jeremiah

jeremiah promised me

that one day we would need no

teachers, no preachers,

because one day we all

will know the lord.

clipped wings: i see your face at every roadside

boys wander blind along

the railroad tracks

seeing only the next trestle

iron eyeless engines

bearing down

wailing whistles and women

in mourning

in morning’s

light i wake, dry-eyed and emptied

left out by the water barrel,

the dipper, the drinking gourd frosted and

biting our lips

that dream of flight gathers

grey dust under your bed

you spook at my footsteps,

at any footsteps more solid than a ghost’s.

i pray for the earth to catch at your heels,

a moth pinned to its corkboard

a dried moth that blooms

back into life.

i won't be wanting

foxes with nowhere to lay our heads,
the salt pillars who looked back,
planting seeds that hibernate in the frozen earth:
he lay on one side for months

you travel into the furnace.
to hold open the door.

a shy spirit, imp-like and gleeful,
the man who points upward and leaves:
 he walks beside us into the flames.

the third roommate

me and my barnacle friend,
pitying herself in a high, soft tremor
"i'm tired of being ignored!"
how could i ignore you
when you linger,constantly,
curled tight in the corner of my eye?
a piece of dust that makes me squint,
rub, and redden, drifting in and out
of my vision, poking your head into my landscape.

your gaze is a trap, waiting resentfully
and eagerly for me to look your way.

crusted on the stern, the
prow of my consciousness

like the dull persistent drip
from a roof that has cracked itself.

we are not so full of malice as
you suppose, we merely are trying to
breathe as our bedrooms slowly flood.

paul revere: part 2

i'm wearing the remnants of
last night on my face,
sitting in this polished pew,
and no one gives a damn.

hallelujah!

the seed is planted
in my chest and refuses
to be uprooted...
therefore, i bring out my
pruning shears, to tame
my wild brambles
and their roses.

don't let these
briars choke my heart.
these blooms, they
grow like weeds and
stab like thorns.

...

the shears are sharp.

hallelujah!

well spent: a jar of quarters

i've been thinking about the woman who pretended she would take my fur jew-coat at gunpoint, and the woman who followed me around the grocery store screaming for us all to go home and the women who made certain we could never use the dryers at the laundromat and i'm trying to take my street-face off, but it's so firmly fixed.

venetian beads and blinds

i'm burying this winter by the
spadeful, slicing holes out of
the garden, laying slivers of
january gently in the bottom,
and heaping soil overtop,
healing the ground.

like moses' mother laying her baby
in a basket, tender, letting him
slip away for a time,
but suspecting his return,
altered yet familiar,
shod in a new voice
or sprouted like a wheat stalk.

winter, however, remains an
infant throughout the years,
infant-bear,shriek-berry,
gilded chimney-skater,
and always will be his own
monstrous merry self,
dwindling down into the ground
each year
as i bring out my spade.

shoot 'em up

the easier of the two
is "thou shalt not"

it's much simpler to avoid murder,
eliminate passion
rather than taming or training.

we're all milktoast believers,
empty of love in deed.