Early Morning Alchemy

With a twist of my wrist

I will start that water flowing.

The sink is a magical river.

 

It will come splashing in the carafe

and though my eyes aren’t opened yet

but I know the correct volume by feel.

 

The machine drinks the water all the way up

With a quiet Gurgle gurgle swallow.

it settles in the tank.

 

I Cross the kitchen again,

 it’s extra-long in the early-morning:

I reach the fridge.  Open the top door.

 

There is the blast of cold from the freezer;

grounds are not where they are supposed to be.

I swear to myself in the dark empty morning.

Before uncovering them behind the broccoli.

 

Return to the empty table before the machine.

My silver scoop is a holy object.

Filling the filter is a sacred act.

 

I depress the button.

Red light behind it fills my eyeballs

in the predawn dusk.

 

Listen? Did you hear that.

Grumblings, snorts, almost.

A whisky-swoosh sound,

the first drips, down, down, down.

They are not just water anymore.

 

Maybe this day will be worth it after all.

The mug is a chalice in my hand?

How it did it even get there?

I pour it full before it the coffee done.

Somebody will complain, later

about the drops that burned on the plate below.

 

Just a splash of cream,

then the sugar atop:

The house is so silent it makes a sound like radio station static

the granules penetrate the liquid’s surface tension.

 

I sip it,

almost too-hot, perfect.

and I am transformed.

On Administering The Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment Standards to The Behaviorally Disordered Classroom, South High School

I watch them.These are my boys

and they are the dregs,

the bottom of the barrel,

those who would sooner be forgotten.

 

Truly, it can be a challenge

to find something redeeming…

To call them rough around the edges

would be to ignore the fact

that they are rough all the way through.

 

If we call them a mite lacking in refinement,

so too, should we call oil bleeding out of the ground and sticking to our shoes.

 

But they are my boys

and I watch them.

Pencils desperately bubbling, erasing, bubbling, erasing, bubbling erasing

until it does not matter

whether they are right or wrong

because the machines will not possibly discriminate

between erasures and markings, by the time they are through.

 

I can see by their wild eyes

how all my instructions

how all their work

is leaking out the deadly-sharp tips

of the yellow number 2 pencils.

 

I look over at the other student in my class.

He is not officially enrolled. And he is invisible.

He was expelled from the MacArthur School for forms of fair of Accountabality.

My secret student is not a gang member, an almost-grown crack baby, or a juvenile deliqnuent.

He is an anthromoprhism, a personification.

His problems are legion.

 

I can only hope that he has a brother, a former classmate, somebody, anybody

will graduate the school he’s been expelled from

And I can only pray

that then this will all make sense.

 

 

A Transfiguration

 

A transfiguration 

She felt the happenings deep inside of her;

Not a change but something deeper.

 

She felt lighter in a way that no scale would recognize

A sort-of evaporation.

She was turning away from who she was

into only

everyone’s idea of who she was.

 

If you could only see

the way her eyes would light up with the hope of that completion

You’d feel sad with me.

 

But atleast we would know.

No one else would know.

They would all still see her feel her touch her taste her

and no one had ever heard her, anyway, so what difference would there be?

 

She would go on, fulfilling everyone’s expectations

forever.

Perhaps it is a mercy that there’d be nothing left of herself

to know that she should have had so much more.

 

 

A taste of Heaven

Not me:

at those harps

sporting a stylish halo

walking on cotton ball clouds.

 

Not me beyond conflict,

Receiving everything I want

even before I ask for it:

Not in my heaven.

 

I used to only know what it wasn’t.

But the gift

of the last

few weeks

has been a taste of what it will be.

 

I was nearly wrung dry:

I hope you will permit me to torture that metaphor

and clarify:

the towel

of my soul

was just

barely

damp.

 

In moments of peace

there was solace

in the fact

that I’d done some good.

 

But I needed peace

to find that peace,

a thorny dilemna.

And then there was the ocean

not waiting for me

except that it was

waiting for me.

 

What deep hidden part of us

does the white noise-rhythm of the waves

awaken? Why does the salt

carried on the breeze

remind me who I am?

 

And in the middle

of the rest and the peace

we held a war council

to recover one of our own:

 

But even this brings a deeper peace

than the surface battles we fight:

I am reminded of who is by my side.

 

And the capping moment

that next time

A legacy reawakened

through its own force of will?

 

How could you know

that my own grandmother

stored up her change

for me way back then?

 

A handful of metal and lint and miscelania…

through the bank’s alchemy metamorphed…

and then changed again:

 

Whatever I wanted,

stuff simultaneously

worthless and priceless…

And so my heart tells me it will be like this

In the Great Then:

 

Rest and battle, trials and the continuance of all the good things…

But there is something more!

I will not play a harp but I will hear it

maybe we will hear it

 

maybe this is the Great Difference:

Our acts, all of them, will be the

voices, the strings, the harmony.

It turns out there is a truth hiding in that simple-scary vision of Heaven

 

We will hear it in some new way:

Earthly music will turn out to be only a castrated echo

of this thing our actions themselves will proclaim:

 

Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb Holy is the Lamb. 

 

 

The Neo-Emo-Goths

Where did they come from…

this army

of adolescent

androgyns

 

Where did they come from…

with the zippered hoodies

that look like the skin

of neon zebra.

 

Where did they come from…

Probably

they identify

themselves with a name I’m not cool enough to know, let alone speak.

I think of them as neo-emo-goths.

 

Where did they come from…

Wherever it was

there must have been no sun.

They are so pale.

And they maybe played the paino.

With those long boney white fingers.

 

Where did they come from…

With these elven-waif features

and collar length hair

too apathetic for naturally-occuring color or texture

 

Where did they come from…

It must have been a place

where men only

were allowed product

for fingernails and eyes, lips and cheeks.

It must have been a place

with a surplus

of Nightmare Before Christmas

paraphenelia.

 

Where did they come from…

was it an underground dwelling

with roots poking through the low roof

where they were lined up

bony hip jabbing bony hip

where they were in a catatonia

unblinking

unmoving

until some

unspoken signal

triggered the Great Emergence

of the Gothic Groundhog Patrol?

 

Where did they come from…

Countless suburban closets

where they hung

upside down on pull-up bars

in silence

for years

patiently waiting

for the whole rap chic thing

to run its course?

 

Where did they come from…

perhaps they arrived from

some faerie world

on magical ships

with long sails unfurled…

Were those shopping malls deemed

as good a beachhead as any?

 

Wherever they came from

There is this cross generational connection

It only last a moment.

 

(S)he is buying a stack

of C.D.s that evoke my childhood:

Oingo Boing

Morrisey The Cure

Madness, Pixies– of course the Pixies

and Sinead

 

The purchased is bagged

(s)he turns to face me and ruins the moment

with a Billy Idol whiplash smile

I realize this great confusion:

Is this schmaltz or for real

Is this camp or a home in the 80’s…

When you live

in a world fortified with irony

The sarcasm soon becomes

the very air that you breathe.

I, this crowd

I, this crowd

Whose legion is not demons

But ghosts

Ghosts made in my mind

They’ve traveled foreward in time.

 

I, this crowd.

I carry the weights

I am a pathchworl thing.

A frankenstien thing.

A summation:

 

I, this crowd.

Who I am

Is not who I was

And who I was

Is foreverwithme

 

I, this crowd

The boysmenchildren-crowd

Whisperwhisperwhisper.

 

I, this crowd

Except it is like this

Whisperwhisper whisper

Quiet-loud, so quiet-loud

Sometimes it drowns out

Screams   Screams     Screams

 

I, this crowd

Except it is like this:

Screams   Screams     Screams  Screams   Screams     Screams

 

 

I this crowd

Not me,

It is not me that screams

(except that it is They are me now.)

They were once everyone else.

But when you speak-yell-beg-scream

Screams  Screams   Screams     Screams

They keep going, echos made alive

 

I, this crowd.

The screams kept going echoes made alive and grew screamers.

 

And I, this crowd

This crowd Screams  Screams   Screams     Screams whisper

I can not hear myself

There is no peace there is know peace

I can not hear myself

 

I, this crowd

Lost and alone and the scream and the whisper (whisper whisper whisper)

I have this dream

That I will walk away

 

I will leave this crowd

To whisper, to scream

Among themselves

A Deer in the Headlights

It’s so easy to hear that story
about how everything is ruined.
When you’re not in the middle of this
when you’re status-quo copesetic
it’s an academic exercise
at most
an explanation
for why everything isn’t quite right
even when everything is right

But nobody ever told me
that some nights this full house would be also-empty
that this full life would be also-empty
that my life would demand from me not just answers but actions
except that I’d have no answers let alone actions

They never told me that I might long for the cold comfort of resignation
Right now I’d take comfort in any temperature it wants to come in.
They never warned me
that sometimes
you can’t shrug your shoulders and say
“oh well I gave it all I have.”

I gave it all I have…
I did give it all I have.
It wasn’t enough.
It isn’t enough.
Where is my “oh well?”

I’m afraid.
That I’d sell my soul.
For that.

A small, easy thing

It is no small, easy thing…
this small, easy thing:

To eat unhurredly,
to take small, unassuming bites
to finish them and swallow and pause

just pause.

Wisdom is slow.
Truth speaks in this quiet voice.

There is greatness
in just this:
cool slices of turkey
nestled in a buttery croissant

Knowing that last bite
left me only a little thirsty:
a half-mouthfull of water
from a cup unneding of ice cubes
is enough.

A bag full of Crickets

Was the cruelty accidental? 

To those little things it does not matter.

Some minimum wage slave hung it up here

in front of the lizard tanks.

 

The plodding grey thing at least looks happy.

Its tongue moves like it has a life of it’s own…

Waving a menacing hello

through the glass

 

through the clear plastic.

I wonder how long they’ve been locked in this tableau,

A crowd contemplating their fate

A lizard contemplated his supper…

 

It seems to have been a while.

Things are mostly now a stale mate.

The yellow gray creature stands here in the corner

looking both bored and eager.

 

Dozens of little bugs have resigned themselves.

They’ve settled into a gross pile of wings eyes legs shells

except for this one alone, away,

Legs moving legs moving legs moving

 

finding purchase impossibly in the smooth plastic

He runs like he were actually putting space between himself

and his predator.

I want to be that cricket.