Light Switch

If my brain
turns on
at four in the morning,
who am I to shut it off?

I’ve got engines
revving
with the traffic lights
broken

and who cares?
when it’s a joyride
I don’t have to
be rhythmic

That's Not What I Meant

We were on the wrong side of town.
And by /wrongside/ I mean the side we were on was not the side
we wanted to be on.
Our map skills were faulty
and he says /how did we get here?/
and she says /how did we get here?/
and the other he says /how did we get here?/
and I say /I think it was the big bang/

Genome, a pantoum I wrote to describe my feelings towards discovering I was a poet

I wish I had language then
the way I have language now –
slanted, shuffled together
and seamed, like bulging sacks of rocks

The way I have language now –
I have a crusted gem forming inside dirt
and seamed, like bulging sacks of rocks
that split at the first tectonic plate shifting

I have a crusted gem forming inside dirt
and dust activated by a few billion years
that split at the first tectonic plate shifting
like an engine spinning upon itself

And dust activated by a few billion years
converting grain into bread and bread into Hamlet
like an engine spinning upon itself,
rocking like the positions of creation, that cataclysmic maneuver

Converting grain into bread and bread into Hamlet,
requiring a skill that turns on expiration dates,
rocking like the positions of creation, that cataclysmic maneuver,
resting on the bed of its own certainty to mold.

Requiring a skill that turns on expiration dates,
slanted, shuffled together,
resting on the bed of its own certainty to mold.
I wish I had language then.

On Coming Back to Where I Grew Up

I thought I would have a Wordsworth moment
where feelings welled at a reunion
with the land that birthed me.

I thought I’d say, “Sorry, baby. I missed you. I’m back now”
but instead spiders crept onto my legs and mosquitoes bit
and I was tired of dirty feet and burning garbage.

I thought I’d snap beautiful photos of nature
but my brother just tore it up with a four-wheelerand my viewfinder was stuffed with food wrappers.


Accompanying song: Roads by Portishead

Backyard

The sky hugs the ground here
close, with no exceptions.
It is open and split wide
to all corners within range of my eye.

I imagine all the times I felt
trapped here, in a glass jar
like a tarantula in a terrarium
given an allotment of the habitual nature
it is used to.

I remember the times that
combines roared in my backyard
and I shut the doors to the intruder
like it was a lion,

the times the air I breathed
smelled like cow dung and hay
and I had contempt for those who
worked their hands
and not their brains.

But the yard was a three-acre patch
where no building had ever stood.
My feet were one of the few
out of billions
to connect to the ground here,
and jump,
as if the packed soil was a springboard.

Dairy Farms Don't Make Good Neighbors

My nose itches,
aching
for the excrement and hay
assault to my nose,
tangy and sweet like that
first bite of the hard,
bittergreen apples growing on trees
more antique than the silver spoon
you found buried in the yard
or the rotted leather yoke made
of the same hide that pushed it.
The air is still here, suspended,
a Polaroid your dad took
before the camera broke in 1992,
a firefly in a jar
you caught with your brothers
one bruised July evening,
more still than the air
in corners of the basement
where the canned tomatoes are stored
glistening like preserved specimens,
except for the occasional whoosh
of a car returning from the bar
or the throaty distant bleat
of a cow in heat that makes
you think of rape victims
screaming for life
when your widow is open to the night.
Those dull meat-on-bone
sounds confuse you
but somehow have to do with
the great circle of life
and what mom plops on your dinner plate.
I entertain these quaint
fantasies, born backward by my brain.
I wish I could run in the rows of corn
ten feet from my bedroom window
when it soared for miles above my head
like it would never, never stop growing.
Like it would never, never be the hour of harvest.
But this time I promise not to hide while you call my name.
This time I won’t wrap my sides
in a blanket under my bed
to watch a dead lightning bug
and wait for my mother to come home.

Flower Children

What happened to you,
who refused to tiptoe
through the wax museum
and the rose bush fields
with burs hanging by every bud,
abandoning juice can curlers
and skirts tiered below the knee?

You destroyed the status quo
with posies and rhythms,
with careening kisses
parted by the falling flames
like velvety folds of the closing curtain,
constantly shipped off to one place
or another to die or give birth.

Did you retreat for the next wave to hit?
Or are you sitting in a
three-bedroom house in Boise,
aging backwards
amongst cracked plaster
and hammered copper wall hangings,
rewording your own epitaphs
like you have nothing left
to say until posterity?

How can you retire your own revolution?
How can you ransom your own child
and leave us with nothing
to look forward to but ugly babies
and booming reports of thunder
ricocheting off our own crumbling walls,
while we watch
with failing eyes?

Needle

no one has
asked if

the
nee
dle
in
the

haystack
is worth finding
at all. I would rather
lie in the sun on my back
and whittle a new one from bone

How to Live Forever

If research develops
a new set of tools
with which we wipe out the disease
known as aging
and dying
as easily as our mothers wipe dirt off our cheek,

There would be some people
that no one could live with that long.
Who would choose
who gets to die?

That would be prejudice.
And we could not have that
in a society where everyone
is one scheduled maintenance
away from eternity.

How to Measure the Metaphysical

No, I do not think
that my life
weighs more
than the sum of my parts.

Except perhaps
a heavy moment tethered to my wrist,
Or my words
that stick like glue on the wall,
And the strips of film
stored carefully in a box upstairs.

How many grams?
How many ounces?

Domestic

If you wanted me
to lie
and spare you pain,
I wouldn’t.

I don’t
pussy
foot
or beat
around the bush.

I’m nobody’s
picket fence.
I’m not
a warm fireplace.

This is the first poem I tried to write

Brain Waves

Behind a silent sea
as glass-green as cats’ eyes
I
tried to find

my direction in an alien world
with neither sun nor moon.

I stood between two familiar
sinuous hills, left and right.

I
tried to gauge

the depth
in the empty cavern ahead
hidden in the middle of the hollow hills

And the vein
of fondling trees
with buds and leaves

that retrieve
and perceive
and
criss- cross
the landscape

But I was a traveler
Evolved of the same nature,
Rendered and ruined by its mystery.