is vs. ought (ode to Streethawk)

There really ought to be a law
there ought to be an army
to keep me close to what I love,
guns raised 'til I've given enough
and not this petty stuff
but the real goods that I hoard
all the lovely lines I've stored
at the bottom of my body.

There really ought to be a room
there ought to hospital wing somewhere
where they can open up my brain
and pull out each refrain,
no love is free from pain,
but I'm too scared to sing unless
there's something to get off my chest
or there's really no one there.

There really ought to be an end
there ought to be a grand fateful finale
when each human, animal and plant
gets an award and million dollar grant
to tackle whatever task's at hand,
but our lives' work goes undone,
and even after all the fun
we just end up sleeping in the alley.

Ephmeralove

Last night I found love
memorizing cell structure
in the fourth floor of the library.
She pointed out the blazing skyline
from the window,
I pulled out the books in my bags,
most of them biographies of her

Love's hair is just past shoulder length,
her cheeks flushed and freckled.
We laughed over the madness of poets and scientists
who scream secrets (their discoveries)
to the world.

She refused to move from her seat
so I moved on, the smell of lilac in my mind.
She’s still there now, smiling at strangers
and scribbling notes in the sidelines of her books

waiting for one ignorant of her name,
who isn’t looking to excavate themselves
for her. The last thing love wants is more
of what she’s got.

untitled

The fit
walk with perfect posture,
spindly gazelle legs, dolphin laughs,
firm flesh bared to the world.

The intelligent
walk with eyes up
assessing architectural integrity,
minds floating on a whole other level.

The beautiful
glide just above the porous concrete
with gaunt concentration and stern smiles.
My god how they dazzle!

The tyrants
slink around in shadows
taking notes and leave detonating devices
under flower shops and fountains.

I walk with you,
my little poem,
pleading for the color of your hair,
your hometown, your name at least,
but you won't give away a thing.

Homemade Rockets

On the baseball diamond
behind Granite Valley Elementary School
my father is bent down on both knees
fixing the red rubber wire
to the potassium nitrate engine.

Such force packed into a grey roll
of cardboard. My father starts
the countdown as he runs back
to first base pillow where I lie
laughing, my finger poised above

the red detonation button.
We reach Zero.
The rocket screams away from the earth
and I stand up, as the yellow decals
I’d carefully placed on the nose and fins

disappear into the freedom of inertia.
My father hoots and howls, dancing around
on one foot. There is a moment
I barely catch when the ship is absolutely
still (the back of the box called it
apogee).

Then it somersaults backwards,
gravity pulls open the parachute.
But I could have sworn
that this time we almost broke free,
almost kept on going

right out of the ballpark, out of
this town, and into the weightless
grandeur of outer space.

Everyone wants something

We were all born
with one vital part
ripped out of us.

It hurts,
sure,
but it gives us
a direction to walk in.

literal

I will never write you
into a poem,
no matter how many
times I try

to curl
your yellow tresses
into wheat bending
in whispers of wind

to draw
your lips with wine
onto the brick walls
of infant cities

to translate
your laugh from memory
into a thousand bursting
bubbles collecting
on a kitchen floor

to turn the night
you ran sobbing,
hysterical and hyperventilating
from the car

down the side of the highway,
your stomach splitting with despair
your heart betrayed and bleeding
your hand over your mouth

into a moment of my own
great vulnerability,
my fall into the earthquake
confusion of fading love.

I will be here typing
in my room, coffee
overflowing, and you
will go on singing
across the city
unconscious of my efforts
to write you down.

Sunrise

We’re almost at the end.
I don’t want that to sound fatalistic or scary,
certainly not morbid or suicidal,
it’s just a fact
one my mind insists on revisiting.

Since we began
we’ve been hurtling towards the end,
closer now than we’ve ever been and
I see it rising like the spiked beams of morning.

Don’t panic,
there’s nothing we can do
about it anyhow.
You can’t seem to understand
that this is not a bad thing,
in fact there will be no more
bad things,

no more stubbed toes
or awkward goodbyes
no more hunger
or loneliness
no more forms and forms and forms

of course there will also be
no more tip-toeing across summer fields
or chance encounters
no more seasoned pork chops and Sunday omelets
or time to think
no more flourish in your signature.

But right now we have all that.
Don’t be angry
you knew this was coming
from the start.

immemorial

Confused again by the young
desire towards, not poverty,
but desperation maybe.

The romance of locking
myself in the house,
fusing the windows shut
with cellophane and typing
until I run out of words.

Ashamed that I wish
to be remembered
but that's not it.

Not the vanity of worth
not the admiration of fame
not the power of power

Just the search
perhaps for truth,
but it doesn't matter what you call it.
We must walk, always,
down that path
knowing that it leads nowhere.

Glimpses of truth.
That's the only thing that stays
and acts as landmarks
for the lost
regardless of the time
in which they wander.

I don't remember writing the poem below.
I don't remember posting the poem below.

This isn't a comment on anything,
or a metapoem on the origins of art
or anything.

I'm just a little worried

Election Day

Will I trust you?
Will I ever trust you again?

I don't think so.
We let you hold the diamond,
the most precious jewel that meant
so much more to us than
its monetary worth

and you spit on it
and rubbed it on your
autumn sweater

and you shrugged because
this was just another jewel
and the world is full of rocks
and anything will sparkle
if you hold it at the right angle.

You weren't listening closely
enough. The rock you disregarded
was singing the most beautiful song;
a song about longing and fear,
about control and letting go,
a song about the most rare instance - -
seeing those cracks in the sidewalk
and knowing when to step around them.

You just saw the space,
the hole, the hurt.

And maybe I blame you but it does no good.
Know that my vote counts only once.
It has been placed
with the most pure of heart.

Entropy

We argued back and forth for days
over who could get the credit
for creation.

It was her idea to make the stars shine
but it was my idea to give them seven points.
She thought that burning gas would be the best
fuel to feed the fire,
but I amended this, insisting that the stars
consume themselves infernally
and eternally
or at least until they die.

She wanted to make them immortal.
I thought that was cruel.

We agreed on placing them in a grid formation,
a giant checkerboard hatched across the sky.
With rulers and double sided tape
we pressed the white dots onto the navy tarp,
simple, mathematical,
a framework for the earth.

But when we splayed the tarp over our heads,
waved it out like a beach towel,
the stars slid and fell
shooting off in a thousand different directions.

Powerless, I yelled and shook my fists at the dark.
She took my arm and pulled me down to sit
beside her on the hill. Pointing up at the stars,
random, disheveled,
she saw a dog, with a least two too many heads,
a throne, upright and captive,
a bull lowering its horns to the horizon.

“Look at what you’ve done,” she whispered in my ear,
her cheek touching mine.

I still didn’t see anything more than spilt milk
but I squeezed her hand
and put my head in her lap.

Thought and then Forgotten

Enough! I am finished with this world
of quiet writing that I’ve built and stored away
in the bottom of my sock drawer.
A world where men and women shuffle everywhere,
where flowers smell just like stones,
and love is a disease that causes bodily aches
best cured by hiding in bed.

That world is flooding. Townspeople scream
but secretly delight in this untimely end.
The promises they made to themselves
can be forgotten.

Enough! It is high time I start picking fights
with strangers over they way they spell
gawd, not because I know but because
neither do they.

There are too many answers
scratched into stone
and not enough questions.
Formulate! Formulate! Formulate!
Dictate your masterpiece
to the masses
and then contradict yourself
on the walk home.

We must ice skate through existence;
moving forward only by pushing
in opposing directions.

Maybe.

Enough!
The world will always wake up
before you.
You can add numbers to the clock
but the hands will just sprint faster.
When you finally fall in love
it will be with a French philosopher
from the fifteenth century.
Tomorrow, when you are finally perfect
in every way it still won’t be
enough.