I sat in the basement of the bookstore flipping through the Best Short Stories of ‘08– actually reading first sentences– when Cousin Myron shows up, plops down in the chair next to me and offloads the stress from his day teaching.  Myron’s not really my cousin– but he may as well be.   We’ve been kicking it pretty tight the last few months. 

We were in the bookstore waiting for a reading to start.  Two cats were featuring; one a brother we both knew who has a well received, and I think, award winning book.  The other was a dude I’d not met before.

Anyways:  The host, this older man, began setting up chairs.   I know him, and am surprised to see he’s still alive.  It’s been  that long.  His white hair flaming.  I greet him.  He’s all smiles: You ready for the reading tonight?

Well, I’m not supposed to be reading.  I’m just here to support Sean.

Oh, I see.   I’m _______, he says.

I know you.  I say.  I’m James.

Its then when he realizes I’m not the african american dude who’s featuring– i’m just an african american dude whom, it just so happens DOESN’T resemble the feature.  He pats my arm in something shy of assault, says sure i remember you, then turns from me quickly, smile intact, and heads to the other side of the room.

You know– to finish setting up…

I’m not hating.  I’ve lost a considerable amount of weight since he’s last seen me, and it has been Years.  I wouldnt blame anybody who doesn’t immediately recognize me.

Sean appears seconds later.  We chit chat badly for a couple of minutes.  Maybe he was nervous.  Chit chat certainly isn’t my strong suit.  But he asked me the same question three times in a row: How’ve you been? 

We met for the first time last February .  I was one of five african american poets performing at an event where I met him and a few others.  No one knew me, and — since I was the only one who didn’t have a book published– it was decided I would open. 

I’m very comfortable on stage.  I believe in using vulgarities in poetry.  I believe in anger as a fuel for writing.  I have no problem opening– I have a lot of poems I like reading aloud because of the energy within them.  I like readings to be lively and engaging.   In fact, at that reading, one of my coworkers came and brought his son, daughter — both around 10, 11 years old.  He told me in office the next day, ‘you know, both my kids really liked your poems but they were afraid to meet you afterwards.’

That was a huge compliment. 

But that afternoon, Sean followed me.  And Sean is a true POET.  Meaning, his work is about the page, his words measured, beautiful.  He works in Forms which makes me a lazy/lame poet in comparison because I do so few of them.   In his reading the only thing he raised was an eyebrow.

At that reading, having him follow me was like having someone let all the air out of the room in a kind of silent fart.  Fire followed by an ice bath.  My coworker and his kids left during his set, in fact.

And its because of that I’m here in this basement in this bookstore.  I wanted to really Hear Him.  Despite sitting beneath him in the front row during that reading, I’d felt I’d missed something.

The host has been hosting for years and you couldn’t ask for a better one.  He Actually Reads The Books, Yawl!!  You can tell from his improv’d introduction, which was akin to being introduced by Allistair Cooke on the old Masterpiece Theater. 

Sean is first up.  Like earlier in the year, with him at the mic, I had to lean forward to catch What He Was Saying.  Tonight, with less than a dozen people in the room and him two folding chair rows before me, I can hear him just fine– and he’s putting me to sleep.  His voice is this beautiful idling motor.  It may be the motor of a bugatti veyron, but its idling.  He lives, he said in one of his poems, in the midwest– and somehow, symbolically, his writing reflects that.  I think visually: and what I see as he reads are these huge beautiful snow dunes: smooth, perfectly shaped, gorgeous.  And Quiet.  And Cold.

(and unnecessary aside here: he so strongly resembles another friend of mine its startling.  talk about black men looking alike…  but this time i’m serious.  That they’re not related is peculiar.  Their ancestors must come from the same tribe somehow.)

Sean’s followed by another dude whom I didn’t know, but he’s a more engaging reader.  

I’m leery on names and specifics here, because I’m also telling The Truth, which may be inappropriate– but I’m gonna go there.

So, from the podium, the second dude acknowledges the only other woman in the audience (less than 8 people here)  Turns out she was also at that reading I’d participated in last February.  I have to say: she acted, towards me, very Odd.  Odd= distant.  Cold.  Am Not Trying To Make Friends With YOU.  Initially, I took her distance as kinda bougy.  I’m easy to ignore: No, I don’t have a book on Amazon.  No, I didn’t get an expensive education.  No to this, no to that…  I just write and enjoy reading.  That’s it. 

After that reading, I wanted to double check what i was feeling.  Call bullshit on myself and say, well, people have lives.  Its not about me.  I hadn’t done anything.  Maybe she was distracted.  So, the next day, I sent her a thank you email since she’d coproduced that program.  I wrote: I enjoyed the reading and just wanted to send out a thanks for even letting me be involved. 

She Never wrote back. 

So then becomes now.  And the reading is over, and I turn and stand, and as people are standing and gently chatting with one another– she has moved ALLLLLL the way over to a bookshelf across the room.

Cousin Myron buys a book from the second dude who read.  And while he’s making his transaction, I see this woman is now in a little triage of poets, chatting.  I’m on my way out– but I gotta give some respect.  I gotta say Something.  Itd be rude otherwise.  I mean, that thing from months ago.  Maybe I was tripping…

Ever so gently, standing beside her, I touch her shoulder– I just wanted to say hey to you, I said.  Haven’t seen you seen February. 

She’s like, Oh hi– then Turns– and there’s another older white woman behind her, maybe three or four empty chairs away, and she completely spins away from me to jump in front of that lady.

To wit, I’m kinda left just Standing There.  Dumb.

One of the dudes she was talking with, he approaches: says, I know you from somewhere.  And we chat.  I met him once, but I couldn’t be present with him.  My mind was so scrambled by that strangeness from her.  I suddenly feel like I’m on Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I pull away from him pretty quickly (full disclosure: I’m tired of male friends.)  and Leave. 

Cousin Myron grabs a shwerma and ate while we talk and bond on the walk back to Bart.  We have much in common, similar childhood wounds I guess, and had a good conversation.   I never brought her up to him– whether he had any odd run ins with her.  What does it matter?  But it leaves me curious…  I mean, genuinely: What Was That All About?!?

Titles aren’t always easy– they’re either very obvious or unnecessarily ornate.  Lycanthropoetry may be overkill but I adore it…  A mashup of lycanthropy and poetry, natch.  The former… Well, hmm…

I can say back when i was a kid, I ordered a book from Scholastic about werewolves… (okay, yeah I know.  I told my coworker yesterday I used to collect Fangoria magazines.  That explains a lot, he said.)  But really!  It was a little paperback book on this history and lore of werewolves, but interestingly there were a couple of chapters I specifically remember.  (I searched this book online to no avail– you’ll have to trust me.)

1) It explained how you could identify a werewolf in human form.  There were two tells: first, they have a unibrow (Frida Kahlo, white courtesy telephone!)  and second, their middle finger and index are the same length.  Make sure to keep your eyes open when you’re on the bus.

2) The last chapter had a recipie on how to become a werewolf.  No shit.  Maybe that’s why the book isn’t googlable…  I remember it saying you had to go out amongst the trees, draw a big circle and some other variations and things and chants and whatnot.  No, I never tried it but I thought about it.

And that’s how the word lycanthrope got into my head.

Otherwise– the piece was inspired by camping at Clear Lake during a full moon weekend, not being able to sleep, staring at the moon above, listening to a chorus of bullfrogs in the lagoon…  The piece came out with such clear arrogance I actually thought at one point, this is the last moon poem anybody need right,  i mean, write.

What’s the emoticon for shaking your head in shame?

In fact, when I’ve read it, I’ve only read the second section.  That to me seemed to be the poem in total.   But here’s the full length version

***

I.

The sky is pierced with a white nipple

Lactating spirits.  The moon pulses with

The venom of insanity—dripping starry

Night sweats through the hourglass

Of celestial consciousness.  The moon,

Growing a beard of clouds, demands sacrifice

From its sterile, onyx altar. It is a full, virginal apple

Having never known the homicidal

Climax of the teeth or the tongue.

 

This glacier of foam telepathically summons

The ache of a storm to pelt this feverish earth

With fang-tooth rain which buzzes the air

In a squadron of hornets.  The sound

Reconstitutes as a moan through mourning willows

 

Houses, only graves for the living, inhale steam

Through the bronchial lungs of loose windows

Whose sudden sneeze in the night can startle ghosts.

 

II.

The striptease of night begins

With a dark purple strap falling across a blushing horizon

Freckled with alabaster goosebumps.  The moon hangs

Above our campsite a glowing white spider with a its

thorax full of silk, sitting lotus in a netting of stars—

Each polished to a perfect, happy silver

 

Laying on our backs, we study the sky

Watching it shift in color and undulate like an ocean of chameleons.

We pick the stars bobbing along the surface of night

And stuff our pockets with them

As a child might stuff her mouth with cake.

 

Climbing the ribs of our tent,

Patient, curious and silent as a thought,

The moon leaves a shiny trail of neon

As it crawls along the earth on delicate insect legs—

Know that the sound of light

Moving across cool sand is like that

Of a panicked beetle

Skittering across your casket.

…happened a VERY long time ago now and oddly, is all true.  Mid 90’s, I think.  That salad did appear pretentious to me then, I was so young, years later it sounds good to me.

Truth be told, I turned the salad down because that night I was very broke. 

In the beginning of my poetry life, hitting up cafes and whatnot to read, I was often the only african american in the house or one of a few.  This is because I was going to many events in Berkeley and this was who the audience was.  I’m not implying it was bad or made me uncomfortable– I welcomed it as a challenge to see if I could represent myself, remain honest to my work, and still reach them.   Often, I believe i did.

I don’t think I told the two dudes who gave me a ride to that bookstore What Happened, and what that guy who approached me had said..  Would they have even understood?  I’m not sure even I immediately understood.  I was so young, I wasn’t sure if I’d been offended or if he was being genuine.  Maybe I was the first african american male he’d been able to talk to directly.  That city felt very isolated.

The good news is I was selling chapbooks at the time, and that night I made more money than I had before.  I remember returning home to my mom and dumping fistfuls of cash on the coffee table in front of her– like she’d do quarters upon her return from Reno.  All this just from reading some poems.

***

i am aware of the audience while I’m reading.  I have to be– to engage with them, to look.  I can feel and see when they’re with me and when I’ve lost them, when I need to hurry up and get off,  or whatever.   It can be scary and intimidating.  Especially because back then, I didn’t have a lot of friends or family who would come to support.  I’d never send out invitations.  I was more bashful about approaching people to come see me than I was reading before a room full of strangers.   I’d read to the regular audience or whoever showed.  For example I once featured with this sister who was lesbian and filled the audience with jean and plaid wearing dykes.  There were only a half dozen folks in the room I actually knew.  The story I read took place in a prison and on a chain gang– and interestingly, the story was very well received by the room.  Guess I was biased– i didn’t expect that.  My bad.

***

A Poetry Reading In Pleasanton

I.

My friend offers me a ride to the city of primary colors and dull edges.  During the commute we laugh like school kids, sharing stories and jokes like pieces of  candy.  On the other side of the Caldecott Tunnel, the cabin pressure in his Acura drops and my soul pops.  I curl up on the seat and watch as day assumes night, as buildings become enclosed torches, catching fire from the inside.  The sun climbs down from its perch, lowers itself gently into the pacific and the ocean chokes: glows bright yellow and boils with a killing fever, vomiting bubbles pregnant with steam.  The sky weeps like a lover abandoned, rips its flesh in bleeding strips of yellow and orange and purple then cloaks itself in an indigo mourning.  The stars are suddenly revealed as petrified tears suspended in a chandelier above us.  I reach for the color as I would for a ripe peach and the wind slaps away my greedy hand, then softly whispers its lullabye in my ear:

            “You can’t feel this… Cause this is too deep.”

 

II.

Pleasanton is like Oz on heroin.  I get out of the car and am sucker punched by the stench of clean, filtered air.  (Could the town possibly have a subscription for fresh mountain spring air?)  It smells sweet, but sweet like the odor of an ignored death under the house.  Its puritiy makes me nauseous.  I miss the smell of piss and weed, of cheap cigarettes and beer spilt for lost souls (martyrs for nothing and chicks for free)  I miss the smell of the homeless and greasy coins, of broncchial car exhausts and the scent of something in the distance burning.  I miss the odor of blood and semen that heralds the coming of spring.  I miss the angry ghosts, gutters boiling with garbage, liquor stores with a tight congregation of nappy teens collected like crumbs around its opened mouth.  I miss the abandoned furniture and the autumn leaves of dirty baby clothes.  Pleasanton is a hermetically sealed city that’s never lost its cherry.   Everything is sterile, perfect and lifeless.  It’s as if the town is an architectural model where the trees don’t lose their leaves and if they do, the area around them is quickly vacuumed, bleached and dried.

            The moment I give in and attempt to inhale the pure, ghetto-free air, I am suddenly accosted: an arm is thrown over my shoulders, a fist grips my bicep—instinctively I clutch my poetry.  What’s going on?  Am I being robbed?  Questioned by the authorities?  “There’s no problem here, officer!  I’m a registered poet licensed to rhyme.  I only brought low caliber words to your town, and I left the safety on.”  Oh stop it, Cagney—Stop it!  You trippin!  It’s only your friend whispering words of encouragement on which you cannot sleep…

            Only right now, you can’t feel this.  Cause this is too deep.

 

III.

We sit at the café in the corner of the bookstore.  Fashion models watch us from the covers of magazines that weight more than they do.  He comes to the table with coffee (sprinkled with chopped nuts from the amazon) diluted with crème made from the milk of pompous cows that moo with French accents.  But it was his salad that fascinated me most: its not mommas lettuce and tomatoes, eggs and bacon, but instead its all delicate grass clippings and fresh hedges, dandelion stems, lilac petals and rhodendron stems.  He fingers the root of an Asian weed and it is like huge fingers snapping a ripe bolt of lightning above a dark forest.  He dips the lightning in a lake of warmed ginger dressing and says: “Cagney…  Why aren’t you eating?”  The truth here would be inappropriate.  I couldn’t say: “I’m psychologically unable to digest anything so pretentious.  I’m not too full to eat.

            I just can’t feel this.  Cause this is too deep.

 

IV
Personal note to the Blond in the back row:

            You held my voice between your thighs and I loved you for it.  Somehow my words seemed to support you.  You lived for as long as I spoke and whenever I swallowed or inhaled or paused you shimmered like the image on a TV that’s about to go out.  Reading poetry to an audience is like making out with strangers.  You vanished after my last poem and my throat went dry.  I wanted to thank you.   I think of you often.  There are only a few faces I remember watching from the microphone, yours in particular.  I will forever carry your eager, oceanic eyes on a chain around my memory and there’s nothing you can do about it.

 

Personal Note to the Jr. High School Kid in the front row:

            Did you really get my poetry or were you just afraid to leave?  I loved your eyes too—patient and curious.  Your sister was afraid to return my glances, anxious to yield the space between us—but not you!  Thank you for feeling me, youngblood.

            In fact—would you like to be adopted by a black family?  I’d make a great father.  I’ll legally change your name to Mustafa, then insist on calling you ‘Moose’ for short.  You’ll get bag lunches of hot neckbone sandwiches for school everyday and I’ll let you date all the white girls you want.  But it’ll be all bad before long and you’ll naturally start to rebel, dismiss me with a pat on the back and say in that way of the street:

            “Playa, you can’t feel this!  Cause this is too deep.”

 

V.

The audience hangs like cherries on the vine of my words.  They grow sweeter and fuller with the passing of each fertile metaphor.  I pace the length of their garden, toss images like seeds into the open trenches of their barren minds broken open.

            Afterwards, a man approaches, grinning.  Visibly impressed.  I like his energy already.   He is tall and warm with the manner of a TV priest.  He buys a copy of my book and says: “Keep writing.  Your work is powerful.”

            I say: “Thanks.”

            Then, he shakes his head admiringly and says: “You know, I have always admired the rhythms of black people…”

 

            And I say…

 

“Get me the hell outta here!  There were only three Negroes in the book store all night and two of them had brooms.  The other was me.  Take me back home to the city of long shadows where the streets run with cheap wine and similac bought on credit.  Take me back home to the city of chalk outlines and pine trees ripe with hyperdermic needles.  Take me back to the city where deferred dreams are waiting to take shape.  Take me back home to where there’s blood in the street.

            Cause I can’t feel this.  This is too deep.”

The other side of the white light is a stage light. 

God’s monologue subsides as the last earthly breath

eases from my chest.  Relatives gone on before now sit

in audience cheering my entrance.  God’s

hair is a tsunami shadowing a beach, cresting over remarkable

brown eyes.  He’s in a tweed 70’s leisure suit & yes he smokes

 

& listens with his body.  He’ll erupt in convulsive laughter, smoke

pulsing from his throat in volcanic exhaust, his chest giggling light.

On thick, yellowed fingers he counts off the remarkable

failures of my life—cold nights spent high & alone.  In hiccupping breath

chuckles: That was pretty dumb, huh?  don’tcha think?  God

laughs at clips of me being clumsy, vulnerable, human.  I sit

 

& squirm watching memories projected like a syndicated sit-

com.  The audience nods or stares in cool detachment as I smoke

blunts, kiss girls and search their  bodies for the scent of boys.  God

laughs an aside, No—the burning bush was not cannibis and the light

of the applause sign gets the audience to laugh in one oceanic breath.

To fail is to learn.  In pain lies instruction.  What is most remarkable

 

about life, he says.  Is that anyone survives it.  And what is remarkable

about you is patience and faith.  Despite what many believe, I don’t sit

in judgment.  Eternity’s too short.  Folks judge themselves.  In one breath

a prayer inhaled blossoms into a curse.  Your own hope dissolves in smoke.

God hangs his head.  Now let this be my testimony: God weeps light.

Hard tears, glowing bright as lemons fall just for you from the eyes of God.

 

That this man sniffling We’ll be right back to an assumed camera, is God

a tv host, vulnerable, perfect in his imperfections, strikes me as truly remarkable.

On floating monitors, silent nature videos play as commercial breaks: light

shimmers on water in electric leaves, violets nod in rhythm to wind, the sun sits

as a crown on a hilltop flourescent with flowers.  God pauses, inhales, & smoke

unfolds in a kalidescope of roses embroidered along his breath.

 

Do you have any questions for me?  He asks in rose scented breath.

I wonder if he is bothered by people who do not believe in God.

I wonder about the afterlife earned by people who lived as slaves & did smoke

from the ovens at Auchwitz reach heaven or why people with remarkable

gifts are often so sad.  Do dinosaurs roam heaven?  Does he sit

among elderly in silence?  I ask: What’s your best work?  He says, Sunlight.

 

God’s breath smells like emotions at a wedding.  He sits back

smoke hanging in air like wings and says: Wouldn’t you say so?

About sunlight?  So simple, weightless and remarkable…

 

 

 

They should be.

What made this camp, i’m not sure.

Maybe more than 100 young people were in the auditorium when three of the four brothers showed up.  Our appearance was because of a promise from Will who said he’d show and bring us to do a little performing for the kids.

Everybody loves Will.  He’s very engaging, very warm, insanely loveable on stage and off.  And he’s from San Francisco.

He leads us before the room of kids and immediately they get excited, especially after hearing he’s from San Francisco and graduated from a school many of the kids in the room were going to.

Nearly the whole room gets on their feet for Will.  Then, he introduces the brother Roger Robinson.  Roger is a black man from London (by way of Trinidad) and when he gets introduced the room roars, then falls bone quiet to Hear That Accent.

Will introduces me, as being from Oakland…  No further word: the room blackened with boos.  It was like being pelted with something worse than tomatoes…

What would Jesus have done?

I read my little poem, finally, totally emasculated. 

That was the beginning of a long afternoon.

We broke into workshops thereafter.  Kids hovered around Will as if he were the Pied Piper of Chocolate.  They all but dangled from his arms– touch us!  heal us!  Kids hovered around Roger, too.  Him being so exotic and all– oh, say anything to us! 

Once we were all on stage, we’d recite a lil’ stanza-preview of the poetry we’d be doing later.  Then, one by one, we’d come back up and do our solo thing for about 15 or so minutes.

We were all used to performing.  We were all brilliant.  It was all good.

And to his credit– Will gets name checked here, because he was the first person to illustrate for me You Can Pay Rent Doing Poetry.  It happened once, I know it’ll happen again…

Moral?  I lived through it.  Boo a poet!  Keep America Free!!

 

 

 

I met my mentor, Steve, years ago doing poetry open mics.  Back then he was always interesting– he’d perform his poems from memory and had a beautifully lyrical way of presenting.  I would learn later he is a musician, and it infuses and informs his work and as a reader.  He eventually told me he performs his work from memory because it keeps him engaged with the audience because he’s shy. 

Reading from the page is like reading from behind a security fence.

I’ve taken him as a mentor because he’s older and because we’re close and because I have no other name for him.  Father figure?  Friend?  Alliance?

After my mother died and I found myself sans family, he and I organized a road trip to perform poetry and hit up several art museums and cafe’s along Highway 101 from California to Seattle, Wa.  That week we bonded for an eternity.

Last Friday he invited me to a poetry reading featuring a friend of his.  The address was near to where I worked.  I could walk to the address from my office.  The address belonged to a large office building with a lonely security guard at the door.  There was a neighboring residential hotel, too.  This didn’t look like a poetry gathering and I didn’t see anybody.  I wanted to hate and leave, but I called his cell phone and he directed me to look for a pizza shop.  There they were setting up for the reading.  I peeked in and saw a woman I remembered from years ago– very handsome, older white woman.  She’d totally forgotten me and I re-introduced myself as if those years before hadn’t happened.  (My body has changed much since then.  Wouldnt expect anybody to recognize me)

Gradually, the place began filling with older white people– many of whom I knew from my beginning years in poetry in Berkeley.  But I did notice a couple of brothers, literally three young black men– younger than me, at least. 

There were three features.  The first was a dude I knew long ago– I won’t mention his name because he was pretty bad.  Years before I remember him doing a series of poems on and about the telephone.  An interesting idea, but nothing came of it.  It hangs in my memory like a clue to a crime I’ve never been able to piece together.

Tonight though, he takes another poets idea– prints and copies his set and hands them out to just about everyone in the audience.  He reveals to us many of the poems were written back when he was in high school or in his early 20’s, and it shows.  He’s my age, now.  Fortysomething.  And should know better.  The poems coming out of me in high school were like the black exhaust from a motor that hasn’t run in years.  Dirty, grungy, unformed, and prepatory for a cleaner run, which never happens. 

His poems had no endings.  They just kind of stopped.  He paid no attention to what words end his line.  And the poems had the raw emptiness of a writer finding his way.    We’re Writing Because We Like It, Yet We Have Nothing To Say.

For example, I’m stuck for further detail here, because A) it was very forgettable.  I didn’t bother clapping.  and B) I didn’t keep his handout.  My mentor began writing on it during his set– “Sometimes I like to make notes during the persons set and just tell them a couple of things afterwards.”  But even he left that handout on the table afterwards– and i’m not sure went back for it.

The second poet, the one Steve called me to support, I actually like.  Dude came in, looked around and waved at people he knew or used to know.  He had a strange way of talking out of the side of his mouth, his lips pursed crookedly like if Daffy Duck would look down the buisness end of a shotgun and blast his beak sideways then give a one liner while his head smoldered: yeah!  exactly like that, only there was no dissolve to another scene where Everything Was Alright.  This dudes beak froze that way.

Yet he was a better poet.  He had an awesome sense of humor.  Half poet, half sarcasic stand up comic.  It kept his set lively and he remained in ready position to surprise the listener and shuttle past expections.  In one poem, he used a business presentation as a base and twisted it into this poetic diatribe which was funny and engaging and, as it kept going, surprising. 

Finally, this dude whom I’d known for a long time– in fact, back in the early 90’s when i went to my first poetry reading, he was the feature.  he’s known as a language poet and is hard to describe.  Because I’m being so critical and nasty, I’m not going to name him– but here’s a hint, a clip from one of his stanzas:

thinking grasshoppers radiating
nightsea stone wind to me
Jelly boxes awkwarding
  levi numinous whey muteing sparrows
  dimension flash covers triptych clock sun
  memorises pink arrows coming deeping rolfing
  kettledrums star woven crawfish opium

…i’ve never heard anyone but him write like that.  Its intriguing, hypnotic almost.  (maybe not enough.  midway through his set, the young brothers I mentioned got up and walked out.  Though I respect his work, I wanted to leave with them– or at least tell them, its not always this bad.  Don’t give up!)  I remember back during that first poetry reading, at the mic he finished one poem then mumbled to the audience about wanting to read another one.  When he couldn’t find it, one of the other poets behind him who’d read earlier stage whispered: ‘How can you tell the difference?’

There was no open mic.  After the reading, I wanted to immediately bounce, but my mentor asked me to hang around for a minute to talk.  I got up and wandered outside.  My mentor had hemmed in the woman I mentioned, who is a bit of a silver fox, really.   I strolled past them and sat out at the curb.  That I knew some people in the house, meaningless.  I didn’t want to talk to them.  Instead I waited and watched some 10 stories above me, some window washers power-washing a building.  The dark clouds above them, the halogen lights keeping them enclosed in a bright white shell, the noise and spray from the hoses, the mist: beautiful.  Hands down, the best poem of the night.

 

            …and I’ll tell you

another thing

 

everything you know

is a lie

and all your efforts

have been wasted

 

I got

more sense

than you

when                                                     

I’m asleep

 

I can tell

more truth

than you

can, and

I have

only the

suggestion

of a tongue

 

you can learn something

from me,

            boy.  down

at the crawdad hole

in the shade of that

walnut tree

or just standing

erect

in the yard

 

living this close

to dirt, I

got no reason

to lie.   

            what’s

 

your

            excuse

 

?

 

yeah

 

so

 

all your problems

come from sugar.

I don’t even

peck that shit

 

my weakness

is for the berries

on these bushes

 

I eat them

and cannot stop

the sweet sludge

crawls within me

 

I become drunk

like you’d turn on

a light

            you hear?

 

                        now

 

what

 

was I

talking about

 

            oh yeah

 

fool—

the words

you use

in your coop

don’t make sense

to me

 

you call me dumb

cause I don’t feel

nothing cept hunger

and my brain

is the size of a dime

 

well

fuck you

and

           

kiss

my

chicken

ass

 

I believe in love

I believe in god

            but you—

 

you pray

            and you’re still

                        unhappy

 

your god is a punk

 

my god

is made of

fire

and I praise him

when I feel his approach

 

I know its him

cause

 

everything changes

 

everything gets

shiny and bright

            and warm

 

I sing to him

and my voice

pours easy

from my throat

 

he approves

and tosses down

heat like grain

 

what does he

give you

cept reasons to

cry

 

you’re a sad,

sad case

 

you don’t know me

and you don’t know

love

 

look at yourself

 

look

            at

 

your

self

 

in a palm

full of well water

and you’ll see

floating

among your fingers

what real

chicken shit

is.