After Long Years


After long years, the words still come.
Pages are filled, manuscripts sent out.
Books appear and are met with silence. 
Wasn't this always the way?

When spring comes, the soil in the yard
Needs to be turned. Seeds must be planted;
Fruit trees, vines and bushes tended.
These growing things mean more.
They always should have.

That's where life is. In green leaves,
Lengthening stems, flowers budding,
Before bee magic turns them into
Tomatoes, peppers, long beans.

The children mean more than the garden. 
They always did. They always will.
So much more than words
Or dreams that fuel the writing.

How strange this compulsion
To scribble and type. It must be
Some kind of allergy
That bothers a soul all year round.

I didn't ask for it. It came to me.
Part of the baggage of life,
Rotting fruit from my childhood. 
I could have done well without.

Friends, wife, the little ones,
Before they grew up and went away,
That was all I needed but did not know it.

The garden now fills in for what was lost.
Life is all there is, all that ever matters.
The words must learn to understand,
Since they won't go away,

That what little is left is not for them. 
It is for others and what can rise
From cold winter mud after longer days return. 

US vs. THEM


There is no them.
We are them.
Just as we are us.

Stardust hurling through space
the odds are stacked against us
all of us; so at least be kind.

COINCIDENTAL DISREGARD OF A LIE

Where are the convergent
figures of a Like
etchings in water closet
lewd doodles assemblage
bordering initials and dates
divided in spacetime as an actor and spectator are?
Or vibrant lantern nights
from sweating day through Luzhou wine,
Passengers winding avenues
Dull glinting fireworks
Pixelated sunbeams on the Yangtze.
Could these quintessences—
red molten buoys surge
numbing the lips—
Be carved    a subjected populace
out of an infinitely pliable block?
The algorithm of a landlord may count on
faceless compliant yield
while art can never net a fraction of a cent

On satellite view the percentages confirm
this vantage is the exclusive domain
of the dictatorship of all that is consumed,
Shells take on ghosts
Cash grows a taxable brother big
Consciousness sees flame flicker in a mirror
rather than participate in ecstatic revels
tracing volatile contact
in leaps around a fire.
A person no longer meets
as though Anarchy were a solution to
a future where the past
was only a conceit. 

“Just Another Tuesday”
 
Not even strong enough to drink
beer to numb the day,
but instead surround myself
with the dead
in a desperate attempt to feel
alive.
 
There’s classical music
(more false gods
we believe are immortal),
the letters of a writer
who died thirty years ago
(written to people I never heard of),
and a reflection in the bathroom mirror
that looks like an inmate reflecting
on art lessons on death row.

耳朵
房间里刺耳的吵闹声打破了大门的底线，
门快要承受不住了，
声音传进了我的耳朵，
我想关闭我的耳朵，
它不听我的话，
就像个小孩子一样，
小小的身躯，
非要听话，
耳朵是肉长的，
却像个花瓣，
撑开自己的身躯，
一生都在倾听，
人们的耳朵似乎总不太灵敏，
听不见空气的摩擦声，
听不清钢琴声音的跳动，
听不清风的心情，
耳朵只被迫听到了，
工厂里的机械声，
家人激烈的争吵......

Ears

The piercing noise in the room
breaks the door's bottom line.
The door can barely hold on.
The sound passes into my ears.
I want to close my ears,
but they won't listen to me—
like a little child,
a small body
that must obey.
Ears are made of flesh,
yet like flower petals,
they stretch themselves open,
listening for a lifetime.
People's ears seem never keen enough—
they cannot hear the air rubbing against itself,
cannot hear clearly the leap of piano notes,
cannot hear the wind's mood.
Ears are forced to hear only
the grinding of factory machines,
the fierce quarrels of family...

General all over Ireland
 
dirty as bedsheets
torn tattered to corners.
and wrapped around lamp posts
and cracked garden walls:
 
the snow dropped three
days ago; now
nothing's left but the cold
and an all over ashiness
of aged granite architecture
and dusty wrought iron.
there's a moment in falling –
a beauty and the silence –
the muting of palm-
down guitar strings.
 
but here it falls thick
for perhaps just
a day or two;
then weeks
of wet pavements
which ring like a bell
against traffic.
 
I walk to the shop
for a bottle of wine,
a carton of milk
and some chocolate.
the pavement is brittle,
the evening air
teeth. my hands
in my pockets
curl like crows
under wings against rain.

IT WAS ALL I EVER LIVED FOR

Back in the wilds of March 2019 I somehow
Thought a week without getting shit-faced in
A pub deserved a poem of its own but now,
Some five years later, I can’t even think about
The waste of all those years, hell it was more
Like decades, now without getting sick &
Most certainly not the hungover kind but
Then it was all I ever seemed to live for.

Stop

 
Elise always knows when I am drinking
because of redness in my cheeks,

the glaze in my eyes. After a New
Year’s party, I sleep on a rough

cotton couch a couple
hours before leaving. I do not lie

to the cop when he asks
if I have been drinking. He tells me to stop

at the next gas station to buy coffee.
How lucky I am to have this warning,

to not be tested. My life’s trajectory
at the mercy  of a strange man’s fingertips,

his tongue, the kind of night he is having.
I drive into the darkness, to the next

exit, where I wait for that same darkness
to pass, to turn the key into the ignition.


---

June, 2020


Standing in heat in the protest
masks preceding vax
      followed the chalk outline
to the school bell
ringing     I didn’t touch
the concrete     (fear)  
rough scrapes      toothaches    
edges of social  
-ization    of June   in June
whatever  time we made
work in the throngs
of a fervent following–
spit in the air
everywhere it
glistens in the grass


---

After High School, Ian Got Ripped

 
Soon after, he was arrested for fraud–
both surprises, though every day

he lugged a tuba down the long
green halls of high school. Ian,

who had no friends, lived in
the gym after graduation, smoking

weed to heavy metal tunes, tatting
up, bulking. Before that, though,

I was in the restroom with him
once when he picked up a rock

on the top of a urinal cake and–
to show that he could– swallowed it.

Rain Birds

Rain birds current
the heartline of your palms,
we tread with the river
to sleep in anointing oil,
the vial infuses perfume
into red linen flowers,
maidenhair ferns obscure
the glass surface you inspire,
we net across the water,
we read the undertow.

Suburban Outlaw (Mildly) Terrorizes the Block 

 
Suburban Outlaw occasionally toys
with the rules and conventionality
of civic life. Every few months or so, 
he employs a subtle sense of malice
and trickery, much like wily pistol-packing
highwaymen might have done years ago.  

Here is how his domestic desperado routine
works. Residents on the townhouse block know
gray trash bins get picked up every Wednesday, 
while blue recycle bins are restricted
to every other week. The schedule
is clearly spelled out on the City website.

No matter – busy, obedient, hardworking folk
remain so distracted by life’s uncertainties, 
they easily ignore the easy and undeniable. 

So, as dark approaches the night preceding
a non-recycle pick-up day, Suburban Outlaw
periodically rolls both gray and blue bins 
out to the curb in preparation. Everyone
up and down the street observes and responds
by doing the same, unable to remember
what occurred the previous week, unwilling
to tolerate the risk of being wrong, of being left
out, of missing an opportunity to discard soda
cans and a mounting inventory of Amazon boxes.  

Then, before sunrise the following day
he sneakily rolls his blue recycle bin back
into the garage, abandoning his neighbors,
who by afternoon’s end feel foolish upon
discovering their blue bin lids left untouched. 

At that time Suburban Outlaw will stand on
the balcony wearing a crooked, villainous grin,
a cold one in hand, and as the sun sets in the west,
cooly survey the colorful consequence
of his brigand ways, wistfully regretting
that in ancient days he may have shot up
a saloon or chased a sheriff out of town.