Midwestern

Conchita debemos to speak totalmente in English
cuando we go into Sears okayPor qué
Porque didn’ t you hear lo que pasóIt say
on the eleven o’ clock news anoche que two robbers
was caught in Sears and now this is the part
I’ m not completely segura que I got everything
porque channel 2 tiene tú sabes that big fat guy
that’ s hard to understand porque his nose sit on his lip
like a elefante pues the point es que the robbers the police say

He was just some coked-out,
crazed King w/crooked teeth
& a teardrop forever falling,
fading from his left eye, peddling
crack to passengers or crackheads
passing as passengers on a train
chugging from Chicago to Cicero,
from the Loop through K-Town:
Kedzie, Kostner, Kildare.

I was just a brown boy in a brown shirt,
head shaven w/fuzz on my chin,
staring at treetops & rooftops
seated in a pair of beige shorts:
a badge of possibility — a Bunny

As a boy I bicycled the block
w/a brown mop top falling
into a tail bleached blond,

gold-like under golden light,
like colors of Noble Knights
’ banging on corners, unconcerned

w/the colors I bore — a shorty
too small to war with, too brown
to be down for the block.

White Knights became brown
Kings still showing black & gold
on corners now crowned,

the block a branch branded
w/la corona graffitied on
garage doors by the pawns.

The sill plays a cruel joke — thrones me. Frames me
lording over lawn mower stripes — myself

in a shallow trench. In grass blades. Myself
persisting, despite a dickhead sun — me

in chlorophyll. Early, I find myself
swaying — me! in the black chokeberry, me!

in the rabbit’ s throat. Me, the rabbit. Me
dancing out pellets. Out-dancing myself —

my father’ s pellet gun, the hawk. The joke
is a bright belly full of dark hopping

along my father’ s garden & the joke
small, between wrapped talons, is the hawking

Two spiky-haired Russian cats hit kick flips
on a vert ramp. The camera pans to another

pocket of  the room where six kids rocking holey
T-shirts etch aerosol lines on warehouse walls

in words I cannot comprehend. All of this
happening in a time no older than your last

heartbeat. I’ ve been told the internet is
an unholy place — an endless intangible

stumbling ground of false deities
dogma and loneliness, sad as a pile of shit

in a world without flies. My loneliness exists
in every afterthought. Yesterday, I watched

This early the garden’ s bare
but people pay to walk it,

at plots of budless brush
stop, as if remembering,

and stoop to mouth the names —
araucaria

araucana, monkey
puzzle tree, something

Japanese — each particular
ridiculous to be.

As with this Jet Ski family
braiding the lake
with bigger and bigger shocks
until the one
car-sized one
cuts his engine
and, following him, for an instant
they all coast
through silences
of self-made
rain —

how much is required now
to carve,
out of the general
livable quiet,
independence?

Off rows of windshields
in the Amtrak lot
rain in sudden
clumps like jacks. Parked cars
with people in them
awaiting people they imagine
hurtling through suburbs
of silver woods
awaiting them. True
love needs interference,
a certain blizzard distance,
for the words to worm through.
Remember Iowa?
August storms that would self-spark
as if our fights could trip
the finest wire beneath the sidewalk.
And the sunlight, harder after.

By new names
and then no names
at all, their laws
will reach your land,

Lorine, to feed
on your much loved
marshy spaces
whose occasional faces

discern a stranger
from far off
but like to take
a break from well

or welding just
to talk. We can-
not extricate
a place from those

it’ s made of, the sounds
it makes. But now
from Blackhawk
Island to Madison

to Washington,
geologies
thin; more things
sound or work

As anyone
is apt to, you began as someone

else’ s symptom. As in
other beginnings: drawn lots, blood,
some dancing on the heads of pins

and inside needles’ eyes,
cellular revelry,

hopping
of microscopic

turnstiles. Lucky guest,
grist, leapt

long odds to spark
the tinder in the dark.

Then, the subcommittees met:
made merry in duplicate, triplicate

and so on, much of themselves, divided
and divined and concurred.
All sides insides, pre-ambulatory
perambulation meant: sure