Excuse me miss,
Do you have children?

Children,
No. I thought.
I've never even loved enough
to make those.
Those new people.
New people that grow
inside a real belly,
inside my belly.

I took way to long too long to answer.
Speaking, I say,
No. I don't have children.
No children and I turn
to face my impression in the face.

She is beautiful and haggard and black.
Haggard and struggling
to hold a child dark and as beautiful.
Her child.
He sleeps soundly.
Limp and safe,
strapped over her chest and stomach.

Desperate melting chocolate eyes
ask me,
Can you hold him?
Hold him while I put this on my back.
I have to shop,
and I don't have anyone to help me.

By that she means,
No one to love her,
no one to hold her hand,
kiss her and the dusk dark boy,
help her in the grocery store.

In the grocery store I take him
into my childless arms,
press him to my ignorant stomach and chest.
My hip holds him.
My hip was ready for children.
But only my hip was ready.

Sound

I hear the running of a new beat
not the clashing, but
the simple addition of another birthed voice.

It does not have an identity,
but there is a pale hopeful
glimpse of a new way of moving.

Movement calls to the
hands of the drummer,
and the senses deep in the palm
pushing, grinding, sounding, pounding
the tradition of a generation.

This said pale sound
tunes itself to the mouths of the old.
The new hands, the smart ones,
take their cues from tradition.

But they are not the same people.
Neither do they play the same song.

Lent

The sky roars blue
the wind colors on our hair
the ocean wraps its arms
around our aching brains, and
the eyes of millions of desperate
humans rip apart our hearts.

White, furious warmth, you
looked down at us
and began with a pleading overture.
clues to a faded existence
riddled with unclaimed splendor.

Even with the snapping, bellowing
mouth screaming at us to listen,
we tied down our thousand thrashing thoughts
with a schedule.
We were blinded
living in a bombed black world.

Next, furious warmth,
you gave us a meal.
more than we asked for.
But we are ravenous creatures.
We have teeth growing
between the folds of our skin
and we ate.

Yes dear one,
we ate as if we had never
tasted before, our millions of
sensing teeth melting hard into
your crawling, leaping, growing creation.

We filled our stomachs
until they poked out of our bodies
and then we filled between our ribs,
up our throat and out our ears.
Love, the food stopped tasting delicious,
then it stopped tasting good.

Furious warmth,
we slapped your right cheek,
then we slapped your left,
and we screamed a gut wrenching,
throat ripping noise.
Because all we want is for it to
taste delicious again.

And you said quietly,
my beauties, my loves,
Stop Eating.

The New York Times

I cut a picture out of the new york times
five days ago.
I don't know why I can't stop
looking at it.
I haven't cried about it.
which is a surprise.

I can't forget it it.
I can't crumple the fibers
in my dry hand.
Instead, I find myself
giving this photograph
an important place by my bed.

A boy is looking into a white car
with red blood splattered on the door.
He is so young, maybe six.
The look in his eyes,
angel innocent.

He knows this is the end
of his primary colored world.
He sees his imaginings
draining out to feed the desperation
found in the dying cells
spread accross the car door.

How many people cut this picture out?
How many people said the little boy was cute?
Mocking his escaped reality.
He lives in a world
that births little adults,
and the fully grown species
feeds on hatred for each other,
and yells for bloody peace.

The tall tale of magnet and metal.

Who was that black haired beauty?
What went through her mind as she cowered in a corner,
pushed firmly by the noise of open mouths and tongues.
That was the first time their eyes were in the same room.
That fatefully cold June afternoon,
when anticipation took a seat in their chairs,
and two kids smiled indifferently at each other
for the last time.

She was wide eyed and shy,
laughing too loud for herself when she tripped on her small feet.
He was old news.
Known and known and wanted,
truly remembered as laughable, easygoing, colorful and honest.
Did he notice her that first day?
She saw him, he was not the type to miss.

Tuesday came and she pulled out the paper
crumpled with sweat and almost impossible to read,
it did its job and a friendly "What's up?"
greeted her nervous ear.
That was all it took, and for nine months
Tuesday was heaven, nirvana.
On Tuesday, the world was always spinning.
On Tuesday, the girl with the closed lips fell in love.

He was worthy.
He touched her hair for the first time in the Gelato shop.
Long after voices and water took the place of dessert.
He was a little boy again.
Reaching reverently accross the table
and grinning as he tucked a strand of natural brown
back into its place behind her ear.

She was a masterpiece to him,
and he was home and salvation for her.
Dirty streets were yellow brick roads
and the world was full of artful possibilities.

The day in November when he exiled her to hell,
wide eyes, red lips and all,
she realized it wasn't bloody hot,
it was bone cracking cold.
She stood in front of the night sky
with an oversized coat and a pipe.
Smoking away her despair with every lonely drag.
He thought she was better off without him.
She'll believe that when the world turns upside down,
and heaven becomes icy hell.

No matter how many times he walked away,
they were like magnet and metal.
Years, people, miles, experience
none of it changed science.
Always back to talking,
this time about the shit in their lives,
two packs a day,
and failed attempts to start the world spinning again.

When he finally gave up and told her he loved her,
all she wanted was to lay her head on his shoulder
and feel his lips on her dirty brown hair.
But he sat accross from her instead of next to her,
and told her he couldn't make himself believe
he deserved her enough to take her.
They sat in blaring silence,
taking lonely drags off his pipe,
both in cold hell.
And even though he could have warmed her
with one fateful move,
he chose to laugh nervously, and tell her he liked her shoes.

These two are hardly kids smiling, indifferent.
They sit alone now.
Adults with smoke singed lungs and frozen toes.
dying in their mutual mistakes,
this is a tragedy to make Shakespeare proud.
The best thing that can happen for them now,
is the world turning upside down
and hell becoming heaven,
a glistening, frostbitten, isolated perfection.