The Thick

I am heavy in my own salt,
My feet high arched.
In the morning I will plant mustard.
I will take prisoners
Or flying lessons
Depending on the air.
For now I hear the refrigerator running
Like robotic crickets chirping.
I see your face in street lights
And parked cars.
I am a softer angry,
Willing not to let go so hard.
Willing even to overlook the spelling error
In that Dear John.
The air is thinning.
I miss your hair in the sink.

Do Not Fold

I saw them naked
I washed thier faces
I closed thier eyes
Crossed their arms
To make them peaceful

I watched your loved ones pass
But I never thought to cry
No one makes it out alive

But I watched you sleep
I built myself into the shape of you in the dark
Do not close your eyes
Do not cross your arms
I am not ready to miss you

Excerpt

I sat there that night alone like I had sat in so many other places on as many a clear night. Everyone I asked had other plans, other people or other lives. It was just me, a stale camp chair that reeked like vomit and a tall bag of pine boughs I had pruned off a dying shrub in the front yard. I had eaten too much again and felt swollen but I was ravenous still. That was in the days when I could never get full of enough of anything to quiet the longing for more. Only memories seemed safe enough to count on then.
The pine boughs were too fresh and lent more smoke to the air than flame to the fire but I couldn’t seem to mind. It was the day after June ended in a heat wave. July brought in a welcomed breeze that lifted the sweet, sticky smell of sap into the air and down through my lungs. It was like smoking Christmas in July.
I was not supposed to be alone that night. Though I had known for some time that company did nothing to insure against my loneliness, I had hoped for a distraction. Without it my mind went to where it always went. My mother had been dead for almost ten years by then but I still held silent séances in the checkout lines of grocery stores praying she’d show me the sign of a balanced meal. It wasn’t the holiday that made me miss my mother. The ache was a constant vibration in me. It was small things like sea shells, Coke cans or the color mauve that struck the fork at the core of me.
Since the 1930’s people have been burying cherished things in the ground and digging them up decades later to see if they still cherish them. My mother was my time capsule. Her ashes are buried beneath a stone in her hometown. In those days, I still held onto the idea that I could dig them up, water them and rediscover my childhood, my innocence, my sense of safety, and my mother.
That night I wept into my hands for the child in my heart, for my mother’s sisters, for my unborn niece and her father. Long after the pine boughs ran out and the flames sputtered down to still coals, I sat and blamed the smoke for the salt on my cheeks and wailed the low, long broken cries of a man with a hole in his soul.

(from Passing: Memoire of a Nobody)

Trickle Cell

"It gonna come," he say.
"Gonna trickle down," they say.
They say
They Say
But nothin good ever come this way.

"You got a nigga in the office now,"
"You ain't gotta hold your breath,"
Says the man with the fatter cow.
But when it trickles down there ain't nothin left.

"We been been poor so long it's in our cells,"
Says the beggar with his cup
On the day the market fell
But the riches trickled up.

Logic That Tries Too Hard

It's twenty past ten on a Saturday and I am waiting for the doorbell to ring. I have not asked for any visitors but I always expect that she will come. She will knock on the door and I will answer. My face will go pale and my eyes will lean left. She will say, "I am here," and I will reply, "I have always wanted to meet you." It never happens on Saturdays. It never happens over decaf.
I wonder if there is a place in the netherworld where the "almost saints" go. Where they sit chewing on coffee stirrers while the synapses of their brains cuss at them. There must be so many of them that stood at their bedside with knees that wouldn't bend. I bet they know the lonliness that keeps the poet up at night. I bet they have waited for the call.
I wonder if saints are real. Or if the wind just blows when the pressure changes. I have sat beside the leaves of trees with ears too intent to listen. There are languages the mind refuses. I play at being in love but I haven't the mind for it. Logic tries too hard and speaks too quickly. I have not spirit that rustles or listens. I have the saintliness of a nomad who stands still.
I wonder what she will look like. If she will have fine hair like my mother did. If she will be angular. How big her hands will be compared to mine. I can never hear her voice this way. I have never been that patient. Fifteen minutes have passed and no one has called on me.

How my Mom Met Jesus

I can hear the shuffle of cars on the highway behind our house. Nights have found themselves alone at my mercy more often than not these past few months. Spring is like that to the system of a man. It makes time harder to waste when there is so much of it. So I listen. I listen to the humming of the refrigerator, people changing lanes, the fizz in my water. I listen and I tire. But I don’t sleep because my dreams are all too warm and I wake up soaked with them. It is this that gives me such an angry point of view. It is this that makes me call for my mother.
I read a story once about a woman whose baby was still born. She brought the baby to the Buddha and begged him to bring the child back to life. He told her that he could only breathe life into the baby if the woman could bring him a grain of rice from a house that had seen no loss. So, this woman lugs her dead baby from village to village knocking on doors and calling for those who have never lost anyone. It takes time for her to realize that no one escapes the pain of grief, that death is our common exit, no one gets out alive. She gives up her search, buries her baby and takes up with the Buddha.
My mother died almost ten years ago and I still knock on doors. Cars pass. My mouth runs dry. My feet ache. I don’t sleep. So I knock on doors. I know the Buddha’s answer is right. I know the Buddha like others know Jesus and when I think of what the Buddha is asking me to give up, I understand better why Jesus was killed the way he was.

One Nights

The bus station in Burlington is nothing more than a dinged up trailer and seven hard, white plastic chairs. There is only one bus that comes this early so we skip the small talk. I thunk my bags down and nod instead. He knows what I mean and nods back: travelers' code.

Back in the Super 8 room Tess is scrambling her pants over her thighs. I am smiling against my pillow. My drool is kissing my cheek. I am grossly out of practice. Tess is not. The morning after "what the fuck did we just do" aways feels the same. In the dining room Tess's waffle gets stuck to the iron. She is poking at it. Swearing. Tess is awkward. I am nostalgic.

The first leg of the trip is a cross cut through the forest. The view whips by seamlessly, peaceful: dangerous. Vermont is made from the kind of dirt you enjoy having stuck in your nails: meticulously ragged, recycled, whole grain. Vermont is a great big lesbian.

I have never bedded anyone who smelled like roasting turkey. I have never been kissed with Stove Top stuffing. I have never been in love. I have never been home.

I picture Tess back at her dorm stammering an explanation of friendly benefits. My guts drop. Are we accountable? Does what happened at Super 8 stay at Super 8?

No one back home knows that I am on my way back to them today. I have no working phone. I can't warn them. I don't want to. Adulthood sits in the same seat as rebelliousness. They look alike. I am constantly confused.

The bus stops in Northampton. There is a girl there whose hair is short and sticking up. I wonder how Tess got here so quickly. But, it isn't Tess. I am relieved but guilty for it. I distract myself with long tugs on my shoelaces. They are frayed at the end. I have abused them.

The bus stops in Springfield. I am almost home. There is a twenty minute layover. I get a medium iced mocha from Dunkin Donuts. I don't drink medium iced mochas. I drink small hazelnut regulars at room temperature. I don't want to get back on the bus. I want to call Tess to ask her to meet me back at the Super 8.

I don't. I get back on the bus. I sit in my seat. I drink my medium iced mocha.

Connecticut is dimmer than Vermont. The highways are traced with wooden fences. I have always seen them. I have never known who put them there. The sign on the side of the highway says that Suffield is ten miles away. Tess is from Suffield but she is still back in Burlington. The girl that isn't Tess is here. My medium iced mocha is here. Tess is not. What happens in Super 8 Motel stays in Super 8 Motel.

The bus station in Hartford looks the same as it did when I left it. The same people are having the same conversations. Anxiety like this is maniacal, scorching. Points from opposite ends meet where they shouldn't. Time over laps. In dissociative episodes almost anything is possible. Maybe I never left. Even time travelers have wives.

Tess has eyelashes that won't quit. They go on for days. There are three moles on her left cheek above her dimples. I have named them. Her entire mouth is smooth. It tastes metallic, bullet proof. I want her to be unborn. Leave it to the broken to hate all they desire.

My feet hit the pavement before I realize that I have even stood up. The ground in Hartford is harder than in Burlington. Everything in Hartford is harder than Burlington, even the pigeons.

angular glory

beneath the layers of fat on our chest
is us in all our angular glory
but no one ever reaches that far.

we can never say a word.
there is no fruit in the throat,
no base to our moans

we love god and trees and all these
but what is to love
in that which needs to be torn down?

and when we are remade,
who will remember the school girl
and will we ever want them to?

Speechless

Dear Dad,









Your Son,
Toben

Mother In the kitchen

your hands are wet from doing the dishes
your face is stained with steam
from potatoes rolling over each other
in that pot you got for Christmas
the year I slipped on the floor
and cut my fingers on the glass
that i was not supposed to be
drinking out of in the first place
you never wear an apron and
all the oven mitts have holes in them
you look your prettiest here
even when the food is over cooked
and the presentation is underdone
it is the best way I know to remember you
now that you never come this way
now that you're not just my mother

my ancestors' wheat feild

I think of farms, of yellow wheat fields.
Where there are no clocks watching,
just a natural rhythm.
Who am I not to sit on the lashes of God?
If there is a heaven it cannot be
softer on the eyes than all this.
If I ever had a mother,
surely she is music by now.

She took a spoonful of medicine to make the sugar go down
I stood there helpless and watched her drown
And when I decided to finally jump in
I couldn't sink fast enough so I had to swim

It seems like yesterday I heard the last word she said.
I wasn't always thirty. She wasn't always dead