I saw a man shadow boxing in the shade of a broad oak tree.
His face curled with concentration as his hands machine-gun jabbed
I wish I could stand in front of him
to catch an imaginary punch along my clenched jaw
and unlock the tension it has carried for too long.
The grass outside is freshly mowed
A newly overcast sky cautiously testing
How quickly a few drops would evaporate against a hot sidewalk
Blue and purple hydrangeas
weep petals to rot in a fountain of browning edges
Sickly sweet in life and death
Ink and old paper
fresh wood and lacquer
A hopeful investment breathing chemical newness.
And me, tucked in a corner
book open in my lap
eyes following a wasp on the open sill
industrious and dangerous
Determined
Sculpting old sawdust into something more
It paused, head tilting
Watching me in return.
Another petal drops
A faraway lawn mower sputters to a stop
And the rain
Arrives.
I have kept watch over my emotions
like a broody hen who sets on,
to protect, her clutch of eggs.
She will pluck out all her belly feathers
one by one to keep them warm,
that her raw skin will come into
contact with them, and she
swell up like a puffer fish
if she perceives the slightest
threat, indeed she will lash out
as if her beak were full of venom.
Otherwise, she barely eats or drinks;
one might mistake her vigilance
for lethargy, a moody melancholy.
With narrow slits her eyes mark
the approach of anyone
who might dare to broach
the matter of her discontent;
I tried to sneak another egg
beneath her and she bit me.
I knew exactly what she meant.
You don’t have to believe in God.
God is life, the enduring consciousness
with which we experience the world.
It’s all about semantics and the peep hole
through which we view the universe.
my tires slid
off the road
and i pictured
you
do you think
of me
in tragedies
too?
in a room full of breathing
the inhales and exhales,
hot air pumping into the air,
I struggle to breathe
the fans blow,
rickety and squeaky,
sleep is hard to come by
and yet the others sharing this room
are off in Sandman’s arms
and here I am,
sleepless
in a hot room on an air mattress
listening to their breath
“Say what you mean
and mean what you say,”
I tell my students,
“And if you find yourself not wanting to say
what you actually mean,
Then that might be a sign
That you already know
That it’s wrong.”
And I just know these teenagers are getting it
As I bask in a wave of
Oh shits and damns and preach, girls
And I feel like a Good Teacher™.
That night at dinner
Between swigs of cheap beer
A friend says earnestly,
“Guess who I talked to today!”
And I truly do not expect the answer
So badly
That my glass is frozen midair
Stuck in the space between the table and my face
A still life in shock
Begging him to shut the fuck up.
“He’s actually doing really well now, y’know,”
And my friend’s girlfriend
Kicks my shin under the table
Hard
Trying to hit him.
He –- unstruck and unbothered,
Me struck and bothered for the both of us ––
continues,
“And like, I know what he did to you
wasn’t super cool,”
His girlfriend downs her drink in one go
And avoids my eye,
“But like, he’s grown up a lot
And like, he has a girlfriend now,
So that’s something
Y’know?”
But it’s not.
And I don’t.
And I just wish
That if he won’t shut up
That he’ll at least be brave enough
To say what he fucking means.
“Then Moses cried out to the Lord,
‘What am I to do with these people?
They are almost ready
to stone me?’”
– Exodus 17:4, NIV
What is the difference between striking and speaking
when a rock is meant to give water, that one would
be obedience, the other judgement?
All around, I see the masses turning out, removing
their masks, revealing their spirits and hearts, and
I am shut away—shutting away—the words I would speak,
silence riding my tongue, silence enveloping this place,
silence as solace as circumstance as judgment. But Who
is judging?
She (the collective she) is going out—out amid the noise,
out to celebration, out to the clamor of cymbals and drums
of war. She (the collective she) is beginning, or continuing
to pour herself like new wine into old skins
–fit to burst–
I am hiding in, abiding in, biding time, binding lips, beating plowshares
of swords in my chest, wondering when. When does the star shoot—
again—across the darkness of this sky—the long-awaited messenger,
herald of the new Now, the now when it is time to remove
fetters from phrases and philosophy and the folds
of the part of the arc of the chapter of the story where
I leave
this mountain
I’ve built
of thirst?
