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Selected Poetry 

And very genuinely, thank you for reading.

we all fail (you coming new to us)

we all fail (you coming new to us)

we all fail

like dying that’s what humans do

of course i have failed you

and you and you

and now you newly born

into our congregation of humans

despite our best efforts

we will fail you too

despite my best intentions

i will fail you too

but this is not about that

this is about the promise you

only a handful of months with us

you appear in my dream

i do not know most of the people there

but suddenly and for the very first time

you begin to talk and then walk across the room

as if those are the most natural things possible

and that is what this is about

you coming new to us

you filling our chests near to exploding

with all the possible and all to come

you make us believe in who we can be

you make us want to be better people

you make me believe in who i can be

you make me want to be a better person

it is Friday evening and i ignore friends

to sit on the couch you sleeping on my chest

we all fail

like dying that’s what humans do

but living in the precious moment

that’s what you offer me in soft breaths

as we beg you to say those first words

as we coax you to crawl across the blanket

as we cheer you standing to walk alone

i imagine you reading quietly

playing with words as children do

you lying on my chest us heart to heart

you make me want to be a better person

there us together silent and still

your warm weight lifting us beyond dreams

secrets between my granddaughter and me (watch out world)

secrets between my granddaughter and me (watch out world)

my daughter sends me a video

of my granddaughter sleeping

her eyes are fluttering in dream

her mouth is working working

but the thing that hits me first

is her pose there in her bassinet

lying flat on her back left arm raised

her tiny fist clenched silent and defiant

(on the days i keep her we have read

Marx, Freire, and The John Carlos Story

we’ve watched Ali and Baldwin on YouTube

and listened to Morisson on the white gaze)

my radical five-month-old granddaughter

dreaming wordlessly of the 1968 Olympics

already announcing at the end of her tiny arm

“You must listen to me! You must listen to me!”

Recommended: Americans Who Tell the Truth

imagination&recollection (i come to tell you everything)

imagination&recollection (i come to tell you everything)

I tell you miserable things after you are asleep

“Conversation 16,” The National

 …the loss of the moments of shared intimacy….The prospect of losing that made him saddest of all.

“Scheherazade,” Haruki Murakami

i come to you in your sleep

you do not know i am there

you may not even want me here

it is dark & you lie under covers

except your bare left foot exposed

i imagine you in t-shirt & panties

i recreate until my eyes adjust

so i can watch the soft rise&fall

most wonderful you breathing

with daughter & granddaughter

an act of solemn & selfish love

i have done this often in silence

i am not here to relish watching you

i am here to tell you everything

even more than love all that i fear

with you imagination&recollection

are impossible for me to separate

i have confessions bound by darkness

i could more easily hand you my bones

than lie to you or admit the naked truth

so i come to tell you everything instead

how many nights may i take from you

recognizing i deserve none of them

i begin certain my stories will never end

i could spend every night watching

you sleep & hoping i am welcome

in the dreams that warm your heart…

rising sun, you (solstice)

rising sun, you (solstice)

Loving anybody and being loved by anybody is a tremendous danger, a tremendous responsibility.

James Baldwin, “Go the Way Your Blood Beats”

it is mid-December

just before daybreak

when i walk outside alone

frost and darkness coat the world

tilting toward reorientation—

we will return again to Spring

bare black branches reach skeletal

against the pink-orange horizon’s glow

this coming sunrise of another day

i pause, a solstice

in this dimming fall of life

chilled by an inevitable winter

i am a man bound to dry words

now suddenly warmed at my center

by the wordlessness of memory

radiating bright white through me

recalling the scent of you near

and if smell is our oldest sense

recollection offers immortality

you pull aside your hair revealing

the curve of your neck there

brilliant rising sun, you

the chemistry of my sorrow (skin&bone)

the chemistry of my sorrow (skin&bone)

“It hurts to love. It's like giving yourself to be flayed and knowing

that at any moment the other person may just walk off with your skin.”

Susan Sontag, Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963

[negative: “i don’t want to get over you”]

no Garden of Eden my creation story

me cast from Teflon + every repellent

known to human history

then drawn physically + powerfully

to the impossible compound you

radium + lanthanum + barium

if not impossible at least unstable

thus eventually + predictably gone

leaving only this black hole my sorrow

[positive: “you're the only thing I ever want anymore”]

bruised&broken

i am risen now

most men offer you

only their hearts

but i must confess

you own me skin&bone

if you take my hand

because it is my hand

fingers laced with fingers

you have taken everything

They killed Gwen Stacy in the film too

They killed Gwen Stacy in the film too

Everything I love is on the table.
Everything I love is out to sea.

“Don’t Swallow the Cap,” The National

I was a television version of a person with a broken heart

“Pink Rabbits,” The National

O, Gwen, why did you have to die?

Why did you have to be blonde and beautiful,

pale stereotype of what a woman should be?

And why, O, why did you love her, Peter?

This nerd-love for the unattainable girl?

Like Leonard and Penny on a cheap sit-com?

Peter, O, Peter, with great power and all that…

Pimply and scrawny, I guess, we hide in bedrooms

with Marilyn Monroe posters on our silent walls.

But good people, beautiful people never really die

in three-color comic books or technicolor Hollywood films.

O, Gwen, why did they take you from all of us,

betray us like our mirrors every single morning?

Forty years apart, I cry at your lifeless twisted pose—

frail boy comic in hand, middle-aged man on the couch.

Spider-Man or Elephant Man—hearts are bound to love

and no superpower can ever defeat the space of you gone.

O, Gwen, why did you have to die?

train

train

when you willingly

& even eagerly

board the train

destined to derail

do not act surprised

after the crash

& dare not mourn

all the casualties

because we all know

you were in it for the ride

that made your heart race

so you could feel alive

rooms and spoons (i watch you with my fingertips and palm)

rooms and spoons (i watch you with my fingertips and palm)

When I walk into a room
I do not light it up
Fuck

“Demons,” The National

“The kiss had shaken me up so much I couldn’t think straight.

At the same time, my anxiety had turned into an anxiety quite lacking in anxiousness.”

The Strange Library, Haruki Murakami

(i)

gradually i have learned to hold

bitter tea in my mouth for the cold

my secret Southerner’s rebellion

drinking unsweet tea as denial

(ii)

when i play music for my granddaughter

and sing along to “Graceless” badly

she pauses as only a four-month-old can

just before her dark-eyed smile unhinges me

(iii)

you walk into the room

i am lying on the couch reading MaddAddam

crying so hard tears have pooled on my glasses

but that is not entirely true

you do not walk into the room as i read

those last pages through tears like circus mirrors

(iv)

last night it is the same room

and the same couch where i am reading

about a strange library and a boy

saved from a labyrinth of certain death

by a transparent shape-shifting girl so beautiful

he loses his heart the first time he sees her

it is a sad story about a reading room and loneliness

pinning me to the couch where i cannot talk to you

because the only rooms i have now are ones without you

and like the boy i am rescued and heartless and alone

(v)

i wonder about the two of us

in a room perfectly dark

what the curve of your neck

would look like

to my lips

what my fingertips and palm

would see

across your hip bone

(vi)

spooning in the wake of reading

we talk about the books from the sad library

i collected for you after you left me

stacked and silent and mostly hopeless

i watch you with my fingertips and palm

wishing that this were not yet another dream

(vii)

i have driven to Conyers, Georgia

a place i have never been

but the details are vivid and clear

as if i have been there in real time

you of course are there as you often are

as long as it is a dream and no real room

your disapproving mother watches from nearby

the two of you indifferent as an avalanche

(viii)

i am dust

i am whisper

i am straw

unsweet tea

you did not order

phoenix (an inverted zombie life)

phoenix (an inverted zombie life)

“Because,” said the hunger artist…“because I couldn’t find a food which tasted good to me.”

“A Hunger Artist,” Franz Kafka

“I was afraid, I'd eat your brains”

“Conversation 16,” The National

i am not interested in arizona

but another state altogether

resurrection

i am hopeful that the part of me

that died can rise from the ashes

resurrection

it is lonely living while dead inside

no urge to eat—an inverted zombie life

resurrection

this state has no decayed flesh or moaning

although the living somehow remain distant

resurrection

to rise then in the arms of another entirely

and to resist feasting on her skinny throat

resurrection

chalk

chalk

it was written in chalk on the sidewalk, i suppose,

not chiseled in granite as i’d always believed

winds and rain erase i love you’s in colored dust

while gravestones weather generation after generation

The Disciplines (all those terminal degrees)

The Disciplines (all those terminal degrees)

We are from different times

and different places,

but intersections and magnetism

are beautiful narcotics.

I am now forced to be an archeologist

of my own dreams

where you come again and again

offering indifference.

This is a different kind of discipline, then,

because it is not my field,

and even in my rare dreamweaving,

I am a rank amateur.

Sleeping, I must not shout out your name

in the middle of the night;

I must not fling back warmed covers,

leaping up to run again to you.

But it is there I am disciplined, a Grand Master,

a Jedi, a ninja in all black,

having perfecting the nuanced art of lies

and deception—of not being me.

The disciplines lead us to the inevitable, I suppose,

of all those terminal degrees.

i do not fall in love

i do not fall in love

I won't need any help to be lonely when you leave me

“Slipped,” The National

i do not fall in love with perfect

i did not fall in love to find your faults and fix you

i could make quite a list

of all the ways you drove me mad again and again

but if we had negotiated on even one

you would have no longer been the you i love madly

and my disingenuous professions of love

would have been manipulations seeking someone else

i do not fall in love with perfect

i did not fall in love to find your faults and fix you

and so i must now face the ugliest truth

wanting as i do to change your mind about me

realizing as i do the you not wanting me

is the only you i have ever loved and always will

lies, paralysis, & all the things we cannot recover

lies, paralysis, & all the things we cannot recover

Yeah, I'm missing something
Abel, my mind's gone loose inside the shell

“Abel,” The National

i wake up in a bed of snakes

assuming that all the lies i live by

have been rendered real to cradle me

the first thing they all do is ask me

with their heads tilted just so “How do you feel?”

as if they are intent on listening seriously

they seem completely unaware of the snakes

because of course they too are magnificent liars

and no one acknowledges another’s bed of snakes

this is simply a ploy to allow a brief pause

before they tell me the consequences of The Accident

“The Accident,” they explain, “has left you paralyzed”

as if The Accident is a sentient creature like the snakes

and it is then i realize neither the snakes nor the paralysis

is even close to the worst of this bed i have made to lie in

you see the snakes are simply all those lies come alive

and paralysis is the manifestation of the inner me

the paralysis i have covered in a hissing bed of lies

the worst of it all is something only i can tell them

which is that i have no memory of my past life at all

with this their heads tilt again and they declare

“Ah, well, we are not sure about the paralysis,” they admit,

“but we can certainly help you rebuild your past!”

and so they begin to tell me everything they can offer

strangers, family, and friends are all the same to me

but they each sit patiently one by one beside my bed of snakes

telling me stories in no particular order with no clear value

paralyzed and lying in a bed of snakes i know mostly one thing

something or more importantly someone remains lost in this

something or someone i can never recover is my final fate

knowing there is a vast and precious unknown i cannot recover

leaves me paralyzed and hopeless as a snake in a foot of snow

wishing to recover the unknown and all the sadness it brings

polish (this did not happen)

polish (this did not happen)

Then, without hesitation, she grasped Tengo’s hand, and looked up into his face….

Then she suddenly let go his hand, and with the hem of her skirt flaring, she trotted out of the classroom.

1Q84, Haruki Murakami

i prefer black nail polish

or shades so dark they appear black

although “prefer” understates

this fascination and my jealousy

and then i see your most desired hands

the polish a pinkish-orange i’d call melon

so i ask you if i may hold your hands

each nail like a precious Jordan almond

and you smile raising your hands to me sighing

“it’s been so long since we’ve held hands”

•

it wasn’t you

this did not happen

the hand and nail polish more pink than orange

merely a passing car and someone i do not know

and then the fist of remembering you pounding in my chest

while i alone in my car drove down this black highway

diligence (skeleton key)

diligence (skeleton key)

Perhaps an even more distressing prospect for Habara than the cessation of sexual activity,

however, was the loss of the moments of shared intimacy.

“Scheherazade,” Haruki Murakami

I'm having trouble inside my skin

I tried to keep my skeletons in

“Slipped,” The National

gradually and with reluctance

i have whittled away at my own resolve

to fulfill your wishes when you left

and then as i am walking to my morning class

a student in front of me tells another goodbye

saying your name rattling in my chest like a can

these hauntings erode my diligence to your requests

to live as if we never were and never will be again

i stand on the precipice of this my toes curled at the edge

•

i am reading a new Murkami short story

and it is toward the end when i realize

he is writing about the thing eroding me

and fueling my constant melancholy

because i cannot share this story with you

the thing that matters most about all that matters

everything is reduced in magnitude without you

dimmed dulled and nearly erased except what could be

and there is the limit of my diligence hidden in bone

•

when they dismember me

the skeleton key will be

the thing they come to see

the thing that can set me free

opening the door with a skeleton key

that allows me to be and to see

•

i hear your name and i recall your hands

making me the happiest and saddest i can be