old worries,
stiff and still at night with an open stomach,
belly up to the gnawing emotions of doubt.
is he won't we should i can we?
a spine straight
on a cold mattress,
wind winding around the wound:
bared flesh, pulsing, the navel to breast incision
that means i am lying awake here without you.

and so the midwestern ache sets in again,
the ceaseless desire for Else.
i have seen enough of the world now to know:
there is soft commonality,
Else discordant urban chaos.
there are mighty chasms of humanity, social barriers
too bold to be broken,
too old to dispel,
Else making peace and keeping pace.
there is atlanta, brash and american,
or chicago, which has never lost its iron ore.
there is boston, where the coffee is too dark,
and the busy sycophantic symphony of new york.
there is the quietude of raleigh
(where the word quietude might still be used),
or the silence of oklahoma city.
there is still sweet sunshine in ocala,
clouds that don't protect the skin.
Else flatlands, burnished with old thoughts,
clouds that bubble up on tuesday afternoons like parquet floors
and will not disperse until nine thunderclaps later.
Else cornfields and cowfields and
clawing a way through dozens of other applicants
to find true love.
Else solitude in an apartment full of noise:
Else learning to appreciate nearness.

restless leg syndrome

she says, i think i was born broken.
i think my hips are so wide that my pelvis curves inwards
to compensate,
i think my legs are so long that my knees curve inwards
to reduce height.
she says, i think i was born broken.

in listening to her recitativo i am struck
by the patterns, the pitch:
her voice moves up to the pain,
down to the physiological compensation.

she says, some nights i sleep on the couch
so i won't wake him with my movement.
my legs twitch i roll over sometimes i murmur and talk
and i keep my knees bent because they like to lock up

(as though knees, which have preferences,
prefer to be encased in metal,
opened with medicinal keys and kept curved
like all the parts of her body that are broken)

like disparate strings in a theory of discourse,
like silence or sex,
you and i clutch for company
while having nothing to compare it to.

what is it we own here?
no property, no intellectuality,
no time left to change the future unless
it's the entirety of time at our feet,
only waiting to be made useless.

i am a harsh drumbeat,
a crashing crunching desire to move forward,
to keep the feet in line.
your feet drag:
your spirit lags:
i am waiting, i am standing and waiting
and learning patience and becoming
steadily more wasted.

step one, build memories:
lake erie, a summer night grown cold with depth.
driving across the tidal basin at night, towards possibilities.
reunions in airports, tight hands, easy smiles.

step two, build future:
learning where to walk carefully and where to breathe easy.
finding new quirks, new frustrations.
having the same fight eight different months until we get it right.

step three, build habit:
i can only always come to you when sad, when lost.
i am growing in talent at interpreting few words, fewer thoughts.
i remember, i expect, i relearn your body every month.

and if i am becoming a shell,
if you remove the shrilling snare from my heartbeat,
if some days i feel that
we are too far apart to ever come together--
it is either a learning experience, or a great lack
of humanity and creation.

i need someone to write The Book.
The Book has a main character just like me,
who grew up just like me and thinks like me and works like me,
and her best friend is just like mine and she wonders
and worries about the same things i do.
if someone could just write The Book,
i'd know what to do about you,
i'd know what the write and how to say what i need to say,
i'd know how to satisfy my mother and pacify my father,
i'd know maybe i should never have headed down this path in the first place.

i need someone to write The Book,
and base everything off my life and write it till the end
and tell me what i need to know
to make the ending come out right.

i'm too scared
to accept that i might be wrong,
because who knows?
maybe i have been right all along
by seeing in you something
greater
than what anyone else will attribute.
i wish answers were available right now,
and that you and i
could just walk off into the future,
step by step and hand in hand.

in nine, ten months, we will have the same
brutal fight as last time;
and every five, six weeks, there will be the same
tiny mushroom cloud, and i will walk away hurt.

some mornings on the highway,
on my way to work on the wide anonymous roads,
i imagine what could be us:
i could trust you so fully my heart breaks,
i could love you so well the beat of my heart might explode.
we could have a beautiful home,
a beautiful well-ordered socialized existence,
with college degrees and plants on windowsills.
we could have children,
sweet little brown babies who tap on my belly
and giggle on your lap.

instead i wait for the next moment
when you will set my teeth on edge,
when my gums will rot out of my skull to escape
the nasty words that fill up my mind
and wait to gush out of my mouth.
in some ways,
i am lucky that you silence me
with how quick you are to stumble.

your anger is a bubble and i
am always waiting for it to burst.

because it doesn't matter who you are as long as you DREAM,
because if your life feels entirely built of styrofoam then you will be
inclined towards CHANGE,
you will be seeking something different from the trash in the streets,
plastic bags pressed against wire fences by angry winds.
because if you never got up and did anything then you would do NOTHING,
you would BE nothing, you would be wasted,
because if our children grow up to believe in sentence-long diatribes
against taxes, the government, big ideas they can't comprehend but pretend to hate,
we will have failed utterly.
because the fake things in the world glitter more brightly,
because in an airplane landing at night all of civilization is laid out pretty
in metric grids, just waiting to be touched,
but when you land burned-out bulbs break themselves on street corners
in the hands of angry gods.
because i believe in the sanctity of CHILDHOOD, the sanctity of
imaginative space where nothing can destroy you but yourself.
because i try to teach violent hands and tired minds
what literature is, what making art MEANS.
because the diamond in the rough
is rarely hewn by foreign hands, we are bound to find OURSELVES
in these dim, deep piles of ash.
because the greatest impetus you will ever have is your own ego,
because if you don't decide to do it then no one else will either,
because in a hundred years all there will be
is brown skin, dark eyes, hungry hearts and mouths,
the dirty urbanity that skins its knees daily on empty doorsteps.
you are my project, and my heart is too full up now
to stay here any longer,
but i am duty bound to come back to these streets
because what if no one else will say what i see?

In silence, erosion, a debt must be paid,
the salt of the earth must return
to the day my town fell, and my path was laid
between the remains that still burned.

A wife must obey without question or noise,
but a wife's cherished chore is the home:
evicted for sin, and God left just one choice
for me and my girls, not yet grown.

Lot hurries before us, not one glance behind,
as we run from the gates of the city;
he leaps like a goat, and we follow blind
towards deserts that grant us no pity.

The girls were caught up in the rush of the dawn,
and Lot was compelled by his prayers,
but I was aware of just what would be gone
as we fled into mountainous air.

So I turned around, just a look, just a glance,
a need to bid my home goodbye:
the home I had built more of choice than of chance,
the home Abraham did provide.

The sun shone down bright, and still does today,
though it shines on a much different scene;
my body is scattered from the place where it lay
and the winds have burnished me clean.