Ten Precepts
Whoever’s arms are crossed in the end
loses. If you hug a child tight enough,
your soul will grow slightly bigger than your body
and the camera will steal what it can see.
If someone’s kicking the fence, let him.
When the dust storm comes, run.
It will look like it is standing still. Be like the fly
and avert the slow motion hand of wrath.
When I get to Virginia, I wait for the tremble
of colliding continents to find the waterfall.
I avoid the young men’s hands. The God feeling can
sometimes be lust in disguise. When I get caught
in the cathode glow of twilight, I stand still and breathe
the toxicity. I will know how to save you.
For every walnut you find in the dark hills, forgive
yourself twice. Follow the flying crow back to Kansas.
The dust storm is now a rainy wind. The twilight
is now a river. I will take them back with me.
Don’t return until your open wounds have healed.
Shine little glowworm, burn.
I am not one to initiate.
I stare and fade. Juliana.
Wearing red. I chased her once,
in a fever in the fields.
I stand in my blue pajamas now,
next to my bed and plastic
nightstand. Wife’s asleep.
My kids’ dream spirits playing on the roof.
One little spark here in this dust bowl
would set my life ablaze.
I’d pace through the last kitchen
of my life with pupils glowing red.
I heard her singing to the glowworms
when our barn caught on fire late April,
wettest night of the year.
I ran into the dewy fields, mistaking
lightning bugs for ashes of her dress.
Now I stare and fade into July,
finding her in the lightning storms:
they choose to strike every speck of dust but me.
Giraffe
When a giraffe is born,
it must fall a distance
of six feet. The fall breaks
the umbilical cord, gets
the heart beating,
and clears the lungs.
If you land on too soft a surface, it’ll be like you never fell.
There is always a risk
of injury: the baby could land
on his head, he could break
bones, his mother could fall
exhausted on top of him.
If you land on too soft a surface, it’ll be like you never fell.
I’m afraid today
has been already defined. I’m afraid
I’m not standing on high enough
stilts. I’m afraid my fall
won’t break me to breathe.
If you land on too soft a surface, you won’t survive your birth.
The Knot
I want (SO BADLY!)
to create something beautiful.
Something completely new
Is this how God felt? Materialistic?
I want to crochet a bear
or an owl or a rabbit. Or a pear.
I want beauty I can touch. I want
someone else’s perfect skin.
I want to form, mold, knit
something sparkling and gorgeous.
Maybe He said these things. Or:
I want beauty that can love me
back. A rebound of my beauty.
I want to have always existed.
I don’t want to know your life before me.
Not the people, not the movies,
no past phonecalls or boyfriends.
I didn’t exist then, but I do now,
ever since you spoke Amen.
So are rainbow-ridden cloud factories not real?
Like global warming? Like the positive effects
of yoga combined with organic granola?
Is the world a government of fairness
and unfairness in equal parts?
Or is it just a huge knot of a long kite string?
I used to vote and read the news.
Now the most important thing
to me are the funny pages.
I love the knot.
My trying to untangle was admirable,
My idea to cut it apart was ridiculous.
How many angel arm-hairs would snap?
I absolutely adore the knot.
High School Hearts
I want to go back in time
enroll at your high school
and walk the halls you walk.
I want to look for you
after chemistry because I
know you have it fifth period,
before you head over to European
History, your quick pace giving me
a reason to quicken mine, hiding
behind textbooks.
I want to daydream about you
after school, knowing you
are watching movies, reading
books, racking up your
media-count as I blog
all the thoughts I want
you to read, I want to say
to you.
I want to drop my pencil
in the class we have together,
American Lit, so you finally
talk to me about the books
you’re reading, after
so many classes listening to you
outsmart the teacher. When we study
plays, I want the teacher
to ask me to read Eliza and you
Henry, our banter pre-written
by Shaw but with a My Fair Lady
ending.
I want you to secretly
want me, realizing this
one day while eating pineapple
Jell-O, then later waiting for me
in the curtains of the stage
as I sing my high school heart
out the third-ever song I wrote.
And when you finally had kissed me,
I want all the purple high school glittering
stars to fall and bounce off my chest,
a thousand times more than the way
I feel when you walk into the classroom
every day at 10:55 a.m.
Your husband got lost last night.
Your husband got lost last night.
He took a wrong turn
getting up from his desk
and fell into his laptop,
into the Microsoft word document
he had open.
The document was a poem.
He fell in and stumbled over its words.
His foot got stuck in a w
and he twisted his ankle.
He limped over the word
eradicate and passed out
on the line fold my time
like paper hearts. He got up,
fell off the line break
after the word birthday
and landed on mirth lay.
Holding onto the very edge
of the last word, garage,
the cursor blinking, threatening to delete,
he wondered what he could do
to get out and back into your arms.
He swung up over the e and rearranged
the letters from his poem into hOw do I
geT bac into yo r armS?
He had enough letters left over
to spell I am so soRry aBout last year
and I lo e yoU.
Melanie Was Made to Spin
But once there was a world with people like us in it except the world was a mobile instead of a water sphere and people were hanging from its many wires and strings, dowels and rods. When a child was born her parents would let down their joy and pride on the end of string tied their dowel of marriage. Some children grew up, swinging in the breeze, into adults who swung in the wind until their string came undone, whether or not they were ready. Some couldn’t stop their string from spinning. Some cut their own string with their teeth.
Melanie was the spinning kind. Melanie found only one man to grab her hands and stop her spinning. Jack. Inevitably, Jack let go of Melanie. Jack cut his own string with his teeth. Melanie continued spinning constant dizzy spinning, this way then that way, growing frustrated. Melanie noticed a dark blue book lowering into her life by a string. Melanie read the book cover to cover and understood. Melanie climbed half of the way up her little string on this big mobile and ran out of strength and fell to spinning. Every day Melanie did this. Higher and higher every day. Melanie reached her knot one day. One day she saw her maker’s careful work on her little string on this big mobile. Melanie was made to spin. Melanie was angry. Her tears fell and hung from little strings off this big mobile. Melanie was made to spin.
Days swung.
Melanie spun. She spread arms in the wind, brought them in to speed her spin, sprawled out limbs to slow it, everyone beamed as she drew them in. Melanie got grace, grace lowered down on a little string and she grabbed it by the wide brim and put it on. Melanie’s fan club swung in the breeze beaming in the sun. Melanie let her fingers curl and her head fall back and saw Grandma above in the family mobile, hanging by a thread, so graceful like an ancient dangling doll. She smiled down proud as the sunlight beaming past her head. She smiled falling and Melanie watched white dress flutter, Grandma spinning down to heaven, realized Grandma spun too, back when her knot was still tied, how she never noticed how all she will always remember is a beaming ancient smile.
Coma Dream
You took a blow to the head
in the dust storm of a century
and had to dream a highway back Home.
You met a pregnant pair
of sisters, a rock-of-ages
bluegrass man named
Jack Hammer the Rambling Prophet,
took the wrong way
for miles, threw stars
at the rippling moon,
put on the costume
of enemies, and watched
a lion burn into a monument,
a bat fly with all sense of sight.
You saw with all sense of flight
the devil invade your grandpa’s eyes.
You sang it away in your dreams!
In those open-bed trains you sang
and the trees fell their blossoms for you.
Homecoming dream.
Home is where you wander, home.
The Home of the Rising Sun is where
your sun sets. Your stormed-story
does not end with waking. Go,
but don’t expect never to come back.
Don’t expect home to be home.
Open your eyes. Let Home
rattle your knees, ripple your skin.
Throw off the sweaty sheets and
wander in storm patterns
and poppy fields.
She’s the Fighting
“And finally I just wanna say, the reason you could see “The Devil Wears Prada” is because it was playing on every theatre screen across America … And, if you can’t see … all these great movies that I’ve just seen, … then you have to go down to your theater manager and ask him “why?” ‘Cause its amazing how much you can get if you quietly, clearly and authoritatively demand it!”
-Meryl Streep, Golden Globes Acceptance Speech
Streep demanded us
to demand it
from the movie theatre,
which only gives explicit sex,
shootings, and mindtwists
that Explicit Christians
simply cannot accept.
Meryl Streep.
She’s the arch-angel
She’s the Michael
She’s the fighting.
dig
dig.
dig!
She slapped my face
in her newest movie,
the mom-flick,
the tear-jerker,
and I turned my head,
hands in my leather vest
pockets, no one can reach
me through violins, through
prada-clad political drama.
She tried to get hip, said:
You. Dig. you dig?
And she’s right. So
I demand
Real love gone good,
genuine Dreams gone
real, magical Plotlines
falling us in love with
transforming characters,
leaving us in tears
of joy, leaving us
in a theatre satiated
after its explicit, orgasmic
beam of projection
shot something so good
GOOD, at some lucky
LUCKY small audience.
I demand it for every town
in America.
Meryl Streep: Playing the roles
in the System, then demanding
the System art-making money
instead of money-making
movies, demand NO
MORE SEQUELS
to movies that were never
even worth the popcorn,
demand films too big
for the big screen, too
small for a big hooplah,
too good to have been acted, directed,
edited: must have been God-breathed,
a continuation of the Bible,
we watch, touched by His angels.
Real arch-angels
winning the Michael
at the Fighting Awards
for Demanding us to Dig.
To Heath
Your on-screen performance haunts us
not only because of your acting, your
intelligent mind, and your presence on film.
You, in your bleached-white face
and your deep-set eyes look like you’ve returned
to us from the vat of Death; It should have kept
you but you came back smiling, it was only
a joke. Please come back to womanize
Hollywood, to flirt with theater, to glisten
the big screen that sings the tone
of our generations, carries our minds
beyond ourselves, catches us crying
in the theater, and transports us away
from death and everything equally silly.
