My father was an enormous man
Who believed kindness and lack of size
Were nothing more than sissified
Signs of weakness. Narrow-minded,
His eyes were the worst kind
Of jury — deliberate, distant, hard.
No one could outshout him
Or make bigger fists. The few
Who tried got taken for bad,
Beat down, their bodies slammed.
I wanted to be just like him:
Big man, man of the house, king.
was it so I could
never say
across a courtroom
that man, the one
standing there
was it so you could
walk among us again
after
as if you had shed
the body that did
those things
was it because you could
not bear
my pupils so huge
they would have swallowed you
my whites like flayed kneecaps
when you pressed down
to singe them back
into my skull they were softer
than you expected
you had thought them
diamond hard
weapons turned on you
Jesus, I want my sins back.
My prattle, pride, and private prices —
climbing, clinching, clocking —
I might loan you a few for the evening,
so you don’ t show up at your own crucifixion
naked of all purpose.
But for God’ s sake, don’ t spill any
redemption on them! They’ re my
signature looks. Body by Envy.
Make up & wardrobe provided by Avarice. Lord,
if you take away my inordinate cravings,
what the hell’ s left? Do you know
I don't usually talk to strangers, but it is four o'clock and I can't get a cab. I need a cab because I have packages, but it's four o'clock and all the cabs are off duty. They are making a shift change. At the bus stop I say, It's hard to get a cab now. The woman standing next to me glances over without turning her head. She faces the street where cab after cab drives by with its light off. She says, as if to anyone, It's hard to live now. I don't respond. Hers is an Operation Iraqi Freedom answer.
A father tells his son the thing he regrets most about his life is the amount of time he has spent worrying about it.
Worry 1. A dog’ s action of biting and shaking an animal so as to injure or kill it, spec., a hound’ s worrying of its quarry; an instance of this. 2. A state or feeling of mental unease or anxiety regarding or arising from one’ s cares or responsibilities, uncertainty about the future, fear of failure, etc.; anxious concern, anxiety. Also, an instance or cause of this.
I only recognized your hair: short,
neatly combed. Our mother
would’ ve been proud.
In the Sonoran desert
your body became a slaughter-
house where faith and want were stunned,
hung upside down, gutted. We
were taught
to bring roses, to aim for the bush. Remember?
You tried to pork
a girl’ s armpit. In Border Patrol
jargon, the word
....................... hello hello hello ... Weiwei ... where have you been? ... I see you in dreams ... bleeding ... in the darkness of the sun ... 81 spots in the flame ... each a nightmare one cannot wake up from ... Weiwei ... the last son ... you told me as we said goodbye ... your last night on the Lower East Side ... 未未 ... the last child of your Mother and Father ... born in the labor camp ... exiled from Beijing to the far desert ... watching your Father clean public latrines for singing the truth
So that the truant boy may go steady with the State,
So that in his spine a memory of wings
Will make his shoulders tense & bend
Like a thing already flown
When the bracelets of another school of love
Are fastened to his wrists,
Make a law that doesn’ t have to wait
Long until someone comes along to break it.
Schliemann is outside, digging. He’ s not
not calling a spade a spade.
The stadium where the Greeks once played
used to stand on this very spot.
Each night, Penelope, operating
in mythical time, unspools the light
gray orb Schliemann has just unearthed. Come daylight,
her hands will restitch it. The suitors sigh, waiting.
And each night I’ d watch as my hero curled
himself round home plate, as if he were going
to bat for me. And I’ d hold my breath, knowing
a strong enough shot might be heard round the world.
The skin of sleep
is thin. It will not hold.
Its contents stumble out.
A nub of bone
lodged in earth
at the bottom of a pit.
A stranger staring
down from the rim.
The skin of sleep is thin.
It cannot hold.
Lost names spill out.
Children engraved
in ash. A sea of blood.
Only you, tenderness,
stillborn, beneath
the skin of sleep.
