Poetry: “After the Death of Christopher Dorner”

At the end of everything,
a house burns in the forest.

Notice how the wood seems to catch
too easily, as if having waited

many lives for this performance,
regarding each new ring

as a reminder of the weight
time heaps on ambition.

But look now! How it aches
with sensual readiness

for the task at hand – how it seems
almost to self-immolate

in the manner of a Burmese monk,
or a magician in his final act.

At the end of everything,
a man burns in the house.

There’s no way to tell
if he screams or waits in silence

as the wood splits and bows.
No way to tell if he thinks,

like the magician, that his work
here is done, or like the monk,

that what’s destroyed in flames
so often becomes that thing

which flames cannot destroy.

 

Poetry: “Human and Otherwise”

Mikey showed us a grainy video
of two teenagers pummeling a man’s
head with the clawed side of a hammer.

They took turns, each time trying to outdo
the awesome brutality of the last.
It was almost funny, in a way,

this deadly pissing contest in the woods.
Then something changed. The curtain of static
parted on a squishing sound and we realized

they had split open his head, were no longer
striking bone but all those things that bone protects:
the eyes, the brain, the slippery flesh of

the inner cheek. Someone said, “Fuck this.
Mikey, turn it off.”By that time, it had ended
anyway. We filed out of the bedroom

and grabbed some beers from the fridge. Years later,
I asked Brian how that freak Mikey
was doing. Turns out, he had dropped

out and was working on one of those crews
that cleans up after car accidents,
makes sure the road is spotless and free

of all wreckage, human and otherwise.

 

Poetry: “The Conscience Round”

I remember the recoil as soft,
a palm come to rest upon my shoulder
before the condemned man fell. We later

agreed that there was something off about
this performance, as if we were the ones
facing death and not he. It’s not that we

had trouble following orders, but men
like to know where they stand in these matters.
In the face of death, there’s an incentive

always to look away, or to pretend
that in some moments things just feel heavy,
so that gravity becomes the culprit.

 

Poetry: “An Evening at the Bughouse”

 

For Zack Mast

It helps to have a drink in hand
before the first
performance starts. You never know

how it’ll go. It’s hard work to laugh
and sometimes people
just aren’t up to it. But tonight, the soft

wood of the storefront’s pews absorbs
our days’ concerns.
Tonight we stay up late to learn

from men who can ignore their own
impotencies, or women
who equate the silence between words

to sex, an unfolding of acrobats
whose ecstasies recede
but give the heart a room in which to sing.

Poetry: “Different Coasts”

Something came over me, impatient
as I was to glimpse the waves

that had not risen into view. Your bare
feet, propped up on the glove box, pressed

hard until small cracks began to snake
across the rubber. I traced these cracks

and felt in them a kind of ending, a stumbling
rhythm of shadows that would lead

my hands to different coasts
before arriving once again at yours.

 

Poetry: “Chicago Monday Morning”

On the Red Line
train to Howard,
the conductor announced a delay.

“We apologize
for the inconvenience.
We’ll get moving again
as soon as we have power
on the tracks.”

The black man
seated beside me, drinking
orange juice from concentrate,
wiped his lips
and grinning broadly said,

“We have no power!”

He repeated this twice more,
hoping to initiate
a callback or a chorus,

but we sat silently
and dreamed.

 

Poetry: “Excerpt from a Young Man’s Letters”

 

For Matt Schumake

And I spent the early spring in cities, or trudging
like a conquering army from one to the next,
my good boys on the brink of mutiny.

And I loved you through the end of wars
for that night in which you smoldered in
my arms like downtown on its way toward dawn.

Poetry: “The Flowers”

I would like to write a poem about the flowers
in the field behind my house. Every year I wait
for them to bloom or wither, and this is how
I measure time. Today, however, another
measurement must be made: how far

will I have to throw the brick in my left hand
so that it might crush the window of
the cop car parked outside the 7-11 on Grand?
And so this poem exists only to beg
interrogation, so that you might enter into

a new and different world, comrades, in which
the flowers in the field are minor things.

 

Poetry: “Still Life”

Whichever place you’d like to claim is yours.
This is how a century will come to pass.
Things drift, but not always in one direction—
a rush of scattered waves in moonlight.

To the mind squandered, too soon, to purpose:
remember that you have only the painting
of things, a single candle lit against the sun.
Like the blood-orange glow of a volcano,

sometimes brilliance is obscured. Yet one
has little time to search for it within
the earth, for always there are smaller
truths to be dealt with, as clouds

that spread across the sky so incessantly
that what’s beyond passes slowly through
the misty camera lens of stories.
Whichever place you’d like to claim, be sure

of its mere permanence. Floors can groan
beneath the weight of cotton pin cushions, and
where a painting hangs can contradict the shadows
that seep across the corners of its frame.

Poetry: “The Dream”

Sleep came to him as a dazzling series of things remembered,
a rush of clouds portending rain and silent in the way
that clouds are. The curtains on the windows multiplied
and closed in on him, not so much hanging as hovering

in the air, like trees in the deep parts of a forest.
In his mind, he waited for the soft click that separates the living
from the dream, but the night denied such clean
phraseologies, and soon he stood to assume his place

on the bridge that lies between. “There is no
such thing as a simple dream,” he thought, as fire rushed
toward him from the far end of the bridge. She reached
out from the flames that licked his face, a hot and sorrowful

hand whose touch brought no relief from sleep. Walking
through this apparition, he arrived finally on the other side.
There was a barn some ways off in the distance, its bright
red paint a stain on the blanket of night. He continued toward

its door, and finding it unlocked thrust it open.
The warm rush of air carried with it the smell of
rhododendrons, which lured him to their source. There,
in a lost and foreign corner of the barn, was a patch of garden

and a stream trickling through a crack in the wood.
He drank from this stream and melted into the bed
of sweetly smelling flowers. Hours later, he awoke
as a cloud, hovering above a sea of silent cities filled

with people he remembered, and yet cared mostly to forget.