Fuck ‘Em in the Heart

This woman is passionately explaining

how times have changed, how you can’t

just take a goat or a pony out

on loan from the Como zoo anymore,

how you can’t just

walk out of the warehouse district

freight elevator to case a fresh blanket

of white, glimmering snow

with a may or may not be drug dealer

named Tony and the pony.  

She is passionate with expression,

her graying hair frazzled, she is an actor,

she paces the stage, the audience affected,

stories flying out into the night, around the room,

shaking bones, rattling souls, painting a picture

of places that comprise ghost town -

the town of places that no longer exist,

the town of pop-up exes, cacophonies of dead

punk music (they all drive subarus now),

the town of storms, unearthed trees, cement

that smooths over cracks, cement that paves

over truth, SA hot dogs in a bag, and memories of Minneapolis,

a Minneapolis that will only be seen in a shovel

full of words exhumed for a night,

for those who wear black.

A Run Around the Lake

On a run around the lake this morning,

someone had put words on the trunks

of trees so that when I passed

the first, the tree spoke to me

and said, “The”,

the second tree spoke

in a different voice and said, “mind”.  

As I ran I listened to the trees

eagerly.  “Baffled” one tree shouted.  

“Employed,” another tree goaded.  

By the time I arrived to where I started

the poem had formed

like the first snow on the naked,

icy surface of a lake.  Afterwards,

i walked out to the middle of the lake

and lay down.  I looked up

at a gray blanket of clouds

as the trees repeated the poem

in its entirety from every side of the lake.  

I am no longer afraid of falling

through the ice, I thought.  

And then I fell through the ice.

As the Moon Falls Apart

after years of systemic 

discrimination
by haves, whites, who pretend 
that conditions are improving
even though
just under the surface
of the moon, of the skin,
rotting, stinking, acrid and rank
injustice percolates and bubbles
through the cracks,

mountains must move,
seas must drain,
clouds must solidify
before change will occur.

These feats seem impossible,
these feats seem ephemeral ,
these feats seem like dreams and fantasies,
spotlighted by the public eye
of social media while,

on the streets, black
and white is every day,
in the chokehold of police,
in the paranoid rear view
mirrors, in the corrupt system of
law, fragmented, divided, decomposing
the humanity
of moon.

When You Don’t Know Someone it’s Easier to Fantasize About Them or Murder Them

because we grow up surrounded by images 

and stories in books, movies, television,

because we compare our self with
celebrities and impoverished third world
countries and friends and family,

because we fall in love with beautiful strangers
and imagine dating, fighting, loving, sex, the wedding,
and growing old together before we even know
each other’s name,

(because we hunt for truth and protest and hate
injustice and discrimination and racism and stand up
to fight but go home to sleep at night
in a warm bed, in a heated house, in the winter,
in a safety bubble of middle class),

because we buy gas from the pump
and don’t have to go inside to pay anymore
and even when we do, we hand our money to a face
that could easily be a robot and therefore isn’t human,
doesn’t have kids or bills or stories or hunger or tears
or grief from the loss of a cousin who died after killing
a teenage combatant in Afghanistan once upon a time,

because we laugh at each other’s pain
just like we laughed at Wile E. Coyote
when we were kids or the Tasmanian Devil,
or our brothers and sisters when they fell
off the zip line, face planted in the sandbox at the park,

because we, our self, don’t get listened to,
just liked, don’t get a forum to have our voices heard,
don’t hear the voices of others among the muddled
discourse of American drudgery, slop, diluted outlets
and media sources, that are, one after the other,
a suction cup on the tentacle of politics,
a mash of knots, struggle, futile striving and unrequited
attempts to change systemic oppression that…,

because we all wear masks,
that we create as children, that we don’t know are masks,
that we confuse with our own identity, that are us now,
that we project to the public eye, masks made of skin,
bone, cartilage, blood, saliva, and suddenly
what is real anymore? Who cares if we shoot
each other, who cares if this man gets away
with murder, who cares if this woman spends
the rest of her life in 7x7 prison cell
for allegedly choking her son when
she wasn’t even in the same house when he died,
we don’t know them,
who cares if,

because we don’t live in a world
where we can’t see this dimension of story
that transcends race, that turns my neighbor,
who speaks only Somali, into human,
a human, another human, another one,
just like Michael Brown, just like Eric Garner,
just like me and you and us, we, who can see
beyond the face, who can see stories of people
that are dragged around like tails, tails of tales,
stories of inhumanity that need to be told,
that have to be told by humans if
change is ever going to occur
under the thumb of this militaristic, dehumanizing
social structure
under which we live every day.

What if the Moon Never Sets

and keeps orbiting 

this lonely heart
of an Earth, 
this self-loathing Earth
of a planet,
this great orb lost
in the black of space,

and keeps showing up
in the middle of blue sky
on cold winter days
as fingertips freeze
to steering wheels
on the way to work,

under veil of wispy clouds
a day too late for Halloween
spooks but spooky still,
hunched over abandoned
factories and farmhouses
littered across Heartland,

in between two trunks
of trees, or two skyscrapers,
peering through like an eye
exam, barely making out
blurry human faces
that once were clear
and distinguishable?

Well I guess there
never would be a moon
set then. No, never
a moon set at all.

When the Beacons Burn Out

In ten to fifteen years the beacons will burn out, 

and then there will be no more light
for us to follow through the storm.

The storm that systematically beats down
on the backs of weary travelers
hoping to make it without holes in the hull,

the storm where flashing eyes of G-d
are sparse and inconsistent,
the storm that paints day black

as night, that settles fog onto seamless horizon,
that terrifies the unscientific
and casts doubt upon the reasonable.

We will pretend we’re not, but we will be lost
at every moment, at every turn,
when the beacons burn out.

Those beacons that led us
even though they were lost too.
Those beacons that we took for granted

in the cast of blue sky, in the pale
of white cloud marquee.
Those beacons that clipped the waves

and held tight while the moon pulled
and pushed the blanket sea.
Those beacons that will burn out

but whose shell will remain
like an unlit lighthouse on the rocks
of memory for my brother and I to recall

as we become dying beacons in our old age.

Alone by the Fire

A mirror just above the television, 

next to the wood stove,
in the living room,
another year passed,
an old movie on the screen,
a bedtime tale,
and burning embers.

This is the house of my roots:
the rooms echo of Talking Heads
and Graceland,
the roof, full of cigarettes
from my teenage years,
the kitchen contains the ghost
of a mudroom with a well pump.

Alone by the fire, I wonder
what the unborn children will ask
like I ask how they figured out
how long to cook two chickens
in the oven before the internet.

A mirror just above the television
shows me exactly who I am now
but I don’t look.
I just watch this old movie,
not even really seeing
with my eyes anymore.