Poems

The Useful Anger I’ve been working on the useful angle for a while now,The redirection of the heat and learning howTo point the energy at the work instead of the consume,The useful anger and the way it fills the room.The useful anger is the instrument I’ve been misusing,The useful anger is the force I’ve been […]

The War Ended But I Didn’t The thing is over, everybody moved along,the thing is done and I’m still singing the songthat belonged to a situation that has passed.The thing is done and I’m still holding fastto the fury that was valid in its time,to the fury running over the same damn rhymethat I’ve been

The Truth That Changes Shape The morning sun invades the room like a forensic lightExposing every jagged lie I nurtured through the nightI gaze upon the woman sleeping naked in my bedHer skin is just a map of all the hollow words I saidI thought I built a temple out of logic and controlBut I

The Universe Forgets the Punchline The universe told a joke at the moment of the first bright flash,and then expanded outward at the speed of all the ash,and the joke echoed through the fourteen billion years of space,but somewhere around the Cretaceous the universe forgot the place.It knew it was a good one, it knew

The Thing That Looked Like Anger I broke a chair on a Thursday evening in the spring,Not the kind of dramatic furniture-throwing — just a thingThat gave way when I put my fist through the seat becauseThe alternative was putting my fist through a wall, and the causeOf restraint in that direction was purely structural:The

Anger is a bad messenger with a good message sometimes Anger is a bad messenger running the right linesInto the room before the polite versionWould have gotten there, before the conversionOf the true thing into the acceptableBefore the filing down of the detectableEdge of the actual into the smoothBefore the thing was sanded into grooveThe

The Stranger at the Funeral A man I didn’t recognize–the unplaceableand unaccounted fact of the strangerat the funeral, the vernacularof the unknown, the quiet dangerof the unplaced in the contextof the intimate, who is this manin my father’s circle, the complexmap of the life and the scanof the gathering for his locationin the uncharted map

The Stranger in the Hospital Gown I did not recognize myself in the reflection of the IV bag,the face that looked back from the television had the tagof someone I had met before in photographs and mirrors,but the body in the gown was wearing all my errorsof the recent months, the weight I lost, the

The Stranger Who Was Kind At the service there was a man I did not knowwho had driven four hours because of a debt he saidthat my father had done him something in 1981and he had never properly paid the debthe told me the story in the parking lot afterwardin the specific way that strangers

The Stranger You Know She walked into the room like she already owned it,black dress, bare feet, eyes that said she’d been waiting,I’d seen her three times and we’d barely said a wordbut the way she looked at me was loud and unambiguous.Said you want to come over and I said yes beforethe sentence finished,