Bad, bad

Your defense was the victim.

Always hurt and hurting more

Even when kicking me to bruises

It was only because I had made you hurt.

I made you cry in court, in mediation

The doorstep, the car, everywhere.

You were right, I was bad and had to be hurt.

You shouldn’t have loved me. Couldn’t have.

I was the weak one, always crying, sad.

You could not have loved me, should not have.

With three months of no job, I was lost to both of us.

I cried, or just sat there staring in emptiness

Too scared to leave the bed, the room, the house.

Scared of reminding you that you could do better.

Scared of being unwanted by you.

When you wanted to suicide yourself, I held you.

Now that I did not sleep for three days, you loathed me.

Without you the apartment howled, we hated me.

I could feel it pulse through me. Promising to only

Get through the day and then the pain could end.

Bad, bad, bad, I was bad

You were right, but please love me

After you left, I begged for your love.

And was told to go die quietly.

What? You were pregnant when you left me?

Why tell me you had to end it because no part of me

Should be allowed to grow in you? Not good enough to live.

I wasn’t good enough to live. Not even a lovely little bit of me.

I cried and then bled,

They locked me up to watch me cry all day

They drugged me to keep the blood inside me.

So, I did not cry for two hours.

Then I did not cry for two days.

I could leave by bed, my room, maybe my pain.

Pieces could be pushed back roughly together.

Still not deserving of life.

Jennifer

I thought I heard you scream last night as I lay here.

A voice fully grown up from when you left.

  No more the spindly armed, cellophane skinned creature afloat,

  taking your life from her life.

You had grown to where your thumb was as large as you when you left.

You had hurt your knee, and it bled redly against your pale, dirty skin.

     Or was it worse? Were you older, caught in the currents of a stream,

     dragged from sight, only a yell 'Daddy' to pull me in after you.

To now search the dark places downstream.

To save you from freezing waters and the fishes and the crabs.

But no, it was stronger, a scream of pain and fear.

You were grabbed on a street, dragged into the dark, beaten

as you screamed louder and louder, so I came running after you,

searching the night, low men to beat off, stinking filth to wipe from you,

to hold you safe once more, a child, my child.

No, the scream was louder, worse. It was of horror and pain.

You were suffering, you were crying, and it would not stop hurting.

You beat at the terrors in the night. Alone and crying you yelled at its voices, 

kicked its walls, broke its hands as they grabbed for you.

But it did not stop. You hurt and would not stop hurting.

The pain grew and you sobbed not “Daddy, Daddy.”

But “husband, lover, friend”.

I tried to find you that night.

Alone in the dark I searched for you,

to hold you from the fears. To pry the razor from your hand,

tie back in your precious blood, life of my love.

And you were not there.

I found you instead inches long, a lump of meat, torn.

I could not bury you nor watch you grow till we ran together, alive.

Yet, you cried still, not knowing why.

Then, blood of my blood, life of my love,

I dove into that stream as a blade cuts into flesh,

searching for the hidden parts until I found them.

And fast at first, then more slowly, so slowly,

Trying

I am my skin

my brain grows outside of my skull

my senses are exposed

I see the bugs crawl

about in the grass

feel the bite and brown rub

of dying under the green

these are them

these are them

pictures, thoughts, words

this is

this is

feet nervously bounce against each other

this is,

I'm here.

                      Block walls

Cold, barren painted concrete block walls, everywhere.

Windows that don't open but let the cold in.

Doors that only unlock to let food pass and doctors in.

No belts, no glass, no sharps, just pain.

In memory the beautiful moments,

a caress, a sigh, a whispered 'I love you'

They float as broken glass in the night.

Cold reflecting images.

They cut. They mutilate.

'til death do us part' the promise.

Warm dripping inside.

A cloying, sticky ooze that silences

the shivers in cold bones:

Warm healing.

The eyes look outward.

Drab sky beyond locked glass.

Frozen earth, dead leaves, square block buildings

 lifeless

There’s a string

There's a string of Christmas lights

around the construction of the new Physics lab.

Pretty, dainty against gray concrete,

red steel, and faded men beneath a sweatshirt sky,

dripping sullenly over a campus

spring green and real under the damp sky

and hurrying brightly rain clad students.

A flag flies over the steel stick building

 waiting for its flesh.

Behind rises Hill Center, flying antennas.

Somewhere I was working in that picture,

sweat drenched t-shirt under a safety yellow plastic jacket.

Squishy gloves protecting pale soaked dead-worm hands

And the pretty lights were not pretty, just illuminating.

Allowing me to see concrete still warm from the pour

 the littered beer bottles among the piss in the corners

and my thoughts somehow afloat among the sawdust

and plastic scraps on the roof.

AIPU

Cold, barren, painted concrete block walls.

Windows that don' t open but let the cold in.

Doors that only unlock to let food pass and doctors in.

No belts, no glass, no sharps

Just your pain.

Memories carry beautiful moments,

a caress, a sigh, a whisper of love.

floating as broken glass in the night.

Cold reflecting images.

They cut. They mutilate.

'til death do us part' A promise.

Warm dripping hurt inside.

A cloying ooze that silences the shivers in cold bones:

Your Warm healing. The eyes look outward.

Senseless sky beyond locked glass.

Frozen earth, dead leaves, square cinder buildings

lifeless

Albert

The molecules, he said

I don’t want to hurt them.

They say don't step on me.

The carpet can scream and die,

Can’t you hear it?

The peas say don't eat me.

I can’t. God said that I should take everyone's hurt on me.

I should take their pain. nobody should hurt,

He said so.

The molecules don't want me to breathe.

The room hurts, the molecules say don't hurt me.

And Albert, tell me about your kids?

I can’t help them now. I’m not good.

You love them, they need you.

I 'm not good anymore. They know.

But you didn't do anything wrong.

God wants me to take everyone's pain.

He smiles, our eyes meet.

Your wife, Albert, where is she?

She knows too.

Married at 18, four kids in five years.

Working, usual money problems.

She left them, his wife did,

left them all for another woman.

At work, the nails started screaming when he hit them.

The world talked to him.

God started telling him things.

Said it was a sin to kill yourself.

He doesn't know why God chose him to hear the molecules,

to take their pain, just that he should.

He guesses at the why.

Hey Albert, you, okay? You look asleep.

The molecules, they only whisper

When I take the pills, everything's quieter.

You okay standing up?

Huh? I 'm okay here

the molecules, he said again,

 I don't want to hurt them.

Can’t you hear the carpet?

It's dinner time, come on.

I can't eat. The peas have tiny voices.

Ken at CMHC

Just sitting there and crying, twisting your hands

which are too large.

Six four on an orange plaid couch too low

and your knees too high and shaking.

Crying and forty-three years old.

Sent to this mental health center by police and court.

You scare me when you shake.

I'm afraid of your stained oxford shirt

of your grey flannel pants and square cut hair.

I’m trying to imagine why I wouldn’t

beat the shit out of some fat guy

who held my son down and farted in his face.

I’m trying to stop my chest from pounding

and my hands from shaking too as you tell me.

But I don't want to hear any more of it, any of it.

I don't want to know how you found your wife had a coke problem

and while you were working at night, she danced in clubs.

I don't want to know who she fucked or why.

Don't tell me how you found your kids in your bed that night

and her riding some fat guy and moaning in your son's bed.

Just shut up about the court giving her custody.

Please, keep to yourself your kids’ stories of

Mommy with the fat guy's pee-pee in her mouth,

of sniffing powder off the kitchen floor

and your alimony and support, your house,

your cars and wife, the fat guy.

Shut up about your son's crying.

Shut up about the fat guy smacking your ex.

 Just shut the fuck up about someone farting in your kid's face.

What are we doing here?

What are we doing here listening to poetry?

Why the dark, the smoke, the stage lights?

We should be out, bodies slapping in meter,

Off rhymes of Good, and God, and Oh Gods.

Hump and squeeze with closed eyes and licking clean

like cats of chins and ears.

Can't you hear it, just out there.

Right now, they're slam-puppying and making love,

and fucking and screwing, pumping of flesh,

piston building of pleasure,

listen to the sweat drip off her nose,

getting lost, droplet, in the sheen of his body.

Can you hear the giggle as the pumping piston poots,

As the bed thumps the wall

knocking on our walls.

Come out to play, come out.

They talk better than me

They talk better than me.

I watch their words flow from mind to mouth

 to my ears where I hear the words form ideas

that live under control.

When I answer

the words stumble

on my teeth

coming out.

They lodge behind my lips

to bump and rub each other,    

descending from thought.

They see me struggle,

my hands flap lamely,

 chin jutting forward,

 tongue pushing out the consonants,

 forcing language from thought

 till it flows and

   I pull back to live on

   forming lines of words, sharing

   imaginary worlds they know nothing of

Passage of time

There’s a quiet passage of time

Slow as a cat’s tail flick

A feeling to life smooth as fur

Like you are being licked clean

With eyes closed, breathing slowly

What dreams run through you?

What memories wait to be lived?

You stretch your muscles

Waiting inside

Claws and teeth and heart

Why Protest?

You'd find me, the thought goes, out there pissing on their silly heads.

Or perhaps not using my maleness to such an advantage.

Maybe I'd just, you know, accidentally turn on the water sprinklers

as those damn picketers chain themselves to the clinic's door.

It isn’t like I don't understand you all wet like you are.

Believe me, I feel the not-being of one maybe-life.

I feel it here, in my gut which ached when I heard it was

and then wasn't.

It choked here in my throat and stung my eyes and poofed the air around me, 

so I was tossed into drowning.

I heard her cry that night when I should have been asleep.

Do you know how a newborn's cry can wake you from the darkest sleep. 

How even as you curse, you find your legs walking to bring you to comfort it. 

Well that night after my not so loving still technically wife informed me 

that she would never forgive me for forcing her, because I wasn't good enough, 

to get rid of our second child, that she didn't want any part of me inside of her, 

and because she had to get rid of it, that she would hate me forever, 

and hugging myself and crying, not in the least able to get out of her car 

after Christmas shopping for our first born, then she said she had felt sick 

and thought the pregnancy wouldn't have been healthy anyway.

Well then, she cried and screamed you asshole, get out of my car.

I hadn't even known she was pregnant. And that night the unborn, un-is cried 

and I couldn't go to get her, or him, and she cried, and I tried to hold myself 

to quiet the tears so I could sleep and go to work in just three hours.

A friend you can love

A friend you can love,

even when you can't love.

It is an effortless act,

a shoulder to cry on.

Perhaps two arms to make a hug.

But there's tension between people,

of unknowing intimacy,

uncomprehending borders and stops,

that fears of not knowing.

Shared hurt or grief and fear of the pain.

Not being taken just giving.

Safe.

Stone

Pour shaped stone and steel. Branching, living,

growing from the bottom of the Hudson

and the bed rock of Harlem.

Poured fleshed over bones of iron by sullen men

in stained clothing. Roaring heart continuous of pumped air, pressured, held and released through steel pipes,

held by men to work the stone.

Peeling back the cloth of wooden grey,

like the hands of someone stripping.

The inner shakes and crashes of debris

started and thrown down by beaten men

in and out of the bowels,

heads caught against the ceiling,

held up by swaying constructs of lines, scaffold.

Bending as they tear unthinking to expose the flesh.

Heavy fallings and the straining lifting by scurrying men inside,

rooting, rooting, and building for their lives.

7:20 am

7:20 am

New York Tuesday

From below.

Fuck’em kid

I hear, and gravel goes on the Guccis

With peltering and a curse.

Electric light shadows the stacked layers

 of fill and carriage cobbles, two sand types,

grey shale and beer cans.

Survivor black cracked army boots

and the stained brown leather of mine in the mud

as we shuffle ripped glove hand opens the air

on the heavy chipper, it hisses, he smiles and slips candy

under the dust mask and scratched glasses.

You dig, shoveling at thirty stories of polished pink marble

and mirrored glass in the dawn.

He mumbles about white bread college kids.

9:00 am

“Did you see that shitty bitch?” And his gloved thumb

Points upward to thighs, a flash of white and gray flannel skirt

All with running shoes and now she’s gone too.

Whistles and offers me a peanut chew that I wave off

Followed by the apricot brandy, I mumble “it’s too early.”

Sounds of cars again then nothing

but the sound of the chipper.

I cough dust and replace my mask to toss gravel

at the passing briefcases and blue wool.

11:30

A leaking wood steam pipe from a different time

Lies exposed and we quit for Mickey D.

Sit on a plank against the dumpster we’re filling

And watch the Manhattan that was legs and brief cases

Invisible in our dirt among the dirt.

“Look at the knockers on her” and he elbows me

Whistles to the reply of “Fuck off”, her eyes on me.

Big Mac wrappers blow away, more knockers pass

Followed by big boobs, blow job lips, and “hey baby”

Then a long line of bitches that “we know what they want”

3:15

Above

I pull the spark plug wire on the compressor

We both move quicker than in the morning

Planking is moved to cover our hole in Manhattan

Freedom

There was a man who said to God— make me free

He was made free of Overlords and Government,

Then free from hunger and thirst, sex drive and breathing.

left in a desert now, sitting, not wanting anything, on a rock.

His head in his hand, bent over not wanting.

Eyes turning to God, he was free of wanting to be free,

and sand blew past a face in gray stone, of vast being

without wanting; stillness, sand, stone.

Deeply tanned folks

Tell me it's nice

What I see

Behind eyes

Of mirrored glass.

What is hiding

In your dark

And laughing when I pass?

Standing before a tree

It is a dry pink night. The world seems empty.

The only sound is the distant highway.

As I unzip, I feel the life around me.

There’s energy in the clouds and wind.

Finished, I'll wait for the rain.

The Groan

 Gut and ass

 Dude, are solid with it, throbbing in the bowels

 We look for a laxative and are disappointed,

 Dude, by the word overnight

It is Grendel and we

in its lair looking for relief

some relief to be had by

ripping off its arm and

prying loose its grip to enjoy

the escape of it