When they diagnosed me I was in the middle of my divorce
Astonished at how I had come to find myself
In that time and place
I told my girlfriend I was extremely lucky. She said, no, I had worked hard to get where I was.
I watched a Palestinian child sob and shiver
On the dirt floor of a hospital tent
Her skin burned away. No anesthetic. No triage. No comfort.
I try to imagine what that feels like.
I fail.
My mom likes to say she worked hard to get where she is. She wasn’t lucky.
I think about Victor Jara. Somos cinco mil.
I try–and fail–to imagine how it feels
To sing for a better world,
And be forced to play guitar with no fingernails.
Maybe knowing you are forsaken is worse.
Maybe it’s the fingernail thing.
The national guard shot four year old Tanya Blanding with a tank while she hid in her living room.
A cop shot twelve year old Michael Ellerbe in the back.
Cops only come for me with warnings about driving too fast.
I’ve never even seen a police car at my parents’ house in the sticks.
My parents both told me I worked hard to get where I am.
They didn’t like hearing me say that I’m lucky.
When Adam and I got arrested
The cops knew his dad. (“Aren’t you Hot Rod’s boy?”)
They booked us and charged us and a few weeks later
The court case vanished into thin air
My parents say it wasn’t luck–it was because they hired a lawyer
When I was a child I had a good friend
His dad, in childhood, had been my dad’s good friend
My dad would take me into the woods and teach me to identify
Trees and plants and animal tracks
His dad taught him to buy his Sunday beer on Saturday and huff gasoline to get high.
I once drove by my friend’s house–not too long ago–intending to stop
I passed by instead
That evening my phone rang again and again
Where was I? Where was my friend?
His parents and siblings had been murdered.
The cops held him and did everything they could to get him to confess.
He still can’t convince himself they were wrong.
When I was a kid my parents bought an acre of land from Dad’s uncle for one dollar.
poetry
Gallery View
White names on black backgrounds
Silence
“What can we say about the way this writer uses pathos?”
Silence
White names on black backgrounds
John is the only one who talks
John is speaking up again.
“I think the author sounds disappointed.”
John is speaking up again.
John is the only one who talks.
One student in the classroom.
One set of eyes to contact.
One locus of discomfort to fill the silence
One presence to reassure
White names on black backgrounds
Silence
“How is everybody feeling today? Let’s take a few minutes to chat and warm up.”
Silence
White names on black backgrounds
Why Publish?
To be a writer
To write professionally
To make a buck
To prove that I am a writer
For recognition
For validity
For an audience
For a legacy
To teach
To castigate
To have something to take home and say, “I’m better than the person who left here.”
For competition
For dreams
For disillusionment
For posterity
Because thousands of shitty novels are published every day, and I need to prove to someone that I can write a shitty novel.
Good Workers
“We want our students to be good workers.”
Administration proclaims
But the liberal arts are not suited
To producing good workers
Dreamers, probably
Rebels, maybe
Disappointed idealists, surely
But good workers do not come
From interrogating humanity
Let the admins proclaim what they will.
I want my students to fight.
Re: Meetings
Subject: Availability Poll If everyone could please Respond to the poll By Friday—end of day. Let us know your availability.
Subject: Quick Reminder
And please,
Stop using ‘Reply All.’
Subject: Poll Results Are In
The only shared times
Are two p.m. Tuesday
Or eight a.m. Wednesday.
Subject: Dietary Preferences
Make sure you respond to Susan.
Vegan? No gluten?
She’s ordering lunch
For everyone.
Subject: Update: Tuesday Won’t Work
We’ll have to meet
On Wednesday
At eight a.m.
Subject: Meeting Confirmation
When you arrive,
Please sign in—
To document your presence
At this critical discussion.
Lennie
We met because the woman who owned you
Had to let you go.
I sat on the grass with you and held you
And as you realized you were being left with strangers you struggled against me.
I brought you home and you glued yourself to the window,
Heartbroken.
I comforted you, and gave you a box to improve your vantage point,
But you had no way of understanding what had happened or why.
Yesterday I left for work
And you came to the window to watch me leave.
When I came home a few hours later you whined and pawed at me and jumped
In my lap.
Maybe you thought I wouldn’t return?
You danced for cookies and I gave them to you.
I sometimes think about your memory of the woman who called you Remington.
I remember her crying as she left you with me.
You seem happy here, and I consider
How a dog goes through life without words
And must find contentment in the world as she finds it.
Language is a hell of a thing.
I would like to be able to tell you that I love you,
So I throw your ball, and give you another cookie, and worry how you’re feeling
Whenever I’m not home.
BRCM Co.
One Morning as the sun came up
And the jungle camps were dampened
Up the track came a New York lawyer
He was a business champion
"I've found me a land that's far away
Where no title can be counted.
It'll all be mine, I'll lay my claim
On the Big Rock Candy Mountains."
On my Big Rock Candy Mountains
You can pay by week or night
You can use your credit card
Or a cheque if you can write
Where the railroad bulls are paid real well
To make sure you don't ride
On the trains that bring my cigarette trees
To the factory where my workers bleed
At the BRCM Comp'ny
On my Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the cops drive big ol' tanks
And I can call the National Guard
If my workers sleep too late
All these shiftless idlers
Should profit me or die
I let loose the jerk who invented work
Gave him a gun and I called him "son"
At the BRCM Comp'ny
In the Big Rock Candy Mountains
All the hobos tried to fight
But they didn't have no tools or guns
And right is made by might
I locked them all up in my jail
And gave them work release
Now they slave away for a dollar a day
While I rest at ease with my dollar bill trees
At the BRCM Comp'ny
Ode to Frank
Frank,
One would not guess
Behind the bulk and the bark
And the large muzzle
(that isn’t so full of teeth)
The kindness with which you treat others.
Frank,
Your clumsy leaps and bounds
Are joy and youth and sweet
Beams of sunlight cascading over a weedless garden full of ripened fruit
And your shy, syrupy eyes
Are lakes of pure innocence.
Frank,
I cannot come any closer to God
Than when you meet my gaze,
And, wondering what the world is to you,
I feel your soft velvety ears
And the weight of your body as you lean against me.
No Purchase
A claw twitches
A leg finds no purchase
The mass doesn’t quite writhe
They must be cold, piled on a bed of ice
The sign reads: “Caution! The crabs WILL bite”
I wonder how long it’s been since they’ve eaten.
I’d like to feel their shells, pick one up; but they bite.
I imagine, instead, waiting to die, chilled, on a pile of brothers.
Ten Dollars
It's one banana, Michael, how much could it cost?
Sixty-three thousand gallons of bunker fuel burned?
A couple rainforests?
One point seven million dollars for paramilitary terrorists?
A few democratically elected governments?
Thirty-six years of civil war?
A superfluity, raped, tortured, murdered.
It's one banana, Michael, how much could it cost?
Sophistry and Solipsism in the New Millennium 