The Sky Tonight
The sky tonight
is no reason to believe
an absence of flesh
is cause for arson,
the night already alight
with so many fireflies
we can see
ourselves clearly
in the darkness—
ask yourself again
if it’s worthwhile
to walk the streets
of twenty years ago
as if the stars
had never been there
in the first place
but you hadn’t noticed
To Our Once Dear Friends
The menace of a messenger
carrying news from the portrait
of our brilliant scars
is as childless
as the dying tanager
within our polestar,
a palliation we mask
to maintain a resemblance
to those poets whose thicket
of bodies & thought
echo with stories
broken by couplets & lines
that waltz through their towns
as if we forgot
the dismembered art
laid to rest in the pines—
the vines of our passion
through a wood of despair
remember a time we believed
our friends were there
reading our poems
& not tossing them aside
to drown themselves
in pesticide
or write the same letter
over & over
about part time work
& a busy Passover
indifferent that God’s house
was already in foreclosure—
how we thought they’d see
the burdens we carried
within the jasmine
in our satchels
tucked between our knees
or that our glass frames
had grown too fragile & wary
to hold ourselves together
for another journey
through the prairie—
to our once dear friends
for whom we’d have died,
witnesseth what has become
of our exquisite, sorry lives
Most Of Us Riot
Most of us riot
with supreme brightness
but when people nod
& motion to an esplanade
we have no idea
what’s going on,
we’ve never known
true friendship,
we are bad at basketball
& we are obsessed
with the statistics
of our failures,
so we eat the toes
of our porcelain dolls
& declare our faith
to our cats
by ingesting aerosols,
the lanterns in the river
blacken with ash
as principals scream at us
when our children
can’t use chopsticks
to pick up dice
& run to the cafeteria
to cry under a table
because the gym teachers
of the world believe
they have no rights
