Your Unwasted Summer

We watched the trees' shadows run from West to East
across the too-green, too-well trimmed lawn.
Trapped inside the air-conditioning,
wondering why rehab centers always have names that try to
hide the fact that they are rehab centers,
I would wait. I'd wait for you to
emerge triumphant from your room. Meal times
forced you out. But then your butterfly manners
and listening heart made us all
hate your fucking MCAT prep-book.
I used to imagine that, when you closed
your plain wooden door named “3”
you didn't open the book to study at all. You just kept
trying to lift the weight of it.
It would be placed firmly on the floor, and
you would bend down like a baseball catcher,
grasp the edges, and, in complete futility, heave
like everyone who pulled before Arthur,
as though God had reached down into Middle America with both hands,
grabbing you under each armpit with his enormous thumbs
and forefingers, pulling behind you as you strained in vain.
You'd try to get it up off the floor for two or three hundred hours
I mean minutes,
raise yourself up, wipe the sweat from your brow,
shrug, put it on the desk and come out
just in time for dinner.
I transparently feigned a hatred for MSU
just to keep you out of your cave and smiling for a bit longer.
But you would always retreat eventually, leaving me alone to stare down
the sterilized motivational posters, plastered against
the noxious baby blue wall paper, all illuminated by
the horrible buzzing fluorescent lights—underneath which
we used to drink the shitty, instant, decaf coffee from paper cups.
It was beautifully cliché, and I'm sure that was the point.
But you were a great rock, and you let it all
wash over you and recede like harmless surf.
And you were also the antirock, because
your smile leveled mountains,
then built them up inside of me;
you gave me weight.
I am a Giant Redwood,
and you chopped me down and made me look at my roots to
count all the powerful layers that make up my being.
You cleared out all my dead wood. You burnt down
everything that stole my chemistry. You buckled my seatbelt,
and told me everything would be OK, and I could be as big.
Then it killed you.
Not a death of allegory, but the kind with
autopsies and paperwork, prepackaged,
“we're so sorry your ____ is dead” Hallmark cards,
and endless reassurance that
“there was nothing more anyone could do,”
all set in motion by a series of
trembling phone calls to next of kin
that unravel out into a dream-catcher of grief,
crisscrossing the whole country.
All that's left now is a gravestone that
shouts in granite,
'we couldn't save you.'
Looking back, it feels like
I survived a car wreck in
six months of slow motion.
But I was in a different city,
so I didn't have to watch you be
jettisoned through the windshield
while my seatbelt engaged

Walt Whitman's Shirtsleeve

I am never buttoned.
My off-white cotton is too thick for cocktail parties,
and usually hangs in loose ruffles about his wrist.
But I am not a static portrait;
we are far too full to be a statue.
Rolled-up, I embrace the commanding curve of his bicep.
At full length, I kiss the supple curves of his lovers.
Pressed firmly at the small of her back,
caressing the cotton of her magenta dress,
we waltz endlessly to the cattle's low.
The olfactory impact of her lavender perfume might intoxicate,
were we not also bathed in this barn's dry scent of straw.
We dance out under weeping willows,
canopies of stars and wood.
Her violet fabric twirling billows
wider than I ever could.
But I too cannot be encompassed,
like da-Vinci's prostrate man.
An infinite undying fortress,
smaller than a grain of sand.
But those days now bygone fancy,
years that passed are half a score.
Now an age where all men can see
what the bayonet is for.
I hear them pray into the darkness,
what to do when friends 'come wraith?
Echoes back with frigid fullness,
guide thy hand with steadfast
indifference.
I heed their prayers.
Why fear the coming
metamorphosis?
Though the warp and weave in
tatters, I yearn not for
reattachment.
Now, I'm
serenaded everyday
with unbelievable
percussion.
Leave disenchantment to
dead poets and
the future.
I am brimming with rubies.
I embrace
the flood.

Minnesota Robins

Fiery red breasts
bulging with tenacity,
likely as any dragon's
to hide a torrent of flames.
Staring at the defiant patches of browned grass,
I'm certain they are responsible.
Some days I love their presence,
hopping on the lawn like
dancing flames freed of their candles.
But oftentimes I am shamed in their presence,
as their unflagging industry
fixes a stony, disapproving glare
on the inconstancy of
our once and future selves.

everything ineffable

I saw you
the other day,
but I was afraid
to announce
your presence.
I was afraid,
because I was
worried that
saying where I saw you would
betray everywhere I don't see you.

Everything makes me collapse,
but thank God that everything also
makes me bloom again.

I will defy you. Whoever the fuck you are.
I will resist you. I will embrace you.
You can't stop me; you can't contain me'
you can't encompass me, because nothing can,
but I embrace you. You are me. Think you aren't?
If I can't dive into your depths as easily
as I can into mine, then all is for naught.
But even the frost on my window has a purpose.
Labyrinthine nonsense coalesces into nothing.
But shows that the seemingly endless black
is really the depth of endless Being.
The love for which
is the nature of true virtue.


Probe what you think is nonsense; probe everything, lest it was time wasted here.

“nothing like having your thorax split open to make you feel bad”

I heard it from the 'barista' here,
but I don't like that word because
it makes me think of Starbucks.
This is not a Starbucks.
The oversized Christmas lights in the windows
are not a seasonal decoration.
The counter is cluttered with local artists' gaudy jewelery
and the business cards of everyone who ever asked.
The wide opening to the kitchen—much more than a door—
yawns unapologetically right behind the counter.
Everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle,
regular customers as comfortable as in their own living room,
mismatched furniture, including a bright orange couch with frayed armrests,
and every knick-knack with any kind of reference to coffee you can imagine.
Yes. Every one.
Everything exhales a wonderful fragrance of cliché and home,
swirling in concentric air-currents around the holy of holies,
the bathroom. A glass box in the sky, walls baby blue
with vaporous wisps of white twirling round.
There's even a bright green beanstalk growing out of the floor.
Everything perfect.
I close my eyes, fall through the floor
into God.

all those who came after

Sometimes I hurl them
into a great furnace,
flames lapping flesh
from bone like
popsicles in August.

Now and again
I am Vlad,
and they are my rats—
or disloyal subjects—
but usually rats.

Occasionally,
if I'm feeling pedestrian,
I simply knock them into the brick wall
on the opposite side of the street,
leaving a spiderweb of fractures.

But today, I just yawn,
and with only half-feigned indifference,
I ask about the weather,
coursework, and if
she likes the new apartment.

her orange shoes

seemed so utterly out of place
in the inescapable february gray.
caught helplessly
between the end of football season and
the advent of march madness,
punctuated by Hallmark's reminder
that, for at least one day,
the gift card industry can make
eight out of ten americans miserable,
the second page makes me shudder—
but also makes me
THANK GOD FOR THE CALENDAR.
it's square boxes confine it to only four rows of
waist-deep, slate-toned slush to trudge through.
i need the divisive power,
lest the evils ooze on into infinity.
i also need her orange shoes.
she can keep them, but
i need her to have them.
they weren't even crocs.

abiding

even after the third washing,
my hands still smell of
barbecue sauce.

the irremovable smell and
deep burgundy pollution
stuck under my fingernails

is not at all like original sin.
it's much closer to sweet baby ray's
than anything else.

it is certainly not akin to
anything that brutus
wiped from his hands to his toga.

it is far too savory to be
anything like the lingering,
astringent taste of shame.

no, it is just barbecue sauce.

the room of sun

The 'dining room,'
in the house where I grew up,
is mislabeled.
I always knew,
but the naming of things
seemed to me
the realm of grown-ups.

It was the room of cats,
squinting contentedly
as they bathed in the
commonplace splendor
of the mid-morning sun.

In fact, it was the room of sun;
the sliding glass doors
breathed in warmth and light—
like a child filling her lungs
before her journey to the bottom of the pool.

It was the room of the New York Times;
though it was Wednesday, the Sunday edition
still sprawled across the tablecloth,
the gloss of the magazine glistened
amid the pile of coarser grays and blacks.

It was the room of lazy mornings and coffee,
of slow reading and hope,
of life, love and of
everything that has ever
shone like the sun.

Of Profanity and Apple-Fruits

What more appropriate title
could I have found
for the first post
on this 'innocuous blog,'
which is a phrase that
seems oxymoronic, as
'innocuous blog' makes
me think of only
cancer and death.


But this is a blog of Gods and life. Of people and fruits; of poor punctuation and few worries; of beer and of record players; of baselines and of clouds; of cantatas and distortion; of gods and women; of God and dogs; of snow and of lightning- if it is not as much yours as it is mine it is nothing or next to nothing.