queer and dangerous, but childlike—a bizarrely perfected image of masculinity and prowess delivering my sinewy frame through this. I have always been barked at by certain types go evolve. ❖ I’ve been maligned, as you and this city know, while I wreck my physique by staring down barrel-chested men. My slim body—over-extended and sickly with the blackest slice of bread it could acquire— my incredible body used to be berserk with lust but now lives in the jubilee of my meekness. The open within this could bear passage for a terrific ship of my serious griefs, but it’s fine to stay buoyant through my naïve affection. I am X years old and still talking like this—incredible. Just incredible that the calamity that is my innocence gilds a pleroma unique to the day when the earth again of this city will fall apart. Call me freak—every man is a masterpiece but what is it to confuse this many creatures. ❖ The exaltation aware that I’m no longer dressed in just flesh and blood— I found firmament between my helmet and skull. Death was learning to speak through conjecture that our skinny long-haired pitching phenom had irreversibly lost his finesse. Called my body Brother Donkey, was burdened with all that impedes resuscitation— ❖ Humility of pacing, diligence of recall, set forth for me a taxonomy of announcements by which I may sequence these feelings toward a higher order of praise. Children have been raised by wolves, and even birds are overheard to answer questions, yet few inhabit that zone which adheres a beast's meekness to a human’s persistence of self-effacement—all against a weaker physique and panic throughout asserting itself. for Jason Morris ❖ A wilderness contains no diamond. And because a diamond has been built for us, we must be distant from regions that threaten our civility. I speak about civility with a laugh, of course, but it’s good-natured. “The universe falls apart and discloses a diamond,” according to the dictation transcribed by Jack Spicer, who was not quite Francis of Assisi, though both spent their lives in despair making toys to amuse the infant Christ. Whether the voice of dictation resembled that of our home team’s radio announcer or the San Damiano cross—“Francis, rebuild my church”—is a matter of taste, such as taste in furniture. At any rate, Hunter Pence grounds into yet another double play, and we are stuck in our deference. A city could be built out from the baselines of a diamond. Far from the hospital near where I live and where Spicer died, the city’s edge meets wilderness, and my reception crackles—how’s yours. I am trying to design my solace at a point shared by different stations, but the ballpark seagulls become a menace to my anxious antenna. Most nights they circle overhead until game’s end when it is safe to ransack the leftover food, but in an inning distended past anyone’s enjoyment—a hangover’s early arrival—they settle upon the outfield. Their skepticism must be a sad sight for the rookie at bat, a spooky parody of messianic expectation. I mean we are smack-dab within a quiet, null moment of life (on earth) winding down to a supposed eternal hurrah deemed paradise. ❖ These mornings I bike within a lyrical but discreetly resonant rule where I recite a settlement among recalcitrant systems to axe the psychopomps that took the best out from us to some distant historicity. They should fear it when I am so employed. I’m recently defined as a maker of my own oxygen, haircut, and enjoyment. Today I wanted to dissolve into the Giants victory procession up Market. It’s possession of a desire to be rid of my body but also to join this party because we’ve been fledged into city living, the captivation to a melodic apokalypsis. Don’t humiliate love by doubting these poems. I had to tell myself that—

Mirror, mirror on the wall show me in succession all my faces, that I may view and choose which I would like as true. Teach me skill to disguise what’s not pleasing to the eyes, with faith, that life obeys the rules, in man or God or football pools. Always keep me well content to decorate attitude and event so that somehow behind the scene I may believe my actions mean; that one can exercise control in playing out a chosen role; rub clouded glass and then, at will, write self on it again. But if, in some unlucky glance, I should glimpse naked circumstance in all its nowhere-going-to, may you crack before I do.

i’d rather have an agogô for a heart a djembe for a heart gramophone for a heart bison bone for a heart dandelion spore for a heart sweet cream butter for a heart i’d rather have a mason jar for a heart an ashtray for a heart a plate of liver for a heart lawnmower for a heart jezebel for a heart instead of this flesh & blood which mars my sheets instead of this archive that clogs my toilet instead of this flea-bitten attic full of raccoons instead of this envelope that arrives already open instead of this light bulb that rattles on the inside instead of this tv box that draws attention on trash day instead of this wart that only responds to rain instead of this colander that never catches the grit i’d rather have a heart born of the lust between a sonnet & a blues song a coleridge-wild weed hoochie coochie heart a we real cool heart aboard the impossible spawn of slave ships an undying, maroon eternally brown in the black hills heart i’d rather have a heart that beats that beats that beats that beats that beats