la ciudad

Beautiful island of second chances,
wet leaves on sidewalks and
sepia-toned storefronts.

You were discovered by the poets,
colonized by the merchants
and invaded by the priests who
came looking for the hand of God.

When you were young men fought for you,
for their right to conquer and own you.
With their long phallic swords and their blood
they came and they fought and they stole.

Beautiful island
I first read your books
in the summer of my crossing.

In glimpses, now and again,
a vision of your one true language.

morning commute

The whole thing is fraught with peril!
Distant with my book, leaning alone
against a door of the L train,
sometimes distracted by cute boys,
sometimes never noticing the mad
preachers with the hidden hands,
this is no land for the lost.
Bumping along, the car fills with humanity,
all of us perhaps busy with our busyness,
eye contact at a minimum,
the train is like a waiting room.
But then the stop, then detraining,
and the platform and the stairs.
The whole enterprise is fraught with peril!
Misjudge the flow of the crowd,
get shoved trackwards, backwards,
misjudge the stairs and get trampled
by ever-marching shoes and the rat-a-tat
of soaking wet umbrellas.

Don't drink the Kool-Aid!

When my ancient, crumbling regime
finally gets tumbled down,
brought down low by the boredom
and general fed-up-ness
of everyone around me,

it'd be nice to hope for
a warm, soft bed
and a forced exile
somewhere

but no, there's a fence post
planted by itself near the city gate
and there's a man out there
in the noonday sun
busy sharpening the point.

I know just where my head will be
someday.

Post it note (A Dream)

Criminal pop tunes, rushed
seatbelt paranoia. Midwest congestion.
I can't find the moonlight, too many highways
not enough stars.

Peach tree advocates, November
apologist. I've eaten days with nothing
but slumber and apathetic hangovers.

Autumn.

ohhhhfuck

Break glass in case of
emergency,

well, that's what it said

but of course there have been
false signs, false omens, before
and more might be on the way.

In any case it wasn't
the apocalypse
just a small uprising, a minor coup,
sweeping down the coastal valleys
and up the solid mountains

and what's called for now
is a broom for broken glass
and a redrawing of the maps.

and I slept through it all

Last night,

Millions of madmen died for love & were given
nothing but shallow graves. The women of my village burned
a man for obscene thoughts & no one thought anything of it. I
Wore a mask to sleep & only when i woke up did i realize I
had always been wearing a mask. My father rose &
it was deemed a miracle. A new deity was born, while another
one was massacred. The cycle continued & I wrote out the last
line of the longest poem ever written on a window that looked
out to a wall. My neighbor finally perfected his song but knows
that no one will hear it, suicide seems like routine. With my left hand
I lifted the ocean, with my right the desert. I waited & waited, divine miracles
cascaded off of the rooftops, in every apartment a rose. A father
slept in his empty child's bed in hopes of holding onto what little was left.
I wept & it went unnoticed.