b>the poem is

not always your friend, it is not

the roomie who holds back your hair

as you vomit your insides onto white

notebook paper, it prefers

to hold your head down

in the toilet that is your life

and flush repeatedly

it makes you tell the truth, possibly

wringing out horrible things

about your family

it mocks you

with the artifice of love

it exposes with deadly accuracy

the nature of your frailty

it climbs to places just out of reach, saying

you are not good enough to write me

you are a coward



and then, when you think this poem

has gone, it raises the blinds

and wakes you, begging

shut up and look, you idiot

look, just for a moment

at how beautiful we can become

july 4, 1996
on the fourth of july i see my mother

illuminated by the strobe-flash, sparkle

spray of cheap fireworks, in our yard

with her hair pulled back, she holds the fire

setting off class D cardboard explosions

with the tip of her cigarette

her face half-hidden by smoke and

night, i think that she is nothing at all

like those childhood photographs that

hang in my grandmother’s spare bedroom

she does not fade

she does not force a smile

she does not curl

against the glass

sitting on the front porch, i am

the good son, again, watching that older

female version of myself walk barefoot

across the burnt grass, the wheat

fields stretch out around us and my

mother launches plastic rockets that drop

delicate tissue parachutes,

flickering and dying out like a lifetime

of summer holidays all shot in one moment

i close my eyes and smell the 4th of july,

tugging at my thrift store sleeve


surviving the moment of impact
it’s like restaging a play, equal parts

rudnick and euripides, the protagonist

somewhere children grow up to be normal

returns to his childhood home, all wood paneling

and farm implements, and is confronted, literally, figuratively

somewhere people pay bills and don’t lose sleep over paying for

school pictures, 3 dollar lunches, antibiotics

by the reality of his childhood, embodied by figurines

and old trees, nothing less surreal than a movie set, a backdrop

somewhere a city pulses like an artery, full of heat

some created thing. he steals a cigarette

from his mother’s purse, retreating to the back porch

somewhere a boy dreams of kissing the football star, square on the

mouth

with only a tin pan of cat food and an eternity

of dumb, unmovable stars to stare at.



inside, the siblings sleep in their rooms, dreaming

of new cars and top 40 radio, the mother warms

somewhere kids are fucking on country roads, listening to heavy

metal, hiding beer in their glove boxes

the kitchen, turns on the oven, busy in the act

of making something out of nothing. he smokes

somewhere old classmates are making their parents happy,

enjoying a life full of sport utility vehicles and endless, beautiful

babies

on the porch, the house behind him a thing

perpetually burning, and suddenly he is 14, sneaking out

somewhere people are doing what they really want

with no place to go, imagining a thing bigger

than this dirt and one tree--a world that moves

somewhere there is something more faithful than television

and is knowable, a place not teetering

on the edge of collapse.



so, he comes back to this spot, pulled

by an innate need to fix things

somewhere people don’t secretly fantasize about death

that stay broken, to be the good son,

the good brother, the good person, again

somewhere religion isn’t a substitute for thinking

again and again, confident

in the knowledge that he cannot save them

somewhere people are being forgiven

from burning houses, tornadoes, divorces, propane bills

or the ceaselessness of struggle, the blow, the head-on

collision that has become their collective lives.



so, they wave from the house, the props are all left in place

as he drives down brown gravel to the spot

somewhere people leave and don’t look back

where dirt gives way to asphalt, highway

interstate--something far away from canyons of

somewhere someone isn’t compelled to make sense of it in a poem

red dirt and the violence of lifelong despair,

a place where he forgets about solution and resolution, his mind always

preoccupied by the unlimited possibilities of failure.

somewhere the world is not like this