You’ve forgotten again the names
of states and cities or how to measure a mile
with the tip of your thumb.

My body at five, head to toe is equal to a back seat.
I begged you to leave my mother.
We could have lived on bread crumbs and driven away.

This is how you measure a life.
The tip of my index finger is a perfect inch.

In a normal lifespan, I am halfway to dead.

You are in a city without a name.
My hand numbers five and you know all the words
for fuck. You say, my mother

is not smart enough to use a gun.

The window itself
is an alienation
weighing in at four corners
with a sheet of clarity.

Understand now, forty two tiles exist on the house next door
for my eyes there is nothing more.


Brown wet, is a dark brother to brown dry
and I found no way
to extend my neck
unless I open the very thing which holds me,
protects me from the wind.

All the rooms in the body lock down with the same key
Yet the wind knocks my door open. Ajar.
A jar needs a lid; a cup, lip. This is how
You rattle my house. Good
Bye equals freedom. As if
the body desires escape more
than closure. What if these words
are not spoken. Alice
What if I tell you the stone to lift?

ghazal

All the rooms of the body lock down with the same key
Ear to window, not one sound comes with the same key

Day IV
All of it is about longing
blossom and branch, cup and saucer
even contentment in her little white slip
is swaying away.


Day II

Oh the body temporal! Oh the mind obtuse!

Lift your fingers to the sky—
Everything is gone: trees, blue

Only the flesh survives. If God
Is next to cleanliness, only

Earth survives. Call me brother
Let me remember

What a cock feels like.



Day III

All the rooms in the body lock down
With the same key

day one

This is a poem without animals,
nothing braes, bothers or finds its way through the grass.
This is a poem absent of reproduction:
the fuck, the sway, tilt of the hip.
This is a poem drained, left on its side,
white grass under stone, deformed.
This is the sprout and the seed, the cock and the void.
This is the thread sewn into our eyes, here is the needle
This is the point, silver and clean, absent of sacrifice.

My father as metaphor and my mother as a topical map

And they were beautiful, at times, the animals—
misshapen, torsos distorted, legs outnumbered.
On her belly, he let the beasts run wild with fever,
killing everything: grass, thistle, flowers .
Until the land was flat , emptied even of insects.
A land full of distance and clouds.
It was not until later, when the children came
to their pitch tents, run in the open fields. It was the children
who knew enough to look down,
to see nothing to live on. Everyone paid attention then
to the drought, and the earth which never filled
with water. Everyone forgot the animals
except for the father, he kept them close,
leaving the others behind to care for the land.

Claim Everything

I’ve come to claim everything
is beautiful and if you wake to this
in the morning, as if someone has turned
the knob or allowed your retina to receive
more light, just a small millimeter
so that all the world is brighter somehow,
it seems, this could be the definition
of joy. Nothing has changed;
paint falls away from the yellow door,
weeds grow between the uneven slabs
of concrete and it breaks open
the place within which once believed
in goodness or the clean face of god.

Because you’re dying I forgive you
the finger on the nurse’s wrist
which follows her veins upstream;
away from the cancer, eating your liver.
Because you also forgive death
by skimming the pulse of the living, searching
for what you do not have. I understand now
more of what it means to be human. How the body continues
to desire---and I want it to stay, this animal
called hunger, for it means
we are both still alive.

It’s burning, the house on the corner. Everyone is late: the woman from the carpool, the mailman. They all wear ash in their hair. People need me to understand--my house is on fire.
I watch from a window, men in their orange coats, tails full of flames. Tell me please, where’s the car for the woman? Where is the stamp for the man? House you do not need me. At noon I eat lunch in your red window
and you don’t remember my name.

The Finger On The Girl's Wrist

Because you’re dying I forgive you
the finger on the girl’s wrist,
a finger which follows her vein upstream;
away from the cancer, eating your liver which is not blue
like the tunnel under the girl’s skin. Call me a child for believing
all rivers to be blue. Look into the water---
it’s the absence which determines the name.
Because you forget you’re dying, hungering for an almost woman
as if there are days to feast, tomorrow will remember---
a blue girl will walk away. But today you’re the boy
who is not dead, nor do you understand the hunger,
the last act before the end. This I should forgive.