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The Destructive Nature of Construction
Cummings and Basquiat could not birth me;
I came pounding out of the steel womb
of two dimensions, of talents hoarded
in the coin purse made by the flaps in my skin.
My lineage could not be Neruda;
my mother did not coddle a paintbrush
in the hand that was not rocking me.
I am suckling on my own fingers,
nibbling at my own neck, the bones snapping
as i reach, impossibly, for that point
where the scent of skin meets
the sweeping texture of ephemeral hair.
I leave that hair all over this place;
you know it by the villain red of it.
You know that I whisper poems in your ears
and stroke your soft, precious arms,
leaving smudges of colored oil on your skin.
Your eyes are losing the film of bestial youth
and you see that these are dismantled
teenage strings of sorrow and centrality
that pound upon the drum of your ear.
You look at your arms and say,
a child could have made that.
I am a child.
I am weeping, cursing, infantile;
I am ignorant, backwards, blind;
I am lost, a serpent, a corpsy shell;
I am trying so hard to make light and language
that I am burning the black gold
of what could have been.
A Century Ago, People Had Shelves For Their Jackhammers
The angry jackhammers that carve
lines on the veins of white leaves--
where do they exist now?
I see people walking around in clothes
and I don't know them,
and therefore believe that
they do not lie awake in the lonely dark
crying at that corner where ceiling meets wall;
somewhere in that crevice slithers
the person they love, the family they lost.
Somewhere in between shots six and seven
is the sense of self, the consciousness.
There is a sticky guilt mixed in with the beer
that rushes down the tube of the bong,
and each breath they exhale that night
stinks of what they once did wrong,
so many nights ago.
These people, they think about existence
as they grind cereal on molars,
they are aware how their tongues move
inside their own mouths, along the teeth.
They think about death when they see
beautiful trees out by the bus lane.
They think about life when they set their
alarm clocks, listening to the beep of each minute.
I do not know where they put these jackhammers,
and these sliding, silent ghosts.
I think I would find them somewhere stashed
in the CD case
under the bed
pouring out of the closet.