Life Choices

Quiz

Correct answers: c, d, d, b, b, a, b, a, a, c, b, b, b, c, b, d, b, d, c.
— If you scored 14-19, you’ re a well adjusted person, a home-owner, with and income of at least $50,000 a year.
— If you scored 8-13, you either rent or live with your parents, never exercise, and consume at least a 6-pack a day.
— if you scored 7 or less, you’ re in trouble with the FBI and/or the IRS, cut your own hair, and use public transit as your primary mode of transportation.

Gone Away Blues

Sirs, when you are in your last extremity,
When your admirals are drowning in the grass-green sea,
When your generals are preparing the total catastrophe —
I just want you to know how you can not count on me.

I have ridden to hounds through my ancestral halls,
I have picked the eternal crocus on the ultimate hill,
I have fallen through the window of the highest room,
But don’ t ask me to help you ’ cause I never will.

Something with a Lifespan

How many times
should I look at you and should
I change my life?
Monarch you make
your orange assent to death.
And how much dexterity
can you really teach me?
Does your courage
even map onto these
worldly obligations
to friends, my job, desire
for a little affection in the late
hours of the evening, etc.?

I can't put myself ever
in your head.

But I can lie
on your wing, with my left eye
letting my right dart forward
as you do.

Sonnet 10: I have sought Happiness, but it has been

I have sought Happiness, but it has been
A lovely rainbow, baffling all pursuit,
And tasted Pleasure, but it was a fruit
More fair of outward hue than sweet within.
Renouncing both, a flake in the ferment
Of battling hosts that conquer or recoil,
There only, chastened by fatigue and toil,
I knew what came the nearest to content.
For there at least my troubled flesh was free
From the gadfly Desire that plagued it so;
Discord and Strife were what I used to know,
Heartaches, deception, murderous jealousy;

Amening

Model prisoner or not, I won't.

Silver lash, hound's tooth,
meager sinful town's crook.

I am nervous again. I could kill
if you let me. But tonight, I'll be still
under this palm. Zeroed out,
the tea my toilet muck.

Licorice and almond
twisted beneath the sink,
I'm lovely again. Come on
with my dying.

Today the globe's underside
isn't pink, but rather,

I look ahead toward what
has happened.

By Subtraction

The wind shakes the chimes
into the siding, and the dog shakes too
though he doesn’ t wake you
as I carry you to the bedroom. Small mouth
sipping breath, you are fish-strange,
bejeweled in the dimness of the microwave’ s
nightlight. As I turn my back to the bulb
I make your form in my arms a dark weight
but you are no anchor. Together
we are sloops trailing a tiny wake in the carpet.
In the dark it’ s hard to navigate the furniture
so I count distance — five paces
from the tile to the sofa. From the sofa,

Choice

1.

some things, I knew,
were beyond choosing:

didu — grandmother — wilting
under cancer’ s terminal care.

mama — my uncle’ s — mysterious disappearance —
ventilator vibrating, severed
silently, in the hospital’ s unkempt dark.

an old friend’ s biting silence — unexplained —
promised loyalties melting for profit
abandoning long familial presences of trust.

The Silence

She took the spareribs out of the oven
and set them steaming on a plate
before leaving her apartment.
I didn't know how long to wait,
tore into cold meat when I decided

my mother wasn't coming back.

*

No one knew about the gun she kept
in her purse until the authorities
called — a.38 caliber pistol
with a pearl handle and a trigger
even she could easily pull —
her car still waiting to be towed
from a roadside ditch

when they arrived on the scene.

*

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