Sleep

Each night,
like into an envelope,
I slip into bed.

Each morning
I expect to wake
in a different mailbox.

But the walls are white,
the shades drawn
and the alarm yells
the same damn thing.

City & Death

Of course no one notices
except the family and neighbors.
The swirling subways run
and the floors pile higher
and higher in the sky
while in the midst of this hive
a small inversion of birth
occurs and no one notices.

March 26th, 2007

The old man looks miserable
in the sunshine.
He realizes the bugs have come back
from the winter
and the street is a river of cars,
current too fast to cross.
He stands all alone on the corner,
the sun beating down, bald without clouds,
and remembers his wife with a shiver.
The way that he felt when she sat next to him
and the spring is a terrible lover.
It comes like a drug and it leaves you undone.

So he rolls up his sleeves,
an old ex-marine and shoots a look
over his shoulder.
But the ghost just ain’t there
and he scrunches his nose.
Takes a step off the curb
and the whoosh of a car
almost blows him over.

So he sits and he cries
on the side of the sidewalk,
in the sun the tears dry,
no one stops to help,
they’ve all busied their lives.
And that’s how it ends,
an old man on the street
on the first day of spring.

On the Wall of Every Good American

is a painting of Jesus.
Whether above the bed of mother and father
or watching every meal in the kitchen.
Little Timmy glances at his face everyday
on the way out the door to school
and Mary Anne notices his eyes watching
her fingers run across the ivory piano keys.
In some paintings he’s white,
in others being crucified
while the Terminator echoes
through the five bedroom house.
He’s even hanging
from the rear view mirror of the Escalade,
a small Jesus watching
when we hit the Volkswagen
and Aunt Sarah hit her head on the dash.
Sometimes he is under the food,
peeking out from behind the forest
of broccoli or the wall of steak,
envious of a full belly.

And his eyes do not move
but in your head,
And his hair is not cut,
And his smile does not show
but in your head,
And his sins do not resolve
but from his wrists,
And his image does not fade
when you grow
as a child with him everyday,
And I suppose he could be Elvis
but for the music,
And I suppose this could be Graceland
but for the rapture.

Religious Irony

When I have a headache
it is in the temples.
I hold my hands over them,
a giant failing to brace earthquakes.

There must be some message
trying to be sent to god:
the ship is sinking;
do you think it’s a mayday?

“(Please) stop praying so hard,
I am trying to sleep”
I say, but the holy places
keep pounding keep pounding.

Who would want to feed
a religion bent on splitting
your brain in half,
disabling any work the next day.