I like to talk to Jesus when I chain smoke.
Tell him what’s working and what isn’t.
Ask him if the things I’m doing are right.
(I think by simply asking I’m confirming they aren’t)
    The daylight never really feels like prayer light
    And I get honest on the back porch under the moon.
So I talk and he listens and I listen but he’s silent.
I’m still learning his language. I think its carried by lunar beams and crickets and the gentle wind.
    Sometimes I wonder, if he was standing next to me
      As I pulled another cigarette from the pack
        Would he take it from my hands
          Or quietly offer me a light?

Because I love you, tiny boy,
breastmilk on your breath,
dark down covering your head,
the head I can still cup in one hand
as I lay you gently in this cradle,
gently so as not to wake you–

Because I love you, I open
the iron scissors, place their strong
blades, sharp as eagle’s talons, wicked
as wolves’ claws, here above
your eggshell skull to keep away...

Our country is drenched in oil

and your body is

                           Flint–

has rubbed together

all the dry books you read.

                           You learned nothing

                            about how polluted

                            friendly people can be

like too much lead in water.

I dreamt that I broke my key
off in the side door
         and not for the first time.
I stood there,
         wide-eyed and open-mouthed,
looking at the fat bit of bronzed metal
in my hand and the jagged
         jut
sticking out of the off-white door.

Our town ventriloquist
amazed without a dummy,
putting his words into the mouths
of local people and their pets.

Politicians on TV certainly benefited.
It took skill, so few of us even bothered moving our lips
after a few years of silence and/or doubt.

Especially uncomfortable conversations
he would have with himself

when neighbors weren’t around to hear.

We collect in murders, spy
the eaves, survey the alleys,

streets, sidewalks. We receive
those who belong, flag those

who don’t. It was only last week
that the mother with the hawkish

nose, the mother with the talon grip,
called her small child. Mittens trailed...

Garnished with the crust of appetite,
it leaps into you over and over.
Barnacled and bunioned, this is the foot
that is your black feline familiar—
old when first born, moving even when
still. You don’t have to know this language to
read it: a cuneiform of flat bones,
a collective of want and need. You do
not have to love this soul to carry it...

1
The Angel of Death had yellow—
and-black wings that looked
gold and gray in the setting sun.

You can be killed any time
by someone you don’t know.

2
My mother’s side of the family doesn’t
exist anymore. Someone killed them all—

had them gassed, shot, hanged, injected.
I can’t think too much about it without

feeling I’m meeting the person I might’ve
been. Billions of us occupy the same small

planet, but it only seems like we’re sharing...

The man leaning over the window is volatile. The winds could carry him without a trace of noise, particularly on a night like this. His eyes are contorted by a sudden loss of memory, his fingers tap restlessly on the sill. His voice is nebulous—a gathering of clouds in pursuit of its shadows. Everything seems to be lost here, even his body.

He leans closer to the mirror to realize he has lost it. Where did it go? 
Answers seem to evade his feeble ears.

Somewhere far away, a horse neighs softly. That is his voice, it dawns upon him. His reality. When he drapes it around himself, the moon will no longer be a stranger. The sun a myth. He will stop wondering about the stars in the horizon, their irreparable losses.
Perhaps, someday.

after a career of running guns
in North Africa, Rimbaud succumbed
                        to either syphilis
or carcinoma (depends on who you've read)
in Marseille in the care of his sister,
            much as he had written.

he was thirty-seven–
same age as Mozart.

Zen Masters, it is said,
recite a poem at the exact
moment of their death,
often ending with
the exclamation "Ha!"–
            whereupon
                they die...