I have layed in the stillness of thunderstorms and found nothing there but the churn of my liver, of organs unnamed and sly, and wept for the mystery of body.

Excerpt from a work in progress

IV.
You were eight or nine but definetley
not ten and didn't know that song was
about AIDS but not long afterward you
cried after watching Tom Hanks in
Philidephia, convinced you'd never
get to slow dance in a sailor suit.



V.
And everything seemed so mullioned then-
yellow colored and light, truthful, like the way
you saw your body and didn't see your body.

VI.
I have wasted away the best mind of my youth
for eight million cigarettes and books whose endings
I can never remember.

VII.
The same rock songs sounds different when the
way you used to listen to them has become obsolete.
I have become so many butts and the butt
of too many of my own jokes and can barely stand to
take it all too seriously

We're not too sure

My lungs feel like wet denim. Mishappen, heavy, and hard to carry around.
But they'll dry out, she said, licking the mess that was her popsicle.
He hated her for eating like a child, eating a child's food on the street.
Maybe, he said. But wet denim stays damp for so long.
Do you have to be so cryptic?
But of course, the creamsicle matched her dress, her sunglasses, her eyes, the shoes, the way light hits the high windows and the water and suffuses this neighboorhood with light.
John?
I don't know if it'll dry out, but why the hell do you have to be like that?
Like what? You're the one who's morbid.
No, I'm a realist. My lungs are weighing me down. You're the pastiche.
John- he began to walk away, hands curled in pockets like hedgehogs- John, you don't even know what that word means.
yes, but, I sound like I do, and you have creamsicle on your chin and no one can see your eyes so they're more inclined to trust me and my wet lungs then you and your.

After an abscence, you will contemplate coming back again

Muriel Rukeyser once opened a poem with:

"Then I began to say what I believe."


I am struggling with what to say, what to do. I am struggling to see myself as a writer at all anymore.

There is something to be said about being "deeply affected" or "being affected deeply".

My Best Man

I had a vision
because 'dream' seems like
too much a word here-
too improbable, maybe-might-not
come to happen...
Visions, like the world hanging from
a branch. Ripe,not flat like a table
between us- visions come to men
of a sure cadence.
Anway.
I saw myself,black lapels of a suit
pointing like compas needles, hour hands
away and out from heart.
I raised a glass, raising a voice
to you, to the many tables
to the chandelier which leaned in to
listen to the five words that shaped my life.
Do you want some rum?
Led to Do you want a cigarette?
Led to Do you want some lunch,
a future, a hug, to meet up with me later
Led to this day in my vision.
Do you want some help picking out a ring
for Her?
Led to, Yes, only because you helped me
pick out one for Him. Pick out names for Them
Led to christenings and backyard barbeques
and the table of brightly wrapped everythings
on a table before you filled with all the things
I wish I could give you back-
all the things all the things
You gave me years ago.
Now tell me really this time- Do you
want some rum? Or, maybe this time
Will a champagne toast do just fine my friend?

This is my Dream, It Really Hurts

I want to be going gray haired at the temples and just too old to bother with contact lenses, with one too many light blue polos or silk ties. I will have great claves and a sleek, stainless steel coffee maker and kitchen knives that I hardly ever use or maybe use daily.
There will be bookcases, vases. CD's and pictures frames to dust, plants I will forget to water and that goddamned carpet I just couldn't talk him out of.

My daughter will cut her hair red hair off at age seventeen and never regret it. She will obsess over whether or not the resurgence of polka dots applies to her and where she ought to apply to college and for what. She will nurse a secret crush on the lanky boy next door who is growing taller, who plays the trumpet and who brings us our mail when we return from vacation in New York. Their fingers will brush when she answers the door and the envelopes pass hands. My daughter and I will exchange excited smiles later on over dinner. His name will be Terry or James and I will catch her doodling it all over the borders of her magazines as we sit at the DMV waiting for her to take her permit test. I will not know what will make me more nervous- her cautious driving or her driving away from me. Her name will be Jane.

My son will be sensative. A swimmer. He will smell like chrlorine and we will lap swim sometimes, never nearly often enough with my bad shoulder. He will boast my breastroke is better, but his butterfly will be graceful. He will move through water and crowds with confidence.I will yell, daily, for him to not leave his goggles in the bathroom sink. Dogs will follow him,lick his hands under tables. Girls will watch him from the corners of keggers and he will be kind enough, and complacent enough, to pretend not to hear his name whispered in huddles behind bathroom doors at parties. He will sleep with the same blanket, even when he returns home from college his first winter. He will take up smoking and join me on the damp back porch one morning and expertly toss his butt in the coffe can next to the door right after me. He will break my heart, make me proud, hold the door for me. I will let his father name him. He will name him Jonas,for my favorite novel and because the men in my life will be true Givers.

One night, before college comes and they will fall into the routine of videochats this night, phone calls to us this night, weekend stays and care packages on these dates and that- they will leave together for a party in a carpool. It will be early october,barely fall. She will ask for advice on how best to wear her new rouge. He will borrow his father's old denim jacket from the hall closet. Me and my husband, my wonderful man, will sit on the deck out back and smoke a sticky spliff. The house will be wonderfully warm and we will slowdance once back inside to "Namesake" by Anais Mitchell at full blast across the hardwood floors in the living room. He will still be in his work things- an oxford buttoned down to his navel, sleeves up, gray slacks and shiny black shoes. I will be wearing cargo shorts and a sleeveless tee shirt from our sons long ago basketball camp. No shoes, just socks,and I will barely wince when he steps on my toes. I will barely breathe when he dips me, suprisedly, and for no reason. The lamps on either side of the front window will glow golden and I will smell like earth and mums or grass and he will smell like midday cologne and my tobacco.

We will undress each other as we crawl up the stairs and not make it halfway up before we fuck, right there, suddenly and quickly, like we did while the kids were younger and only down for a quick nap. We will both remember this instance and familiarity and forget if we had done exactly this back then- because time has moved so oddly since then. He will grip my left shoulder- the bad one- from behind. I will place my hand on it. Downstairs, Anais will be singing "1984".

When the kids come home, at different hours, smelling like two different brands of lite beer, they will pause outside our half open bedroom door and see us half asleep in the blue lights of the tv screen. The sound will be off- Lucille Ball's Mame will havenever been better. Jane, then Jonas will pause, smile, say I love you Dad, goodnight, wake me in the morning?

I will say I love you too, goodnight and yes- bagels and shopping with Aunt Kate? They will head off to bed. I will nuzzle deeper against the clipped black hairs of his muscled chest. He will have fallen asleep, upright against the headboard we paid too much money for, his mouth half open, head to one side.

Tomorrow, we will look for antiques- I will already have all the pricelessness in the world.

In Vitre

The Republican Party has traded again and again on the conjured idea of an American golden era, circa 1945 to 1960, after boys who were ripped from the arms of their virginal sweethearts and sent to another continent to fight a great war against tyranny and despair, had returned home as men, as heroes, and set to work, every last one of them, making babies with doting wives and grabbing the American Dream with both hands in the dawn of suburbia. Scientists in white lab coats and square, black-framed glasses toiled away to make American astronauts the first on the moon, and to fill all the pretty new homes behind perfect white picket fences with fancy, new-fangled household gadgets to make life easier and more fun. Teenagers hung out at sock hops and neon-lit diners, girls longing for lavaliers and boys wondering how to get laid. Elvis' pelvis was considered a scandal, and Marilyn Monroe a bombshell. Dad had a pension and the promise of a gold watch at the end of a long career with a single firm, and Mom had a Frigidaire. And everyone was happy.

Republica! Vote for us—and we'll give you that!

It's an empty promise built on an illusion, carefully constructed to conceal that America's so-called golden age was imperfect like any other, and perhaps even more so than most. Half a million of those boys who went off to war never came home—and some of them weren't boys at all, but men, who left wives and children with desperate struggles in the place where their husbands and fathers had been. Some who had come home were never the same, their bodies or minds damaged beyond real repair. Women who had been called to duty in factories were forcibly driven back into domesticity, segregation was a legal fact, every gay had a closet of hir very own, mental illness was treated with lobotomies, McCarthy was on his Communist witch hunt, and we fought an all-but-forgotten war in Korea for three years and lost over 35,000 soldiers. There were back-alley abortions, and the KKK, and Elvis and Marilyn both died of drugs.