Teens

Not an optimist. I lie awake at night and say the name
of everyone on the block and for three blocks …

An antique spacesuit with a skeleton inside it.

For many years, it has circled the earth.

___

Sometimes…

The sprayed cockroach doesn’t know
it’s already dead.
                           It’ll scratch around 
behind the refrigerator 
                                    while…

If I don’t taste the complicated waves—
if I only see the rolling,
only hear the roiling up
or smell those…

The sky is a sickly
smell, even a crow
cannot fly and will
land to nestle
and breed in
twigs and plastics…

Deltaic deposits deepen hues—
not green, but that green,
not blue, but that blue—

In the small museum,
a…

Remember how you didn’t fall yesterday
even though you thought you would?
Life can be like that all the…

It’s an hour before noon, and Amtrak train no. 56 rips a path
through the rain outside Baltimore,
its …

Of all the species
of eight creeping things

I burst my pink peppercorn
of DNA and became a bird,
like you…

First, I took off my jacket,
then my shirt, pants,
shoes, underwear, then

my skin, then my muscles,
then…

While I waited
fall came on.
I sat in one
bright interstice
and nothing
filled, it was
already at the brim…

Wild for once, we drenched and drugged and flung
our sunstarved bodies into brunching and clubbing and…

Here, my one raucous prayer
coaxed from this poor drum,

my double heart, under a beat-up slat
of divine…

Sleep with your face visible so the young will remember you are with them.
You want the others to see…

in which kobe seeks a mentor to train him

Praying for a fiery muse, he was
answered by the clang of hammers…

Some mid days, blank moments in loud
gatherings when I fall from the conversations’
sweetening threads…

Under the billowing heat of the white
tarpaulin church tent, my mother lowered
her worshipping hands and…

Who art in Cali.
Programmer by trade.
Thy start-up come,
thy will become
an FTSE 500.
Give us this day our…