872 Life poems

Sometimes it feels like it is over and it's not. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it's over. It's dark often at these times. Urban though, so a certain version of light too. It's hard to predict if it will start on time or how late. I'm often a little late and it has started. Last night, I could tell from the copters overhead that I was late. As I walked up, the blocks around it were emptying out. Parents pulled their children home. The night herons settled into trees. That's the outer ring. As I got closer, all that was left were the blinking lights of the motor- cycles blocking the intersections and the men and few women in uniforms that mill about the corner, helmets in their hands. They talked among themselves. Ignored me mainly. One told me how to get around. I did not clarify that I was walking towards. You can hear it sometimes. It often has a soundtrack. Sometimes it has drums and brass. Sometimes just joy. When I am late I am trying to guess its path. Last night, several times I got close to it only to be turned back by a line of cops. They let the media through but turned me back. Then it turned the corner and there it was. At that moment, I melted my body into it and it embraced me. Rosy fingered dusk and all that. Come here, it sang, listen. And then I was borne along by the waves all night and the whirlpool, the fig tree, and I was the bat, hanging on patiently. Aarav came up and hugged me. Someone grabbed me from behind and I thought it is Artem but later realized it was Berat. So much mask. I grabbed Charlotte's hand and held it for a while when things felt dicey. It felt dicey as they cornered us from two sides and we went down the tight side street, up the hill. Charlotte's hand. It's like that. Moving from isolation to the depths of friends. At first we didn't mask up. We were poets. Then slowly one by one we did. As we got turnt. As I got turnt I mean. Sometimes I still don't mask up. It often feels hubristic. I keep a bandana in my pocket. It isn't super effective. It falls down a lot. Last night, I tied it around my neck as we walked up the side street hill. I pulled it over my face as I walked past the line of cops. I noticed Emma there, throwing eggs. I ducked. Two balloons filled with paint flew by. Visors suddenly yellow. She said to me, how is your heart? And I at first worried her question. Then I realized she meant my heart and how it was turnt. It is good, I said, I am opening it; I am expanding it. And I meant it. I love you I texted Felix. Lub u!!!!!! I texted Haruto. Texting Isabella and Jackson, I love you guys. I miss you. I texted love you some forty-three times in the last few years. I texted <3 some thirty-three times. Lub u, eighteen times. Miss you, thirty-eight. She said your feed is all riots, plants, picnics, and poets. It was an accusation. She was noticing that I had got turnt. And I said, my son, my son is in my feed too. I didn't bother to argue the riot with her. Still, oh that moment. Turnt moment: I was at the poetry reading and Mia didn't go. She was supposed to read too but she didn't. She said she wanted to see what happens. Then she texts I love you and I know then that Trader Joe's has been looted. All the wines out in the street. Such sweet elixir, FOMO. Then the rest of that night. We quickly say good-byes after the reading, refuse the offer of going to drinks, careen from the reading to our home. One of us on twit- ter the entire time. Texting too. While we are driving, one of us at home runs out into the streets, towards the gas. I drive up and two of us get out of the car and I stay in the car and drive the few blocks home. My son has fallen asleep in the back. I am coughing in the car from the gas. He sleeps through it. I take him out and carry him up to bed. More texts. I love you, I text. Come by and get me when you are done. Later that night, I go out again. Miguel stays home with Minjoon. I go to a fight party; Marxist v. Nihilist. No one knows which is which. Mohamed, my fighting teacher, fights. I miss it. I love you I text. She texts back I'm high on being slugged; my eyes are swollen; I lost; I'm turnt. Standing outside, a woman gets kicked out of the club. The bouncer tosses her out and into us. She is fucked up. And this feels awful to her. Her arms wildly swinging indicate this awful feeling. It feels awful to us. Another woman tries to help her and she slugs her. She misses and the woman who she has tried to slug takes her, calms her down. I hear her saying I love you, I love you over and over. Later I will learn that she spent the entire night talking the woman down. It's like that. When turnt, sometimes one needs to be held. Still later, I stand on the street, outside my house and watch the t-mobile get looted. A man tries to stop another man who has his hammer at the ready in front of the window. The man who is attempting to stop the hammer gets hit in the face with the butt of the hammer. I decide to go to bed. It is 3 am. I text Nathan and say I love you and I'll leave the key in the box for you. The march continues on, Nathan continues on, turns left a block away and then when Nathan texts me back I know the Whole Foods is looted and they are all drinking champagne, dancing. All of them will get a cold later. Riot champagne becomes a term among us that winter. I wasn't there but I was there too. My germs were there. I too had that cold. Is this poem too heroic? I am sorry. I worry it is. Or I know it is. We are turnt to mere vandals at moments. I'll admit it. Every computer in that shop. Every phone in that one. Every car in that car lot. I don't want it to be heroic but last night I turned the corner and Nor was there with her bike and when I saw her I said I love you and we walked down the street as each window was cracked. They got turnt. Eventually we disperse. I jog for a few minutes away and out of the kettle. We joke, circle back to watch a car burn. Oliver walks by. He is hurrying towards the dispersal. I love you we say to him as he heads off. The car burns. The fire truck arrives. As I stand there watching it, it is as if everyone I ever texted I love you to walks by. I love you we call out to each other. A group of women walk by the car and stop to take photographs. So much joy they have. They are laughing with such triumph. Selfies and all. Turnt. This poem is true. I have texted I love you and its variations over and over. Sometimes I barely knew you. But the names are not true. This is not a coterie poem. Is it a milieu poem? Can it be a movement poem? I took all the names of this poem and never wrote them in. There is no electronic record of them. I found a list of the most popular baby names for various countries in 2015, the year in which I am writing this poem. I made a list, one male and one female from each list. Then I alphabetized it. And I put those names in this poem one by one. I got to O. But Olivia, Saanvi, Santiago, Seoyeon, Sofia, Yui, and Zeynep, I love you too.

don’t expect too much. Well I expect you to go into the fucking human tunnel I’m going. pink grimy glossed entabulature, welted and tattooed. Enfolded in ropy ceiling-hangings but it isn’t a room, and bumblingly sliding out, little legs of a little girl, bum on the wall/opening pink legs sticking out like a hermit crab’s, she’s coming! shudder out the little-girl legs with a little girl head mostly eyes, no ears, bug brain, aimless Send her to school It’s cold, and where should she go, she will eat her legs with her mandibles her eyes will retract inside. Stroke her riding hood Settle down, little nobody will hurtcha by breaking off your little legs, six little legs, if you come.

to mama who on the eve of my birth beat a bitch with a kool-aid spoon for taking her eldest child’s red balloon (if i wasn’t wet-fisted, all hemmed up inside cecelia, i’da jumped in) to the bazaar of milk & afterbirth that once was her body, piping hot almond dark with laughter & memories of fenced-in two-stepping late night in a brownsville park to mama’s hands, mad stallions pummeling dough for biscuits, cherry-scented butter-smeared fists or floured moons to ms cloritha, professional crier for dilroy’s funeral parlor (stuffed the dead fulla who knows, once saw some geezer’s toupee slid back like a yarmulke, a woman’s wig bangs in her ear, mourners too busy kiki-ing in the back to tell the woman’s kin her fall fell forward & dipped to the side cloritha wailing all the while, earning her fifty bucks off the books) to ms sheronda who daily bugged mama for dried black-eyed peas, swore her son looked like a jackson (the eldest sissy, what’s her face, bee bee, cee cee you know, “centipede”) to the hungry black power thief who snatched nefertiti off our wall, public enemy off the turntable, platter of mustard glazed tongue picked clean in the kitchen sink to cuban ruben cross the hall who loved tongue & chuck D, father figure by george michael (also gone from the crates), who OD’d at the tunnel (stuntin’) in mama’s leopard print dress

This is my last report: I wanted to speak of existence, the ants most of all, dressed up in their naughty flame-trousers, the exact jaws, their unknowable kindnesses, their abyss of hungers, and science, their mercilessness, their prophetic military devotions, their geometry of scent, their cocoons for the Nomenclature, I wanted to speak of the Glue Sniffers and Glue Smoothers who despise all forms unbound, loose in their amber nectars, I wanted to point to their noses, hoses and cables and networks, their tools, if I can use that word now—and scales and scanners and Glue Rectories. I wanted you to meet my broom mother who carved a hole into her womb so that I could live— At every sunset she stands under the shadow of the watchtowers elongating and denying her breath. I wanted to look under the rubble fields for once, for you (if you approved), flee into the bullet-riddled openness and fall flat, arched, askew, under the rubble sheets and let the rubble fill me with its sharp plates and ripped dust— alphabets incomplete and humid. You, listen, a little closer to the chalk dust—this child swinging her left arm, a ribbon, agitated by unnamed forces, devoured.

In the laboratory waiting room containing one television actor with a teary face trying a contact lens; two muscular victims of industrial accidents; several vain women—I was one of them— came Deborah, four, to pick up her glass eye. It was a long day: Deborah waiting for the blood vessels painted on her iris to dry. Her mother said that, holding Deborah when she was born, “First I inspected her, from toes to navel, then stopped at her head ...” We wondered why the inspection hadn’t gone the other way. “Looking into her eye was like looking into a volcano: “Her vacant pupil went whirling down, down to the foundation of the world ... When she was three months old they took it out. She giggled when she went under the anaesthetic. Forty-five minutes later she came back happy! ... The gas wore off, she found the hole in her face (you know, it never bled?), stayed happy, even when I went to pieces. She’s five, in June. “Deborah, you get right down from there, or I’ll have to slap!” Laughing, Deborah climbed into the lap of one vain lady, who had been discontented with her own beauty. Now she held on to Deborah, looked her steadily in the empty eye.

Now it's time to play. Nobody says, like they used to, but in my bones the desire overwhelms me. "Write! Make a poem," say the bones. The inlet will come first. It always does. Water calls urgently, "egret." The waterbird that moves elastically over the surface making everything focus soon or late. Now my hand enters. It always does. It gives the bones reason to observe. It makes the egret the finest thing in sight and the water intelligent north of here. Water is genius because it is interconnected. Drop south knows drop north. But the bones will lose their joy if the bird overwhelms the old playground.

Some places you could die in, if you could just go on living there. The boy, his legs bare and small, swinging in the stroller, sockless, suede-shoed feet touching the runner. He can walk, but the woman keeps him from running into the street. He won’t obey but listens to everything we say. Head tilted, face changing with the conversation. Green leaves leap through fences. Cars wait while we cross. And each bird the boy greets with its name, “Bird,” flies away. The sky holds everything. The woman pushes her son’s son along. Her arms strong enough to hold nine strong horses prancing. She’s given her money away because someone had to bury a child. That is the worst thing. A mother burying her child. I would never do that to her, even though it means what it means. A thousand years from now when I am only a dream I will dream this dream of strolling. Perhaps I am doing so now.

for Max Ritvo I Three weeks until summer and then—what? Midsummer’s gravity makes our heads spin each hour a gilt thread spool, winding through the second hand, gossamer fin de semaine, fin de siècle, fin slicing the water of the too-cold-to-breathe bay, molten silver, then receding as if we hadn’t seen it, sultan of so long, see you tomorrow. Dead man’s fingers, lady’s slippers, a seal who swims too close—too close for what? The needle swerves. Our element chooses us. Water fire, air, earth—the rosebush, Lazarus, hot to the touch, gold reticulate, is love’s bull’s-eye, attar rising from the rafters. II If I could make it stop I would. Was it the crocodile Hook feared, or was it time? The hour’s arrow never misses, the gnomon, glinting, cuts the Day-Glo sun to pieces. In the ultraviolet palace of the Mermaid King his girls wear scallop shells, one for each year on their turquoise tails. Even they have birthdays, why not you? Death, hold your ponies with one hand, and stay awhile. On my desk, the lion’s paw lamps scavenged from the winter beach, its poppy-colored shells like the lit scales of an enormous Trojan fish … teeth chattering, its metronome time bomb tsk tsk— when is giving up not giving in? III ( child’s pose ) When Alice pulled the stopper, did she get smaller, or did the world get larger? In the bath, your nose bleeds a bouquet of tissue roses, white stained red—adolescence is to overdo it, but really? Thirty stories up, our birds’-eye view is the hummingbird tattoo on your bare head, wings beating, too tiny and too big to see, your wire-thin profile drawn upright, bones daring the air, marionette running on the brain’s dark marrow, tungsten for the fireflies’ freeze tag. Due south, the Chrysler Building’s gauntlet holds a lit syringe. We do and do not change. Let me go from here to anywhere. IV That’s it for now. And so we turn the page your poems standing in for you, or—that’s not it, what’s left of you, mediating between what you’d call mind and body and I, by now biting my lip, call grief, the lines netting the enormous air like silver threads, the tails of Mr. Edwards’s spiders with which they sail from ledge to branch “as when the soul feels jarred by nervous thoughts and catch on air.”Pace. Your trousers worn to mouse fur dragging on the stoop, your hip prongs barely holding them aloft, the past a phaeton, its sunlit reins bucking at before and after, but there is no after. V Or is there? For once, when you rock back on the chair I don’t say don’t do that, forelegs lifting, hooves pawing the air— Every departure’s an elopement, the shy cat fiddling while Rome sizzles, spoon mirror flipping us upside down. Son of Helios, rainbow fairy lights blazing, when one light goes out they all go out. At the top of the dune, the thorny crowns of buried trees, their teeter-totter branches a candelabra for the spiders’ silvery halo of threads. What a terrible business it is, saying what you mean. Speak, sky, the horizon scored by talons.

Today you find yourself guilty as the rim you split an egg against You press charges You spell out your name like the letters are medals for good conduct in a bad war The night moves in with you into your room until even your sleep is not your own Through the window the grass tells you to give up and you are trying but on the other hand things keep you: the moon, the cars, cars You undress yourself more deeply down like this is the way to get to the future You let the darkness medically examine you So much can’t be put back together To burn the house down to burn the house up It’s the same problem in any direction You’re matter You turn on the light

Come To Sunny Prestatyn Laughed the girl on the poster, Kneeling up on the sand In tautened white satin. Behind her, a hunk of coast, a Hotel with palms Seemed to expand from her thighs and Spread breast-lifting arms. She was slapped up one day in March. A couple of weeks, and her face Was snaggle-toothed and boss-eyed; Huge tits and a fissured crotch Were scored well in, and the space Between her legs held scrawls That set her fairly astride A tuberous cock and balls Autographed Titch Thomas, while Someone had used a knife Or something to stab right through The moustached lips of her smile. She was too good for this life. Very soon, a great transverse tear Left only a hand and some blue. Now Fight Cancer is there.