"shelter" and other poems

shelter

train cuts the sleeping man
in two

flies swarm the
dying horse's mouth

its eyes

june
then july
and the green gives way
to dust

a woman i will never meet
writes to tell me that
i'm blind to beauty

another sweeps her front steps
and waits for the check
from her ex-husband that
will never arrive and
what exactly is the difference
between living and
survival?

who teaches the children
to hate?

don't tell me you've never stood
in the room of mirrors

don't tell me your god is
merciful

i've seen the cages and
the closets
where the bodies were found

i've been to
the hill of fifteen crosses

was given a shovel in
the middle of
a field in pennsylvania
and told to dig

was told i'd know
what i was looking for
when i found it

cared only that
my own children were
healthy and safe and sleeping
one hundred miles away

---

between pleasure and 45th

think of something easy
like sunlight

the soft edge of the sky
where it meets the ocean

the word christ and
the way it falls from your
lover's lips

hangs there for a second
in the pure white glare
of the afternoon
and then explodes

---

spontaneous untitled poem #2 in a series of 3

and do you believe that
every poem is about america?

not the big picture but
the specifics

a young girl's body found at
the edge of a desert

the mother chasing the oldest child
through the house

holding him underwater

and there are some who argue
that red is the color of death and
there are those who make
a case for black and
all i've seen for two weeks now
is the bottomless blue of dali's sky

all i've heard are stories of
someone's sister stolen from
her bedroom

of unemployed men
questioned and released while
my son sits quietly on the
front porch and plays with his trains

and the space between
the need for words and the
belief in them is a huge one and
i am always standing on
the other side

i am always in
the empty parking lots of
abandoned factories

i have both
substance and shadow

have both desires and
addictions

if i were an honest man
i would tell you that i no longer
bother making distinctions
between them

---

sweat, sorrow, despair

looking for words that will
peel back the sky

thinking of all the ways i
ever let my father down

of his friends and
how they laughed at him
after his death

how they drank to his memory
then raped their wives

lived in filthy apartments
over liquor stores and
barber shops

and it's been eight years now
and all i've done is
move twenty miles to the east

all i've done is given up
on answering the phone

and at some point
it doesn't ring anymore
and i don't stop to consider
whether or not i'm happy

i don't stop to consider
how easy it's become
to hurt the people i love

i don't stop

---

love poem, late in the season of loss

my wife and sons asleep
the day after the storm

the young girl's killer
sentenced to death
which is as close to victory
as any of us will come

the idea that
there are those who
truly deserve their fates

i need to think
about this some more