Double Time

1.
marching double time
to judgment
the all-american way

left
right
left
right

blame the left
blame the right
left to blame
right to blame

the right to blame
we have the exclusive
right to blame

to choose
from whoever is
left to blame 

it’s a point of privilege
the right to blame
to be able to point fingers
a point of privilege
to be comfortable
assigning blame

2.
stop it too soon get a grip shut up and
think first of the victims
and not anything else

they tell me to feel instead of think but
I don’t have tanks full of what it takes
to do that anymore

they tell me to think
about the victims but
too much casual death, etc.

they want to tell me something but
I’m deaf
one too many blast waves

3.
they tell me to report
anything suspicious
which is what I’m doing here
there were bombs and suddenly
everything is suspicious so
heigh ho
heigh ho
off to hate we go
left 
right
left
right
a quick march to judgment

double time
to a killing place
with a wall
and six guns 

when I said that
you saw the scene

I can only hope
you saw yourself

staring into the open barrels
with your back to the wall

 

On Your “Political” Poem About Something I Actually Lived Through

You’re insulted enough to swear
when you realize I don’t care
that you tried to empathize
with the dark behind my eyes.

I am sorry you’re insulted;
next time I’ll bet I’m not consulted.
Easier to be outraged
if your anger can’t be upstaged.

Please, write on what you feel.
Even if it’s not quite real.
If you want to emote, do;
just be sure it’s about you.

The Towers, The Pile, The Hole

Because hope
is more important
and harder for me to hold
I will hold hope

on this day when
again and unlooked for
all my brain can talk about is
The Hole

In this life I’ve been up close to
The Towers
The Pile and
The Hole

I recall The Towers
I can still smell The Pile
I don’t know how to fill in
the blank that I feel

for The Hole
For its emptiness
For its open core
in the chugging tip of Manhattan

For that first trip
to the city afterward
when I was lost upon approach
because the skyline had a Hole

Some days
you open the book
and hope is everywhere
All over the pages

All you have to do is wipe away
the extra and leave just enough
and you’ve got something
the people will want to read

But today The Book
fell into the Hole
again and I have nothing
but Hope

if I want
to stop falling
(and I want
to stop falling)

Geodes

An old poem.  Someone was looking for it.  Here it is.

1.
This Monday night bar in Union Square
is loud enough to allow for intimacy.
You have been here for hours when a co-worker, 

who is also the woman you’ve been seeing,
who has also been sitting across from you all this time,
rises from the table and turns toward the door.

You catch a glimpse
of a tattoo on her back, 
visible between the shirt and the belt.

It stretches from hipcrest to hipcrest
as if she had sprouted 
low-slung wings.

Her skin, her body, her message — now your sudden burden;
she has just recently inked this code for
escape upon herself, but 

you never noticed it until
she stopped listening 
to you.

She leaves the bar,
moving away from the sound of your voice
out into the night ‘ and you know she’s thinking that 

though your words, like stones, were clearly born in fire, 
though you have tumbled them a long time between your water heart and your earth tongue
to make them cool and gleaming and edgeless,

as if all that labor had meant nothing 
you took and tossed the once-burning words at her
through the air, and it felt like hail in July.

She is longing for flight, but how will she ever rise
when you keep burying her 
under such a tumble of dead things?

Inside her 
a stone is growing where her heart once was. You know
she believes now that you will not be the one to move it.

She is gone, but you drink for another hour. 
On your own cab ride home, you begin to plot a path 
toward the cracking of her heart. Your dreams burn and spin all night.

2.
Next day, awake at 6 AM.
Thin clouds beam in the dawn,
slip by the window.
In them, her face: and then you see her face become 
the face behind the voice of heaven. 

There have been many things 
in your life that were 
seen once or many times 
and unremembered 
until they were needed. 
A ripple on a lakebed, 
a patch of wrinkled layers in old stone,
some tree bent and gnarled into a twist ‘ waiting
until they could give meaning 
to something else. 
Her face last night, 
seen so many times before,
was like that. 
You saw it and now
you hear secret voices,
voices heard solely in the body, 
saying that
revelation exists 
in a simple trace of 
transcendence – even inside 
the skin and eyes 
of someone you think you know.

Before now, you certainly would not have called out to God when thinking of her. 

Now your brain slides into that way of being – 
now you say, alone in your bedroom,
what you have learned: 

it exists, 
it certainly exists,
a way of living, 
a holy space that only another body can make real –

and because you will not call it 
‘being in God’,
you will call it 
‘being in love’. 

You have never felt like this 
before work before -
ready to pray all the way up to the 
forty-fifth floor.

3.
By Tuesday noon 
you have run back down 
forty- five floors,
you’ve learned thousands 
of new names for God, 
crying them all 
as you run from the thunder, 
fleeing stone 
and powder 
and shock.

The running itself is a kind of prayer
that she is running too,
or watching this happen from elsewhere, 
one hand on her mouth, tears 
leaving trails in the white, 
awful dust on her cheeks.

Your running is a prayer that she still can fly.


4.
You kick in the television at 9:30 PM.

You have not spoken for hours, staring at the phone, waiting for it to ring, waiting.
You close all the blinds while waiting, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting.
You wish you could drink but everything tastes like suicide. 
A pill forms in your hand while you wait, wait for the phone, waiting.
A pill washes down past the scratch and raw breath of your coughing. 
A pill makes you lucid in the face of delusion long enough to realize
that someone really is at the door, it’s your landlord, just arrived, 
all the roads closed, been waiting for hours in the lines,
waiting, checking up on all of his tenants, tells you
the towers are gone, the towers for the cell phones are gone, 
no calls coming in or out, no calls, 
all those hours waiting, 
air filled with voices in tears, 
in arrest, in thrombosis, in embolism, 
waiting, waiting, with crush injuries, 
burns, inhalations, rages, fevers,
blames and names and hatreds,
silences and understandings, moments gone with
all the bodies newly torn, flung, 
sundered, crushed, and cindered;
all the memories and the bearers of the memories 
waiting to get through, 
hoping to reinflate, 
to reanimate, 
to be reborn:

while you’re still 
waiting.

5.
Wednesday, driving north from the city before dawn toward New England
to stay with friends. It’s mid September, nearly time for the leaves 
to come off the trees in one last burst of flame. 
The day looks like it is going to be
perfect.

You are trying to remember yesterday morning’s dream of her,
how it felt to rest in the moment of knowing
she could leave you. You linger on one small moment of it:
the moment of not caring where she was, 
as long as she was out there somewhere, 
as long as she was happy. 
You called it love then, 
but now you know it was God, 
that moment of being without attachment to the result 
was something you could call God. 
a name you could hang 
on the moment,
a name you’ll cling to 
though it has become hard to say because
it does not include enough syllables 
to describe the fact

that you didn’t bother to bring your cell phone with you this morning,
that you did not leave a message on hers before you left.

At a rest stop outside Waterbury
you pull over.
Maybe you fall asleep. 
It isn’t important ?
what matters is that 
suddenly all around you
the earth is pushing up geodes
by the thousands.
You pick one up and it cracks in your hands,
spilling oceans of ancient, limed water,
soaking your hands with salt and 
the flakes of 
long concealed
crystals. 

She is suddenly there,
watching you weep, 
and as she rises from the ground 
she tells you:

keep moving

there are more names 
for God 
than any of us ever 
could have 
imagined

Never Forget

1.
Humble home
growing out of any landscape
in any era.

Land grabbers’ bullets
course bouncing through and
through.

A man comes running,
shooting, alone,
just to fall anyway.

The rest in their imminent 
targets, wondering if it is better
to stay and wait.

2.
Shipping
west upon
the Middle Passage.

A stirring
among
the cargo. 

Then, overboard:
a man,
a woman, two children.

The rest below,
wondering
if this would be better.

3.
Two assertions
of ownership
pushing into the sky.

First one retort,
then another,
buckling them. 

Now, abandoning them,
come many.  Hard to say
who from here; they are trying to fly.

The rest inside, choking,
wondering
if this would be better.

4.
There is
tragedy built into
the support of this world.

The owners
are the only ones
temporarily immune,

and the owners
change.  Always,
the owners change.

Do not
forget
this.

Do not forget
how the illusion
may break. 

Do not forget
the silver grace
of escape.  

Do not forget
the red joy
of resistance. 

Do not forget
that you may be
called upon.

Do not forget
your freedom 
to choose.

Ten Years

You  are going to make it
whatever you need it
to be:

fireballs for patriotism,
two fingers raised on high
before folding,
heroes and victims and flags
and lies, dust,
gold salvaged for tacky coins,
bones, parts, mysteries, 
excuses for more and more
of the same, souvenirs,
graveyard tourism, shining
city in a hole, just another day,
a beautiful early fall day, 
no clouds, warm enough,
a promise of a good fall,
feeling special, all the world
a stage for the next delicious act, then
sandbags cut loose, damn, 
it’s a damn horror flick, must be,
let’s rewrite the script, let’s 
animate it, 3-D it, make it
part of your movie –

oh, for a bit of rest.
For a pillow, a clean pillow,
and a night not bugged 
by listeners. A night that turns into
a good morning, a start to a lifetime
where nothing ever happens again
and days follow nights
that contain nothing but sheep
and sleep and waking up
in familiar arms.

 

Not This Year

not this year
no
I will let go
I will face planes and towers falling
say
yes to friends lost there
and no to
being told
ordered
compelled to recall
every damn detail
in service to
overwrought agendas

how many houses
in how many countries have fallen
and no one remembers them

how many terrors are there
to tame

how many names unspoken
on bitter tongues

no exceptions

mourn the dead long enough
you mourn yourself into the holes
left behind
it’s a long climb out

I am climbing

damn the demand for excruciating recall
I want to forget everything
except how my friends smiled
and that all over the world
for far longer than ten years
everyone else has always known
death makes no exceptions
for the flags people die under

On A Killing: May 1, 2011

First,

I’m not embarrassed to say
I’m glad he’s dead.
I acknowledge the hyena in me.

Next,

I’m not embarrassed to say
you embarrass me
by choosing from among
so few sides
when there are so many
to choose from
when looking at this.

I’m looking at you
with your flag and your beer
and your three-letter chant
and your brave,
brave sneer.

I’m looking at you
with your Truth fliers
and your semi-conscious racist
undertone:

no way those brown bastards
could have done that to us.

I’m looking at you
reciting the ritual retelling
from the teleprompter
to make sure
we feel enough fear
to fall into joy
upon clinical description
of the wet work involved.

I’m looking at you
beat down by deceit
for so many years
you won’t believe a thing
till you can personally stick
your oft-betrayed fingers
in the bullet holes
and now you won’t get the chance
so you won’t believe anything,
anything at all.

And yes, I’m looking at him –
first surprised, then not at all,
then blind and deaf and
dead.  See him slid into
a body bag, his skin scraped,
see it all slide into the sea,
his body breaking surface
and sinking into a singularity
that will suck us in for a long time
yet.

I end up looking at myself
in a tall, tall mirror.

I’m wondering if I
look much as I did
ten years ago.  I can’t imagine
I do.  I take in all
that’s being said, and
it feels like shrapnel’s
remodeling me.

I don’t know how not to believe
in karma, but I try
by seeking to know all
the names of God, for I know
you can only expect God to answer
if you say them all at once.
I don’t know how to do that. When I try,
it just comes out
as the scream of a hyena.

The Big Hole

Abner and Jeremy poke
around a hole they’ve found
in a vacant lot.

Jeremy says,
what used to be here?
I don’t remember much about it.

Dunno, says Abner.
Maybe a post office? There are
a lot of flags and messages
on the fences.

You’re an idiot,
retorts Jeremy.  They don’t
keep holes where post offices were,
they rebuild them.  It’s not like
post offices aren’t a dime a dozen,
anyway.  Look at how many there are.
You can’t walk ten blocks without passing one.

Well, I don’t know, says Abner.  Looks like
some government thing.  It’s been a while
anyway, it seems, from the look of it,
so who could know for sure?
It’s a big hole, though.

That it is,
says Jeremy.
 That it is.  Deep one.

Eh.
Someone will put something up on it,
land’s not cheap and leaving it empty
won’t be an option.

Pity, shrugs Abner.
We could use a little light, some more space,
a few less buildings. 
All you see is buildings these days.

I hope it’s a good one, says Jeremy.
Something to look at, maybe some nice apartments?
A school maybe?

Not likely, says Abner,
nobody wants to build a good home
for anyone anymore
unless they’ve got money and a lot of it.

Eh,
they both say,
wait and see what they build.
A good bet we won’t like it.

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Overforgetting

I want to overforget.

Not just not recall,
but live as though
the thing
never happened.

To get in practice I’d
overforget
bunches of
movies, a lot of songs.
A lot of books.  Certain lovers.
Meals taken with those lovers.
Details, mostly.  Details
no longer attached to lovers
but which rise and disturb
and damn me to recall –
hell yes, overforget all that.

You say,
there was a movie about this.
I say no,
there wasn’t.

I would then overforget
a lot of animals I killed
individually and by species
whether by bullets, neglect, over-consumption
of resources — no matter the method of their murders,
I’d overforget them.  Suddenly
nobody has fur coats, photos disappear
from calendars. I’ve overforgotten them,
you can’t have them either,

for this is not the complete mind-erasure
of legend — I would choose what to lose
and once I had chosen
all trace would disappear from the world
for all.  Overforgetting would leave nothing
to stir even a ghost.

You say,
this would be so cruel to the rest of us.
You say,
we’d wander around with our own memories
and wonder if we were crazy to think these things
had ever existed.
You say,
how could you think to rob us like this?

I say,
who are you?

You ask me why I yearn for this?
Really?  Haven’t you ever walked
a street in an unfamiliar place
and been rocked by a scent or sound
and dived into your pocket
for the money to buy the cab fare, the flask,
the pipe or the pills
to carry you away from the suspicion
that something you’d forgotten at last
after years of work
was returning
and though you couldn’t quite place it
you knew it was awful and that you’d want
to dig your eyes from their sockets
and rip ears and nose from your head
to keep it away from you?

You say,
but you would lose who you are now
and what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,
you’re the sum of…etc., etc.

I say,
have we met?
Do you know who you’re talking to?

You say
ow, no, not this,
not this scent of bitter-burnt orange
and sick-sweet wires, raw ozone, dirt of bones,
auras on the wind here,
time to flee;

I say, oh, good, it’s working,
overforgetting,
I don’t recognize that –
isn’t it sweet,
and tangy, and so thick on the tongue — say,
where are you stumbling off to so fast?
Don’t you want to know what really happened here?

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Tags: poems, poetry, 9/11-processing

One More About That Day

The sky’s never looked the same since then

I often look up without breathing
I memorize escape routes
I travel light
I have named all my guitars
I eat carefully
I open doors for dogs and breezes
I dress for running and sitting on lawns

The highway’s never been slicker in the rain

I hydroplane on purpose often and have learned to adjust my skid
I love others when it is comfortable
I forget where the speedbumps are right after I cross them
I stream planetary influence
I articulate every word to ensure understanding

Forward motion’s become a mere suggestion

I sleep on the couch a lot
I’m afraid to sleep too long
I flash the news anchor though she cannot see me
I hear rodents in the corridors of power whispering

When the anniversary comes around I dance frantically

I am certain of the time at all times
I watch the hard freaks as if they were prophets

If there is a place to stand I conceal myself nearby

For I am unable to imagine a time
when I will place the day in perspective
and allow myself an instant to proclaim my witness
or let myself forget the ongoing ruin in my gut and groin

I cannot imagine how I will ever
Let myself fall into the symbolism of flag and anger
Admit empire into my smoldering eyelids
Dust myself back to clean gray flannel and silk tie uniform
Make myself believe I’ll return to being an innocent fool
who doesn’t know how to run and duck and cover and choke
or who has forgotten that such skills are necessary lessons
of the years that have passed since then
as monstrously as the burning of once-privileged skulls
saying to me always
that for some
there will never again be
unquestioned safe passage

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This Is Just The Trailer

This is just the trailer.  Wait until you see the film.
 – from a message delivered by the Mumbai terrorists to the Indian government, November, 2008

1.
classic film

love
rejection
redemption

define those things ever after
by referring to the movie

“it’s like when she
turned and walked away
and then he falls to his knees
in that movie…”

classic film

the trees are
perfectly shaped
there’s snow that doesn’t go gray
with road filth

“it’s so beautiful,
I feel like I’m in a movie…”

classic film

there are guns
and clearly horned enemies
to be slain

“it’s like in that movie
where the buildings exploded…”

in here there are answers
always

everything is enormous
and significant

details are just nails
holding banner importance fast

in here light is a dog
to be walked
leashed and guided
along scents
to known targets

from in here
come out and stare into living
seeing instead the light on the screen
twenty feet high

eating the apple that is offered there

learning everything
whether it’s true or not

2.
in the classic film
they walked from set to set
no trailers
no limos

walked outlaw
through shanty towns and elegance

extras earning their lines

they took direction well

“he told me I’d receive a reward,
be a big man, blah blah,
all that stuff…”

straight from the mouth of the extra
captured after
the walk though the city
the station
the hotels
the hospital
placing bombs in taxis
bullets and fire in guest rooms

the prisoner
sobbing
sold by his father to the terrorists
with the words
“look at these guys
they have money
a good life
your sisters can be married”
and his response
“fine
whatever”

blah blah blah

just a bit of business
between the good scenes

3.
“what did we ever do to them
that they hurt us so”

said a boy
thinking of how he’d sheltered beneath
his blood soaked mother and father
on the floor of Victoria Terminal
in the heart of Mumbai

how cold he had been
it felt so damp and cold

4.
the handler
for the Mumbai killers
told them where to strike
and rated their performance
based on what they saw
on the news

whenever a gunman
took an order
from his handler that day
he responded with
“god willing”

5.
when I saw the towers fall

when I saw the first plane
full of my friends
enter like a spoon into soft serve
or a hand into popcorn

it was like a movie
I’d seen a thousand times
in 3-D

they had shaken me
with surround sound
a thousand times before

but on the day
I went there
I was unprepared
to wonder
who this was
bitter and sweet
present inside my nose
right under my eyes

6.
now we watch them on predator screens
solarized and polarized to enhance a target
god willing

and they watch us on television screens
clipped and closed to interpretation
god willing

everyone
dying easily far away
god willing

7.
how it looks
is in the script
for a classic film

how it smells
is not

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Diary Of A Plague Year

When it came to us
from somewhere else,
we could not acknowledge
that it had been born
among us.  It traveled
to us as prodigal,
not as alien.

Dirt from its boots
got into our food,
lay on our sheets
and scored us as we slept
and made love,
clouded the very water
in our drinks.

We stopped using
our bowels, absorbed
our own waste

in an effort to stop
the spread,
but it spread anyway,

we could smell it
everywhere we went:

concrete
and flesh on fire.  Roses
in Afghan graveyards
and homely Iraqi streets.
Honey in clay jars masking the stink
of money.

The fresh odor of the flag
on the stiff wind, snapping
in our nostrils.

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Ladybugs

Coincidence
or not, it’s a fact
that seven ladybugs
lit on my window
as I spoke tonight
of seven friends
who have passed on.

I let them crawl
around a while
before shooing them out
into potential doom
in the hard frost
that’s predicted for tonight.

It doesn’t matter
what signs you’ve been sent
or how many laws you follow
as you pursue the meaning
of this life;

you have to put the messengers
out into the cold
and get on with living
as if grief
were something
you can keep at a safe
and practical distance.

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The Story Of An Unsaid Thing

We fought all the time.
Two strong heads butting up
against different world views.
Work was like that, a lot.

When she sent her sister to me
for career advice, I was shocked.  Her sister
told me she’d said
how much she respected me and that I’d help,
anyway I could.

Feeling guilty, I called her
and we made plans
for lunch the following week.

I had a lot to say,

and the next day she got on a plane
and it flew into a building
and she became –
what?  Icon, symbol, memory,
martyr, victim –

She was none of those.  A huge smile
and a sharp tongue.  A quick word
and a deep thought.  A boss, a mother,
an adversary and a thorn.  Yes, those –

but I don’t know what to call her now.
She was a colleague, less than a friend,
but she looms in me now
below my heart, nudging it with her strong head,
reminding me:

I have left things unsaid
in so many places.
I have misjudged and will again.
I have held grudges and still do,

and I don’t know where her sister is today.

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