i'm · here

The shadows of the trees click 

keeping time on the highway.

Nothing ever on the radio.

Different city

same afternoon sun

sparkling heavy

like costume jewelry.

Poetry

what a dirty river.

But I will bathe in it

bathe here

in the place 

where my hair 

became gold horns

where the enamel of my teeth

found honey and became that.

Where the camels carried

the swaths of silk

under the bored 

and naked sun, the desert 

only something to cross,

jewelers cave,

the genie in a tea cup

erupting in fire and soot

riding a black tree of smoke

his fingers holding 

his toes to the sky

giggling out wishes.

50 pounds of poems

in the trunk of a car

I do not own.

Tonight I will sleep

on a couch

near a beach.

A bay of water 

north of the warm Atlantic.

The lighthouse in me

is sometimes a lighthouse.

Sometimes a ball of gasoline.

Sometimes a sack 

of quarters sometimes

a sack of pennies

sometimes a sack.

Flapping in the wind

of an open car

or on the floor

or waiting to be 

filled and emptied

again and again.

Mountains poured

all over the carpet.

Peter was in the other room with his thing in a girl.

Oscar was passed out on the piano, spilling his brain.

There was a bright chandelier in the big room hanging 

like a painting made of light and everyone at the party 

was passing their molecules between paper cups, trying 

to walk through walls with words but not doing it very well 

I had on a pair of old school Reeboks I had found–the Pump.

Like the ones that came out in middle school I’d never owned. 

I looked fresh, my pockets full of mercury, Jupiter was retrograde 

in the house of crestfallen that my hair was crisper than his was,

sharper than his was, my little songs tuned in the key of swag

but my future was just as precariously perched in the present

as everyone else in the house. All our firecrackers were busy

eyeing everybody else’s fireworks up wondering if our sparks 

were colorful enough, our bang as loud as others, our fuses 

the longest or the shortest, some -est to stand out in a crowd.

When Peter walked out of the bedroom just off of the kitchen

I was in the library, reading Moby Dick upside down, hoping 

nobody would notice I had forgotten my shoelaces at home.

Peter had blood coming out of his nose and he was laughing 

like a coyote too skinny to catch a rabbit. The girl he was with–

her name was Maria–she had on gold shoes. I knew the caves 

that both of them were living inside of, had cut my name deep

into the same walls. All of us here had. In the dark we kept on 

trying to light something that we could call fire, call warmth,

but we were too scared by what its light might reveal.

I love my moons better than myself

I love my Dr John better than  myself

the girls dressed in jeans and teeth better than myself

the sunlight pouring through the cracks of the afternoon

falling between the slats

I love the music more than myself

love the leaves twisting their thin bodies in an orange chorus

the tongue of my wife’s heart

the electric fence of its touch

how it puts the palms of God burning over my eyes

I see the shadows of gunslingers 

the ghost towns they come from

the silhouettes of what they walked out of

lit in reverse inside my skin

I love the New Orleans

the ancient and current New Orleans

the rag of its musical barbershop

the bloody pole on the wall

painting its hot and sharp notes across

I love my belly opened 

and quivering a bowl of raccoons 

plotting under the crescent and full plate

how the bugle of my heart announces a flag rising

how the clarinet is a river of darkness that floats out of my love’s fingers

how even in the cold wind of the Providence 

the poem pulls itself out of my skeleton

how thin the skin is

how thin the coat

how tin of sound it rings under the clatter the battle the barrage of fingerbone

o Louis

O Louis

your dixie rose

burning in the red light

the coal wiped lips of your mother lost under the bridge

how I love the blanket of your grin

the forest of your black skin

this I love more than myself

the astronomy of the Lord

the observatory in faces

how the stranger is a telescope into some new definition of self

how the closet door slammed and then opened

can tumble forth constellations

tripping over their shins to lust over us

to claim our memories as their lungs

I love the science the biology of the brain 

the atoms of the soul

the mountainous mountain 

rising out of the land to get a better look at its brother sea

and the sun the glorious sun punching its armless fists 

out of the complacent clouds

to find my hands 

Walking past the manor

a light in a third floor dormer window on

with music coming out of it

singing out to find me below

like a serenade in reverse

a slight draw over the violin strings

like a thin knife across the metal hands of the moon

a slow pull of the bucket out of the well

with some other collection of strings

perhaps a harp

perhaps a cello

perhaps another violin

being plucked 

like drops of gold 

moving out of water

I wish either my wife was on this plane with me

or we were cutting a rug on earth somewhere

or finding some street and some corner of wind 

to push our bicycles faster and further 

into the warm afternoon

How close the land can look 

when one can see so much of it

I wonder how many flagpoles set top to tip

would fit between the earth and this flight

A hundred thousand? I suppose it depends 

on how tall each one is 

Each one a hundred feet then

100,000 flags all flapping in the wind

That sound made silent is the soundtrack

of my body with yours

These bodies we are in

for a short short while

a bowl of soup

tomatoes on a vine

before dropping

and returning

somewhere

to be going

someplace else.

How like a pot of tea

open for the steam

to carry itself out

and bring with it

pieces of the leaves.

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