Election Day: Nov 6th, 2012

If I can fall in love with a boy passing westward
on 7th while I move east
If I can make a long distance phone call during my lunchbreak
to a friend who is sobbing on the T
and If I can smoke on a terrace while the bars are letting out
and the streetlights shine on the 100 people searching
for their cars Then don’t you still exist as we imagined you America?

The newscasters speak as if you were both halfs
of the iron maiden as well as the body closed inside
But I will spit at the feet of nostalgia You
still look young and sexy to me America

Full of potential

Too cool for the crowd you hang out with

I may be humanities educated but
I admit you are the body and I am
          just a fleck of your hot blood

If I want to kiss the girl through the mics of WYSO
as she announces election results in Yellow Springs, Ohio
If I walk to corner store for smokes in San Antonio, TX 
where the kid with trackmarks not much older than I am says
I’m having a hard time
says, 
can you spare...
and it’s the face of a former president on a piece
of metal whose smell rubs off on my fingers
that he wants but I only use those to pay
for laundry so I don’t have anything
to give him and I start crying
Doesn’t that mean the chambers of our hearts
are still conjoined America?
Doesn't that mean you still exist just
how we imagined you?

~3

A guy with a mustache
shot God at the theater premier last night.
We’d given him box seats for his birthday
after working on that play for what felt like our whole lives.

~2

The old poets write with their postures--
pressed by precedent into a daunting
straightness of line.

These poets and those who laud them
they say we write with the shaky hands of children
when really we write with the trembling hands of lovers.

Oct/Nov 2012

I was reading poems outside the bar like a misanthrope
trying to look interesting. I was choking on a black
shard of desire too sharp for the sword swallowers.

Wasn't I precoscious and dangerous, once?
I remember thinking: if I continue being this 
charming they’re going to have to kill me
in my sleep if they want to kill me because
otherwise I’ll just talk my way out of it.  

My cigarette mouth must get so tiring.

Throw me from your bed and make me shut up.
Send me out in fresh dew, up all night, into streets
lined with slickbacked cars dreaming. It is 6am,
7am. The first time or the fifth. Who’s counting?

We do it to ourselves, anyhow. And sometimes
it hurts, of course, but I'll dab away the blood
from a million split lips before anyone tells me
it's not beautiful anymore. Anything that persists
in this world is beautiful, and you, darling, above all else.

Revision

Let’s try it again. This time
I won’t be laying stoned in your bed
while you’re putting on your makeup and your dress.

Maybe instead I could put on
your makeup and your dress and we
could kiss and take a picture like running
fingers over the inside surface of our passions.

We could try again on a bridge with a whole
mess of stars, too many to keep
out of our hair.

I’ll fish the shoebox of broken glass out from
under your bed. We’ll build a room to live in
and this time the closet can stay but forget
the handgun at the bottom of the gift bag.

We’ll try it again in a city
with no sharp edges or exits.

There will be balconies and photograph albums.
In every picture we’ll be toasting and our smiles
will look like two champagne glasses clinking together.

I’ll figure out a way
to keep those glasses from running dry if you can stop
bursting them against the walls whenever you get angry.

We can overlook that ugly moment when
I tried to break some boy’s teeth at a party
because I thought he was sleeping with you

and turn it into a magic act
where every shattered thing
gets transfigured into a bird
and nobody gets hurt.

Let’s start over
but this time when we meet eyes
through a crowd I’ll walk away.

We can find our own
street corners to occupy while we pray
for busses to come hit us and when
they don’t come I’ll get lost
and marry whoever finds me.

Her and I will move
to the city. I’ll quit
smoking and drink less.

You’ll be somewhere else
for a little while, getting happier

every day until one particular thursday
when I find you at the corner grocer
picking out flowers, running fingers
over the inside surface of their petals.

I’ll say, “It’s strange peonies
never seem to be in season here”
and you won't say anything,
just pick up some lilies
and smile at me while you
walk out into the crowded afternoon.

~1

Some nights you just want to smoke

and think about all the exceptional kissers you've known. 

Epitaph for Children I Don't Have

My children drowned:

a boy and a girl

not even born but that couldn’t stop it.

The cold lake was a place I had been.
I was returning. The white veils fixed
over their two faces, fogged breath
on a mirror that couldn’t help but
give back the world. My bare

feet on the broken bank beside
several small shells
that were all tokens
of special varieties of grief.

My drowned children: I have lost
            you, familiar as the water returning
            in brackish conversation between
            tributary and tide, I have lost you

not once but twice.
To the deep, then to the morning
when you never were.

You had a mother. When I pulled you
from the water of myself onto the shore
of myself, my breath frosted the mirrors
of your faces and they could not help

but return two images: hers and my own.

You had a mother, but perhaps
no progenitor more real than
the guilt that pushed
your small bones out
of my pores like sweat.

If I had spoken to her
of you, she would not have known
the names that together we gave you.

The news of your deaths
would have broken upon her as an empty wave.

This world a repository for small
sadnesses, cast earthward.
This world that turns up
empty palms in recompense
for all we have interred,
a gesture feeling of forgiveness
until the very moment
it does not.

Drowned children
the news of your two deaths
first in water, then in morning
might have appeared to her as
gift or blessing: the prophecy

of a future wound from which
to carry the relief of never having.

But a morning arrives full

of empty beds and bedrooms like palms

upturned to demonstrate how little they hold

and a night comes when you return

to the water and find it filled with your

children. Children who you pull from
the lake until the lake runs dry and you
are standing alone in its chalk center.

Above,
there is the moon and she wears

her white veil and drowns in the sky.

Below,
the dry banks replete with the bodies
of things you never had to lose.

There will be nothing else.