On the People Who Write By

You alone over there
With the ink on your hands
And your eyes like a pop
Listen to me soft:
I want to speak
Your thoughts
I want to practice
Your pain so I can
Feel your drops
And when I have you
Summed in my bones
Maybe we can get two
Cheers
And talk how it felt
To be alone

Green

There is a green in Connecticut
which I have seen
only on occasions
in Brooklyn.

The grass for once,
little patches of easy
movement between the farms
of pavement built by registers and the
hopes of generations of trys
and streetlights and the
horns of the rushed but

the roof for seconds,
at 6:21
when the sun has just begun
over a line of jagged
buildings and your drunk hair
waving between my
breakfast burrito thoughts,
on stage, a project I just started
then it is green
in Brooklyn.

On my 26th birthday I go back
to Connecticut and we are kids
again, pounding and leaping ultimate
frisbee watch out
for that fucking telephone
pole!
Are my shoes the goals?
Are your pants out of bounds?
There is the grass again
right under our soles
and I'm inspired like I haven't been
in Brooklyn when I'm
searching for those stamped
urns of earth at rest between
the urban farms.

When I move soon
to another Brooklyn
I'll be hoping hard but I have no cash
register with no plans
to ever own one.
I need a window with a little more light
I need a place to go outside
where I can see a few more trees
write a few more lines
and think about how the green in Connecticut isn't for me
because all I had to do
to "succeed" was to ask real nice.

I'm still looking

for a home in Brooklyn where
to succeed you have to describe
how the hoards like flocks of rooks
muck shit wailing
the homeless the poor the oppressed
the failures like a firehose and the relentless drive
to settle
my own impossible definitions of myself today
and my self tomorrow
the fucking and walking hard and running to be
on time for somebody else
's dream
the unbelievable stairs and stars
they are all green to me.

Same Differents

Today the sun
is a whistle
the pavement
a drum
the laundry however
still needs to be done

American Eagle

When I bought these fucking jeans
I swear they fit my ass
Now I'm on the cliff and this jagged air
is screaming on my damn it
denim like some twisted letter knife
and the perspective is collapsing down
hard and fast
collecting in some chaos chasm shit at the bottom
of my guts
nailing me with nightmares
like nothing never will
they're nailing me with nightmares
like nothing never will

Pencils

Your pencils are boring
holes through the pockets
of my rags
A final version of myself
the smoke after the drag

Afterschool

I am in the classrom
Below me
four feet high
stands a selection
for the future
of the world

Henry is an artist
always crying
He sometimes sits
and glooms and sometimes
sobs as he considers the implications of his situations
but Henry is always able to shake it off
ready to try again
for there is always
another beginning

It is children wisdom

But there is a growth
-a tilt away
when raffish Willa
comes with something to confide
and then decides to my adult dismay
that she’s gotta keep it confidential:

I’ll tell you in a million years

she says

If we’re buried
In the same graveyard,
I’ll whisper it to you.

And later I caught myself
preaching to Max about how hate begets hate
unless there is a choice
an effort to rise above
and I thought of how true it was
that I was definitely improvising
making shit up
and I was believing myself
believing in eternities

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