January 19, 2009

Not all men are created equal.
Some come with a twist in their spine.

Not all men are bound for glory.
Some come with weaker design.

He died on a bloody black table,
wearing only the robe of his crime,

but his name isn't far from the martyr
whose legacy he helped to define.

January 18, 2009

Tonight, just before tucking myself in,
I pulled out a small cardboard box
of pictures I keep hidden beneath my bed.

Filing through the glossy smiles and
candid camera clicks, I saw myself as
a young man, much younger than today.

I recognized most of them as I recognized
the people that surrounded them: a name ,
an idiosyncrasy, an anecdotal story or two.

It made me wonder if our lives are
wooden blocks, on stacking one the other, or
if we are paintings, each separate but viewed in a gallery.

And if we are paintings, on what
uneasy easel am I now perched
and what force would it take to rock
myself off this stand, to fall and lie
face up to the wall-covered world,
me at age five making turkeys out of my stenciled hand,
me at age twelve eating warm grapes in a school cafeteria,
me at age twenty-nine, immovable on a color-clad gallery floor.

January 17, 2009

It is easy to write about
Spain in this 4th floor apartment
on the hip of Houston, Texas.

I can tell you about the
stone fountains that bloom
Along Las Ramblas

And how the blue of the
Mediterranean gets in your eyes
like soap or lemon juice.

I can tell you how the underground
wine tasting just off the beaten path
is sipped and spit in the company of three
cubist women exploding in color.

It is easy to write about a place I have
been as I sit so far away because
the length and the width of it have not changed.
The taste and trouble of it have not changed.

So when I write of you,
do not blush. I am writing
of a you that left long ago.

Gather roses at the graveside as you
hear references to her sandy hair
or her glass blown voice.

But do not indulge to think
that these are love letters.
Consider them elegies, and I,
just a clock-necked minister
paying my last respects.

January 16, 2009

Upon re-reading Billy Collins' "Sailing Around the Room"

Without fail I always find
new poetry here. Haunting little
images I didn't catch the first
time I tiptoed through this
little graveyard of a book.

I think, in your honor, I
will begin hiding little poems
myself: haiku beneath the
local park benches, a sonnet
at the local pay-phone,
a sestina beneath the bleachers
at John J. Riley High School.

I think if I hide enough,
then everyone will feel what
I feel now: this Christmas morning,
Tutenkamen, apple falling
sense of discovery that has
led me to write a small poem
of my own, you'll most likely find
behind the milk at your nearest Randall's
or braided in the chopstick nest
of some uncritical sparrow.

January 15, 2009

He came home today.
Like lava he exploded
through the door and
into my arms and now
is ever so slowly burning
his way back into my life.

They say when Vesuvius
erupted, the people of
Pompeii died where they were:
some eating, some dancing.

In a thousand years
when they dig up these bones,
some white-toothed archaeologist
will point to me and say
that woman was praying.

He'll be gone by then
leaving only this charred flesh
and a paper-mache nimbus
I bought for a song.

January 14, 2009

I prefer the leaky pens,
the ones that spit and slobber
on the page like mastiffs.

I prefer the leaky pens
that spin and smear
like Pollock paint on
these tiny blue-lined canvases.

I prefer the leaky pens
that spill the words and words
my Rubbermaid mouth wouldn't
say if you turned me over
and shook my like a madman.

January 13, 2009

They told my this hole in my heart
was God-shaped or girl-shaped
or coin-shaped or globe-shaped,
but what if the hole in my heart
is just a speck on their eye
and what they see as incomplete
is whole beyond their unforgiving I.
and I am the only one with
nothing more and nothing less,
an eye shaped eye, a heart shaped heart