Otoliths

In the blueblack waters of
South America, there is a fish
with a rock in its head.

The natives cut the heads
like oysters and with fish
hooks make jewelry out of

the small stones.  They fish
in local markets for dumb Americans
or pale Belgians that will buy
the wire and rock to decorate the heads
of their fat daughters.

The daughter, all blush and entitlement
puts the jewelry in a ballerina box.  The
native puts the money in coffee cans.

And both the native and the daughter forget
the rocks were put there for balance.

Why I am Writing a Dissertation

For my students, the ones

that click their pens like

a detonator

the ones that can’t fit

all of their life into my classroom

For the soldiers in unpronounceable places,

their ability to do

what I did not, could not

for the wind and the words

and the open mouthed earth,

for those that came home

to banners, balloons, babies

to an empty gate and a

lost bus ticket

for the day after the parade.

For the teachers who can’t teach them

for the schools that can’t fit them

for the students who were soldiers,

I am trying to open the windows.

I am trying to fill this place with light.

On Denzin (1989) Interpretive Biography

There is only fiction

only character and plots

redemption, revelation, and response

Only the stubborn oak

and its many branches

the acorn it drops

and the soil it finds.

Facts, facticities, truth, reality

are not as malleable as much as they are

multiple.

Even while I write this I am

writing a poem

writing a poem about truth

writing a poem about truth and hungry

These are not extended descriptions

of one man.  These are three men

All very much alive

All wrestling for the same black pen.

Open Letter to the Young Sorority Girls Who Mocked My Beard

I saw you

cup your mouths

like you were drinking

from a slow-moving stream

I heard you

as the Kate Spade

constructed critique

dripped through your ringed fingers

I watched you

as you spun your heads

and rolled your corrective lenses

in those small cages of heavy mascara

I caught you

as you walked away

shaking your heads like

disagreeable Parkinson’s patients

And I just wanted you to know

that the beard is a toy, a game,

a ruse.  It is, at best, a prop

I use to pick up attention

like still-husked corn.

And I am disappointed

because I thought you would understand.

Knowing you too seek attention,

you must—

with those thighs sculpted

by a baker’s dozen,

that hair, a stringy mop,

you must have dyed and re-dyed

like schizophrenic eggs,

those plastic shorts and oversized

shirts that cover everything and

still whisper of a ravaged woman.

We both worked for it ladies.

Mine makes me a cartoon,

yours—the vapid precipitate that comes

once privilege and pretense dry.

Central Park, New York

The prancing horses of Central park
are bridled and broken like
the immigrant men who drive them.

their shoes , appropriate for the late
18th century, are anachronistic on
these cement streets.

Their dress, uncomfortable and unclean, have too many bells and buckles.

They are scenery along with the blooming crab apple,
the windblown lake, the British tourists.

They are dead, you know?

The horses?

The men?

The geese and their plastic feathers?

He came here to be model.
That plastic hair, that perfect scruff.

He came here to showcase polo shirts
and boxer briefs in staged scenes
of friends at the beach or a
rooftop barbecue.

he is only wearing sweat pants and
a blue graphic tee as we ride the
1, south towards the West Village.

But maybe this is staged as well,
and tomorrow's billboard will be
this same scene: gray sweatpants,
incomparable ennui, the orange seats
of this dirty subway, and an older Chinese woman,
her eyes closed, her hands folded.

Human accessories.

Critics will marvel, how her quiet defeat
brings out his eyes.

While proctoring a math test

Like children with blocks,
they take each problem and hold it in their hands.
They complain about how dull the colors are, how
sharp the edges and corners are.
They press the blocks against them until they bleed.

They show me the blood.

They say it is my fault.

Their minds are not constant. Their attention
ebbs and flows like the Atlantic.
They are, in the same moment, both cresting
and being swalloed whole.

They say they can't breathe.

They say it is my fault.

And it is.

And I will choke and drown them all until the child that cannot is finally lifeless on the floor of this place. The child that can, peeling off banana skin and rising (some fruit phoenix) to the task.