It's Time To Return To The Square

I miss poetry too much. And Spring is here, it's time to really get into it. You can find my new work here. Thanks for anyone who supported me on this project.

Time to go dancing barefoot in the skies.

Phone Call At High Noon

Drive like the wind!

This is what I imagine shouting from the back of the bus, on days where I actually look at the window and see things; the pigeon with fifty-cent bread, gyrating in its mouth. Snow laying its slim body down on the groaning highway. All kinds of things that wake up all of my desires, the cheap lunch, the distant sex, most especially a kind of electric isolation that I hungered for more than I am even aware. Gotta be on the move, gotta be going somewhere before I find myself and sink into a pit of self-dissatisfaction! Gotta go faster before I catch up to myself!

Drive like the wind, old man!

Gunshots go off from under the bus. It’s the Wild West of the Eastern Mid-West. Except that it’s nearly high noon and the town square isn’t silent: it hums with the energy-saving pride of the city buses, criss-crossing paths and hopping over each other like elongated checkers; an eagle soars overhead but it’s so damn loud at the back of the bus you can’t hear it. No one knows when it’s time to put down our books and pens, and when it’s time to

DRAW!

He got up from the front quarter of the bus and, bobbing around carelessly, made his way back to where I was sitting. He had one of those walks that felt like subconscious intention. Somewhere, he knew what it was that he intended to do, but his body acted only out of habit and without driving force. I half-expected him to turn around upon arriving and sit at a different seat than he was sitting at before. But the dude was looking straight at me, so I threw away my preconceived notions as I have trained myself to do, subtly reached my hand down towards my pocket to pause my IPod, and leaned forward to hear his story.

“Can I use your phone?”

Of course he can use my phone, I figure if someone wants to steal my phone they must really need it and I was probably better off before I even had one. Even so, I made sure he was in my sight at all times. Good to be generous, better to be intelligent about your decisions. Keeping track of someone often involves overhearing their conversation, which they should be expecting anyway, because who borrows a phone and expects it to remain secret?

“bzzzzzzz—warrant—bzzzzzzzz—arrest—bzzzzzz.”

Must’ve been high noon, ‘cause all I heard were gunshots and not a single more word could be heard above the din. I could tell something in me wanted to be apprehensive but I was still hopping, was still eager to be moving, so I didn’t care much, and nearly started up my music again just in time to catch the massive Mississippi outside my window when things got just a little real,

he started yelling and before I knew it, I was looking at my father, wearing maybe the same clothes but with darker skin, yelling at his woman over the phone, trying to get to St. Paul, fresh out of jail, going to court, like my father, like my father, and she was giving him hell and he deserved it, and he just kept yelling, because that solves all kinds of problems, and it was clear then that the world was falling in on his mind.

Wherever it was that he came from, I saw on his face that he wouldn’t be going back. He handed my phone back to me. “Women,” I could barely hear him, “Can’t live with ‘em, can’t live without ‘em.”

But I pretended he said something that wasn’t so dull, something more like,
“Son, don’t let ‘em ruin your life.”

Morning of an Empty House

A couple months have passed since the ball dropped from the gutless needle in the cinema sky, and over the course of ten seconds shifting the entire soft earth under my feet, until none of us can stand any longer and spend the rest of the winter looking for our chapstick—and ever since, I’ve been clucking around, gathering up my visions, memories, sad stories, tall tales, wonderments, paintings and dedications and trying to hussle them into a large, towering cage that is sometimes known as my room. And it seems like every time I get close to succeeding, they all conspire against me at once, whispering in my sleep and when I’m staring out the window, and putter off, leaving behind an emerald, milky white trail of disaster and grace.

Because it’s felt like everything’s wrapped around a delicate string, and with the slightest shake, it all scatters and finds other strings, other warm kitchens and bedrooms, cleaner bathrooms, and leaves me with what can now only be described as a plastic slinky. Up the stairs and down the stairs. Up the stairs some more. I can’t understand in this snowstorm why everything goes away from me when it always ends up coming back at some point. Where’s the loss?

Ah but the loss. Old teacher Kerouac is teaching me from the grave to accept it forever, and I’ve stumbled into a great circus tent of old sands and trying to get on the great, sad elephant of the Past, lumbering around against his will, while little kids (including me, you see, because in the tent I can be nothing but a kid of myself) climb all over his back until he goes into a crimson dissent and tears down the canvas. Or I could be the elephant, I suppose, and the kids climbing all over me could be those visions, memories, wonders, stories, beautiful beautiful girls who don’t mean any harm but are slowly slowly bringing me down.

I am waiting for the house to empty itself. This is an indefinite thing, something I have more control over than I am aware but I just expect it to happen. Like watching an intersection waiting for someone to be hit by a car. Or someone driving one gets so mad they rear end the dipshit in front of them who doesn’t know to turn right on red. If you watch an intersection long enough I’m sure it’ll happen. And I’ve applied that concept everywhere but it seems to get us nowhere, you just catch me watching you and I look away as if all this time I was just teasing you, I’m really still in 6^th grade and nothing much has changed.

So much has changed I can’t even see it begin to shift, like the ground beneath me on that curious, sad New Year’s, like the earth spinning, like the earth moving in an incredible circle around the average-sized Sun, which is on it’s way to dying. I see no cause for alarm. There is life in the Sun, so much that it at one point or another has to end. What cause for alarm? With life in the Sun comes life in all of us, and whether we use it or not is not up to the Sun but rather up to us, Sun-Bearers, and all of our lives can be spent shivering under the moon but we’d prefer it not so.

It’s still snowing outside so I hear, but if I’m good enough at what I’ve unintentionally trained to do, I won’t see its nose for a few more good hours, or a couple of good days, at the end of which I’ll be rubbing my hands on my knees and be wishing for Easter, Christmas, whichever holiday brings a madman into my home. Company of the most celestial kind would be nice. Since you never really visit anymore anyway. Not since my birthday, not all summer, no time no cause for alarm. When is your birthday? so I can be in Florida pressing my body against some nice blonde against the back of the trailer.

Birthday presents are the hardest, hard far beyond writing or pretending. When the economy’s fucking up our youth-hood and we have so many more friends than we’ll ever realize, what can we get? I don’t think you want another ITunes gift card, we get enough from our aunts and uncles. There’s some lotion in the closet that would be crossing and recrossing sour lines. This, here, I made for you. It’s always best to make something, they say, and they probably did get more sex and money on a regular basis, but so far I’ve succeeded in doing what I’ve been told. So I made this for you. It’s just a baby of an idea, a gurgling seed, looking for a place to flourish in the ever-shifting earth, looking for the living breathing sun in the shithole that is my room.

I thought I just cleaned. That could have been last week or it could have been last May, after all I see no real reason for me to have done anything about the filth, the wet musty towels, the gashes in the floor. But look at this place, how I could leave it as it is, how could I leave the constant piling junkyard of coca-coca cans (and my stepdad buys only vanilla anymore). And the bed is so comfortable and slutty, sheets disembodied from duvets, warm scent of just the night before. There’s no room to sit only hide. Pizza box, three stacked plates, McDonalds cups because we like being cheap. Everything is on the floor, the ceiling though is bare! The fishbowl is at half its normal water levels. I should be more concerned for the fish’s sake but instead I’m just trying to remember where I hid your secret artifact.

I’m convinced you gave me one, once, sometime, in the darkest night, maybe, or in the funtime high of my birthday celebration. Somehow I’m convinced, and that you at some unscrupulous point in time handed me something that would send all the right words and inspirations back to me. You once gave me a lighthouse of my own prospects, and I went and dropped it down the right very middle of my weariness; it can’t have gone very far, I think the hole stretches only for a week or two, but god how the days grow wings and take off into blizzard skies. Where did that little trinket go. I need it about now and forever.

The house has emptied itself. The birds are singing a cock-a-doo song, the rabbit is humming a dirge in the basement. I’ll turn up the volume of my inspiration. I’ll shake the house with regret and strongheadedness. When can we have the world over, when comes my excuse to clean myself up and do the festering dishes and take out the recycling to the environmental graveyard. I knew this moment would come soon as I woke up, and I’ve simply waited in the long grass, eyeing the door, eyeing the keyhole of the door, and now it’s locked and prim and come on over I’m waiting just behind the long grass.

My man should be back sometime soon and we’ll continue to shoot at each other and pixels in the too-small screen. I know now that you would severely disapprove; this gives everything a wild glee, a self-indulgent cadence to shoot and shoot recklessly and know that no one will ever get hurt so long as I keep shooting. I should have known you loved flowers. I should have known you love Autumn. And as much fun as it may be to shoot and be shot at, with my man all the way, it’s not the same without your constant disapproval. Disapprove of my actions, look away from the blood-soaked screen. Care so much, lady. It gives this bloodied poet a silver-lined, gleaming fiery ball of hope, bouncing around the starving shell of me. I thank you for this and in a thousand dreams kiss your tender hand.

If magic exists it exists here and you can not come in. Your own soul, delicate loving, hidden somewhere in the weary cracks of this room, this circus tent, defers you from ever entering. It keeps you so far away that it numbs me into thinking you hate. That’s strong magic, for me to ever think that you hate. That you hate attention; that you hate your life-saver and steady source of kinship. That is what I exist as to you. I have come to terms with this among many other wishes—

fuck this sty in my eye and I can’t type fast enough. A lethargy slowly creeps from my heavy eyelid to my still-yawning fingers, which struggle to keep up with the race of the morning mind which I discovered so long ago. This should be a tradition. This should be a holiday. And we’ll ban Facebook and ban sexual experimentation and strap everyone to their uncomfortable desk chairs and hallelujah! we’ll feel something! If I had more power to control my habits I would but habits sneak in like springtime ants and make a house out of your corner. I can’t smoke I won’t smoke I might smoke at some point where I am holding on to a sliver of my ability, where I’m riding on the weakest puff of unsupported air and feel dizzy from watching my best friends move, move everywhere and set up completely new shops.

Write them letters, is what I wish I were better at doing. Some don’t need them as much as they don’t want them, they’d rather forget about that uppity… but I’m not sure what their names are so I better not be too haste with my indignations. Some I would rather just kiss and be done with it, get it out of the way, I’ve had enough and more than enough sometimes of waiting for a long steamy night in the slut bed of my empty house, which I am thinking about now staring out into the foggy white frost of the north-facing window…

Can we not be so alone, for just one weekend. For just one two day span left of the ugly February that I’m sure we’d all rather ignore. March is around the immovable mountain. March babies become strong sons and beautiful daughters. Your birthday, in March, as well as my brothers, I feel so out of place, I need to get creative, get a present or three. I’ll trade you whatever my fervent mind comes up with for just an artifact, just another trinket of your affection (misleading or not). I just think I need something with me to take to the Buddhist mountains, to the red-brick city far away. I might not find it there. It, myself. All that I’m trying to recover and keep trapped in a crumbling cage.

I can see that I am not helping myself. I just want to get better. I want to see the grass beneath the snow. I want to see the trees all in straight rows. I want to see you sitting on my bed without thousands of whisperings mounting in my head. I want to make you think I’ve gone somewhere else. Somewhere different than any one of us has been before. I want to go there now, and I want to keep going there, as long as I have sun inside the heart and maybe someday I’ll have a baby in March. But I can’t go until I can take something with me, something you wanted me to have. Will I have to make do with your smile? Do your fingernails do you justice? I’m a writer I suppose your words will be enough. I hope you don’t mind or miss them. I’m sure they’ll find their way back to you. Until then I’ll go other places and think other things because it’s a tight squeeze into heaven for those naïve enough to think they can get in, and I plan on following the kiss, dumbly into the earnest end of Winter, where I hope to God that everything bounces back to me. Except you. I think I’m okay with where you are.

Sonnet To My Only

You slit the throat of your very best man;

Threw him to the eels, for the gulls above.

Slow he’ll drift until he kisses the sand,

My Captain, be sorry, be hopeful, my love.

Everything is wrong in the flesh-flecked bay

On the ship that breathes water and careens.

Crimson fog, howling seals, hull made of clay!

My Captain, be safe now, be careful, my queen.

The skies by now are too grey for changing,

Too sick with sleet to salvage our goodbyes.

Now I lie, yearning for my burning spring,

And still sounding swept, with my drowning eyes.

I’ve no lips, wish; no lighthouse at the end,

My Captain, how could you, sweet sinner, my friend.

Writing Miss Equinox (And That's Now Your Name)

I woke up still dreaming
of your innumerate smiles,
and determined
chained myself
to this desk.
This play is for

you. Don’t pretend
that I’m not here
or that I’m actually
interested in this book.
I once read Harry Potter
Seven in one night.
That night was for

you. How does it feel
to be latchkey on
an evening in february?
I once left a pile of
feathers at your door.
That morning was for

gotten to the wild scent
of phoenix soaring over
the skyline spring to
September, rotten for
gotten under the weight
of a rigid circle.
That poem was for

you. It had many clichés
all of which I felt we
had deserved. But all
that I felt slipped easy
‘neath an impertinent
rock. A lonely ant!
Only proper to squish
when crawling alone.
That murder was for

you, we decided for
the greater good, that
the greater good consisted
of our combined estates.
And found out how the
floor tastes. Littered with
tranquil to-do lists
and delicate bras.
That outpour was for

you, delving deep into
a yearold cata-dream.
Am I being serious?
Or am I desirious.
Damn Kerouac flaring
up again in my own
cataclysm of a work hour.
This day was for

my other and less lazy
self. I have nothing
nice left to say to you.
I have stripped my palate
of everything sweet
and stuck it to the window
of my most vulnerable self.
This play is for

you. Every word of it
came from my perfect
memory of you. And
your words are in there
too. The ice is melting
elsewhere and there
seems only one thing
left to do. This play is for

you.
Maybe it
will start our friendship
anew.

My Father Called Me At A Bad Time

My father called me
on his birthday.
It was a number
that I didn’t know
with a very familiar
area code
(541).
I picked up and
sounded much happier
than I wanted to.
First he asked
what’s up?
Then I said
a lot of things.
Like Happy Birthday.
Then he wanted
to know more.
So I closed my eyes
and saw the first
day of school,
and the white skirts.
Then my monologue
that was kind of about
him, I told him everything.
Then about the reason
my voice was wrapped
in melancholy: girls,
and he told me about girls,
including mom
back when she was a girl.
He asked all the right questions.
I gave long, prudent answers
that had stuck to my lips
the night before,
just like the chapstick did.
I heard him clear his voice
for hours, before something
important, after something
that made him laugh.
And after being so excited
for all those hours, I finally
had to say

Good Night, Dad,

though I would get no

sleep that night.

Happy Birthday, Dad,

because despite myself

I had not forgotten.

Oh, and Happy New Year

which I at last

looked forward to.

Play

I am hiding you in Chicago hotel-rooms, floors rank with monologuists and self-conscious singers, ready to prove how much they’ve learned by doing & seeing, which is how you learn—
I am hiding you in the camel-tan bedsheets, where there is no Febreeze or laughter, where I only go to paint the ceiling which has lately been never,
I am hiding you in the old Denver home, where I have been told to not get shit-faced on my first night of the rest of my life, which was good advice, some that I will probably take with a long swig of caffeinated orange juice,
I woke up this morning with a spider crawling up my inner thigh and immediately thought of calling you, beyond the airport and into the Southern Minneapolis Skies, which you are now wholly a part of,
but then thought better of it and tucked my phone behind some books about punk rock & the Vietnam war that I still haven’t read, where I hide the condoms, those ones that are still there—
I am hiding you in massive Chipotle burritos that use only the freshest ingredients and are still bad for you, which might be why I put you there, why I love guacamole and why I opened my unspeakable mouth,
I am hiding you in avocado burgers—
am I troubling you or is this just a really long car ride from Cottage Grove to Diamond Lake Rd, where I trouble myself to explain how highways are the quickest and most effective route to memory,
I am hiding you in Fort Snelling, where soccer is only sometimes played in the summer,
I am hiding you at the Lake Harriet Bandshell, even though you were nowhere near, it was the absence of you that made it about you, though I was wearing contacts then, you may not have recognized me,
because there have been nights where I do not recognize you straightaway, where I stare at the crumbly bricks expecting you to appear, with your name on my door that sometimes breathes wildflowers of May—
I am hiding self-limited expectations in the empty glass bottles of the basement, where the rabbit sleeps in the winter and there are no light-bulbs that breathe without wheezing,
hiding genuine glee behind the shower curtain, but of course I don’t remember that now because it was so early when I woke up lying on the floor, over a familiar bear skin,
hiding silver poems in the stake of the heart, unable to carry the weight of your public name—
I am hiding you from the schizophrenia of my math homework past midnight, which is a certain kind of trance, boredom and belching all the way to bed, except for the unmistakable faint scolding of well-dressed friends, preaching a very narrow truth,
do you care about anyone’s feelings!
why do you insist on these romantic misgivings!
you are making the world uncomfortable!
personal issues disguised as questions, but they do the job and well, don’t they?
I am hiding you in my shirt pocket always, because I like to prove myself poetical when someone asks What Is It That You Mean, or How Is It That You Feel, so I hand them a certain kind of love poem and they say that it’s sweet and then take it back,
but I wish they would stop taking it back.
I am hiding you in blank sparkling discs.
I am hiding you in dilapidated scripts.
I am hiding you in a promise of tomorrow.