Milwaukee

Milwaukee promises poetry
closer than tendon to bone:
it offers up floorboards, inches
upon inches of soft cedar
calling for my ghosts to settle deep,
asking me to send dust
spinning through the slats of yellowed light
leaking through paper blinds
left open, on the off-chance
I catch sight of your shadow.

What I know of Milwaukee
I could fit in two cupped hands –
three weeks worth, maybe,
or one side of a record –
just enough to lead my mind to wanderlust,
away from any task I take my hands to,
enough to sink like an isotope,
like music notes and age-old books
inside my skin. Milwaukee
did not exist before your voice
and it lingers, unexplained.

But I could revel in the unfamiliarity
of every lost step, rediscover
these clumsy limbs, slip between bricks
and hug the mortar close,
letting spring drip over the eave.
I could stop throwing the loss of you
against every surface, stop
pinning this rowdy grief
to walks and to sage green houses,
to cat dander and certain songs, to poems
and champagne and thick tangles
of starlings at liftoff,
a landlocked imitation of those startled gulls
we chased into flight.

It’s Milwaukee winter that lures me:
the front page of a book yet unwed to ink,
white walls without connotation.
I want the wolf shore,
the hard grey, the miles frozen deep
with static. I want to pause,
feel the blackness of my eyelids,
weight of my own lungs, and not see
that scorched sun that sunk the pier, not feel
the wind laden with grace, not laugh
at the glass-crowned waves
that swallowed us whole.

Punnett Square

This is my inheritance: limes rubbed

on the inside of wrists, earliness

as a virtue. A clever tongue, to be a

happy drunk. The ridge

that splits our faces and green blue eyes

from southern Flint. Pens,

writing lists as daily prayers

we add to just to scratch off.

Smelling the trash

to know it stinks - Thus

an aversion to tequila, to

our knotted knuckles and backs.

Johnny Walker Black

with water on the rocks and

the snap, pop of seasoned knees.

A steady hand on a French press,

folding and refolding dogged ears

of Melville, of the gospel of Luke,

margins almost black with scraps:

poetry. Doodles. Hebrew and Greek.

I know why you married her;

how her grace tempers our nature.

And she told me how your father

pressed cash into your hand

as he hugged you. And you bookmarked

your favorite poems

with dollar bills for me,

threading our inheritance.

the land of

i had a dream of milk and 

honey you were in it, leading me

across a way i never built, saying

sorrow never hurt a body and oh

will you give me yours, sweet heart and soul?

i had a dream where i was ghost

so maybe more than how i am

to your pen on paper future

spinning a wish of what i could be.

it is sorrow, isn't it honey? it bites

me so swiftly and heals by the

the knowledge of God that steps

where i step since i met

your conscious voice, all of grace

verse my nature. it is nature, isn't it,

this sorrow's hurt upon my body

and this awake. it is not just

my dream i dreamed of milk and

honey you are it.

this is indian summer

this is indian summer:
sepia ink on my wrists,
the dusted monarch wings
resting on your extended palms
face up toward the cool sky
and the rogue moon that brushes
against your flushed cheeks
as you dance with a grown ocean,
landing with lavender and
half-turned leaves.
it is the finger dipped in batter,
the first delicate step into
a lightly bocca-ed rain,
nails navy blue and lashes
curling with laughter, slim fingers
round a coffee cup i fill
and fill again to hear my name
upon your lips, & eleven-morning
sun on a street burned gold,
shadows matching and smoothing
the frayed edges of my hope.
it is your Michigan Americana folk song
smile, gifted.
this is my return to your unaware;
the architecture of my autumn.

k vs. k

KH

I have never been so aware of my misery,
never held the shape of it in my hands and known
its color, width, breadth, so acutely, and this
clarity is compounded by past experiences which
drag me into uncertainty. in fact, I have known all
along the mystery, but afforded myself the luxury
of putting it away with the other cobwebbed relics
of common sense and sanity. someday I’ll come
back here looking for an old feeling and will
find these broken smiles to remind myself.
I know this – I know what happens – I have seen
the descent, I feel it beneath my feet and knocking
knees and I have heeded myself. I am pausing
just to remember, to learn, like reliving
the past will eradicate it.


KC

you pressed first though you didn’t know it
I breathed fast as a summer breeze, wasted not a moment
to absorb the inches of your features.
then I knew

you to be beautiful by the measure of your voice,
a burning light baritone, and the steady smile you gifted
carefully. I began to see our differences
match

your measure where I rush, faith in place of
moxy. I project loudly. and I pressed back, to your
knowledge just a brush, a flicker in a
meadow.

you may see a sea from where you stand but
my eyes among many are thieves for you only.

for P255 - Personality & Voice ("Pride of the Philippines")

It’s like my tiya Shang says:
“Lub neber pails.”
I got this idea man –
I’m just full of
so many damn ideas –
if I could just
get this one right,
you know
it’d change stuff.
Hand me that sauce
over there, yup.
Lolo says I can split
the tip with you ‘cause
your car’s gonna smell like
crispy pork. Anyway
who’s asking Rin
to prom? I heard
Beckett. That’s some straight
bull. Dude touches her I’ll go
all Manny Pacquiao
on his ass, right, all,
“Pride of the Philippines”
til he learns to
treat a lady right.
Remember when
I did it for you?
That was hi-larious.
But dawg this pig’s not gonna
fit in your scrawny trunk –
you bringing this lil’
thing to school? –
put it in the back seat,
we gotta go before
this feast gets cold. Ya know
if I was at your school
I’d be bumpin’ Weezy
everyday. Becoming
a “murse.” Yo that’d
be sick if we went to
college together
if I went to college.
I’ll come see you bro
don’t even worry about it,
you know my tiya
Shang says love never fails.

for Poetry 255 - On Love

Love
was that time I ruined
one whole side of the car. Love
was when I threw up from
dawn ‘til dusk on
someone else’s birthday.
Love was tracking mud on the tile
forgetting to scrub the bathroom and
leaving my lunch behind on the
first day of 8th grade.
Love was that time I went 87
in a 70.
Love was awake when I came home late
(love was, every time).

Love was then &
love is,
love is,
love is.

for Poetry 255 - laced

my fifteenth birthday I got
cash so I drove to the mall
where I was bought
by the ugliest pair of shoes I could find.
Vans. Canvas Classics
in red, obnoxious.
sunny.
mom gave them a look-down,
tight lipped.
from then on
they owned me.
I laced ‘em
beneath the tongue &
we were off!
two dozen
concerts, someone else’s beer
sloshed on them,
a thousand dusty days
of high school and down to the
downtown of Detroit where I wore them
until they didn’t squeak,
they scraped, and stuck
particularly well
to the backs of
church pews
and skate boards.
Oh they knew the Holy Spirit and the holey
rawness of skin
versus pavement!
size 8 devils wrapped
in rubber and
trouble, gorgeous
fence-scalers,
treasure excavators
and ditch
explorers.
filthy.
my nineteenth birthday I got
the hose, sprayed
those tomes ‘til they let
the dirt loose but
left the
stories intact.

for Poetry 255 - child's play

there’s the clatter of my sword
on the driveway, followed by a fat silence
as two warm trails converge
into one glossy, livid, fire-engine red
path that tumbles down my lips and chin and neck and
gets clamped hard
between my fingers, still oozing slowly.

he is pale and startled. in his hand rests
a broomstick – a makeshift
lightsaber today, magic staff tomorrow,
and the current weapon in question.
fiddleheads of paint are peeling from the handle.
there is shame in his face, but I am awed.

soon he props a bag of ice against my nose,
telling me that we can pretend
I survived an alien invasion,
Empire attack, and meteor shower
all at once.
you got the wound to prove it, he says,
and you are a hero!

ten years pass and I can’t pick a pair
of glasses that fit quite right – they’re always
cocked a notch to the left –
but things are never what they seem,
and I wonder if he knows
the gravity of how he shaped the way I see.

how we burn

without a single shred of context,
i murder in masses, have a penchant
for glasses, and will never trust
another yellow buttondown.
i'm ruined.

even as a scholar i'll turn up any turned-down
dog-eared page with a Bukoswki
poem, venom churning,
because my heart is still burning
from her hands.

it's all got to burn. every
memory, trashy television program
and gum flavor. i should have ran,
but i'm doing all the running
now.

in the scope of this life that leaps
as fast from me as it snares my feet,
there are greater things to be done
than try to name the color and shape
of love.

postage

it is not
enough

to live through letters.

i can duck behind a paper phrase,
but i can't hide face to face.

i work for four fifteen hour days
to buy a ticket with pocket change.

to be weird and lost here or there
doesn't matter -
it's in presence, in the recesses
of your fingerprints on my mind.

bring your heavy chained soul
and i will free it,
leave your constant loud voices
and we will be silent.

time touches only what stands still,
so keep running,
let the postage keep up.

belief

i am a fool for belief
and its sweet everythings.
i know the nearness of faith
when falling on what can
only be felt.

i believe in meanings,
am meant to have
meaning.
if i am alive to hear the cries
i am meant to stop them.

here in this suburb
meanings gave way to
less-than,
the relief of exorcising one's
demons
by declaring

they

don't

exist.

i've been fucked for believing
in meaning. i was told,
"it means nothing,"
and i believed that meant
something -
what
a holy fool i am for falling.

it has always been
those demons
who keep me strong.

now i pick up my scraped knees
my knotted knuckles
and still believe.

fiction

i don't have anything in me
that hasn't been put
there by a movie. (flesh and bones
and bloody noses.)

when i die they'll take my body
away on a dolly.

DOCTOR 1 TO DOCTOR 2:
"she's stuffed with scripts,
and all her organs run with ink."

'cause i'm a paper man with
all the wrong dyes, just a
paper man with two lost hands
and the kind of blank-page
panic that makes manics sing.

this girl is oh so ever clever,
pretty like a bookcover with no body -
an actress. and i'm the pages
that want a spine but got no glue -
the writer.

i love her fiction,
how i invent her over
and over and over again
to reflect and refract
my reality.

we live in these flickering frames of light,
and we have never been so alive.

because you know

it would be better if i could take my thumb
and wipe away those dark crescents beneath
your eyes, but i'm not a painter, and i'm
not God, and i'm not the sleep you're losing
over her, and anyway she's standing at the register
with cash in her hand like i'm about to have
quarters for eyes. i can't take your look
but i'll take the coffee i haven't ordered yet but
that you have in your hand
because you know.

my face says more than my choked throat does,
is that any surprise? or are we fooling ourselves
when we talk, like it means more than the wordlessness
that passes between us when you pass back
your lit menthol and we're singing all the same songs?
it's like the times we throw down on the floor
with the haze and hot breath. i give you goosebumps
and you laugh, say i can't do that,
not even when you ask sweetly
because we know.

he shows up when the cup is empty and tells me
you're not very cute, that you have nothing to hold onto
and nice noses don't do that. he's trying to help
in his backwards way to stop my train from derailing.
he doesn't know it makes it worse, that my arms
are heavy from not holding, that i would take
my brazen fists to his face for your honor,

because i know.

day/weak/strong/week

the poetry in a still room
while the mind is full of motion

hammer head, brash moves
regret soiling the whitest sheets

alone, swallowing heat
sitting on a swing with a cigarette

sick punch of nausea
character shifts as fast as wind

catharsis comes slow
like stumbling home
on a moonlit cobbled street.

i paid my tithe last night

i drank the holy water -
a sweaty sort of baptism.
now i smell like smoke and
perfume (incense of choice).
every body's sacrifice marked by
orgin-less bruises,
painted purple in the dark.

my hands still flutter
with the feeling,
the memory of running
my palms up her thighs
and putting my faith in the sway of her hips

to lift
me up and up and up and up
out of my head
and into the world.

homecoming pt.2

i'm putting things into boxes
moving books and scraps of my life
that haven't see much light,
only steady piles of gathering dust.
time is moving through my mind
like nostalgia always does -

nostos
to return home
algos
to ache

and that's the point.

i'm putting things into boxes
moving away from this life and toward
another. when i come back,
it won't be to the same room
or even to the same space.
everything will have a different color and shape.

all filtered through different
lenses, my life churned over
in minds that are not my own.

title

and when i
laid my head down, i
found it hard to
quiet my busy
mind, lit-up like a
city at night.
i could not see past
my memory,
could not smell but
to search
for that scent. yet
above all else,
it was the pounding
rhythm her name
beat on my heart
with each
and ev'ry
breath i
took,
repeated through
my weary bones.

i was lost in two
syllables -
that was all it took
to spin my mind 'round
perfect words
and half-lidded eyes.
even as my mouth
formed the shapes
of letters, i
could taste
her on my lips,
feel her breath on
my neck.

and so it cycled
in my mind
like an
uncontrollable
tic.
a name.

that 70's show

my feet were clenched tightly,
as if somehow that could stop the walls
from changing shape.
a hulking shadow in the form
of my friend reclined on the couch.
i was trying to swallow my own mouth.
he grinned at me.

"how you doin over there?"

well, did i send that to...
the right person? and
am i saying the
right things? and
will my sinuses
stay this way? and
is my phone
going to...die
before i can say goodnight?
and, ohhh god, what if - what if -
the girl next to me thinks...
i'm hitting on her.
or worse.
what if - subconsciously -
i am.
and if that happens to be the case,
what does that mean?
and…does that make me…
an emotional slut?
is this aaaaaaaaaall a very
obvious secret, or
am i just being...annoying?
and i just want to know if that's a shadow on his hand,
or if it's really that dirty. and….
does anyone have a problem, and
has anyone ever had a problem at all?

"great."

the season

there's no more small, sloppy flakes falling
outside my window and
it makes me think about how this all happened around spring,
about how time is moving forward with us, won't fall
back. no more cold air caressing the curve of my neck -
just me rubbing warmth up up up

to your fingertips.

nothing could possibly be dull anymore with so much to
daydream about,
'cause my shirt still smells like your bed.

& the difference between my gray winter and this green season is
that before i never wanted to wake up & up & up

to my reality.

but now i hesitate just to
fall asleep, thinking maybe someday i'll have a cup of coffee
and realize you were a figure in my dream, a fragment of my mind.
but for now it's safe to call you mine.
so stay alive,
because i will find you.