You can hit a woman – not in the way she is used to,
You have put away the knuckles before picking them up,
Your fingers are always relaxed.
All you need are words.
Words are all you need.

Come on, she wanted you to, anyway.
She wants you to be the bad guy.
She wants to be able to tell all of her friends -
“And then, when I was just about to put my shoes on,
In the hallway…”
There will be a meaningful pause.
Her blue eyes will well up with tears -
Unshed, but trembling there, as fragile as soap bubbles.
Her friends will find all of the right things to say,
All of the things women say
When men are as obliging as they can be.

Tell her that she is just like her mother,
And will wind up the same way -
Beautiful and underfucked,
Stirring sugar into her coffee somewhere far away.

Tell her that great writers have said,
The sort of things that can apply to her.
And tell her that lately you’ve been thinking
That they really apply to another woman.

One you haven’t met yet.
Or have you?
She’s standing somewhere under her umbrella.
Her eyes are probably dark.

Her tits sag, baby – compared to these things,
That have softened, and not too far
Below my collarbone.
I don’t give a shit about her medical diagnosis.
She doesn’t have my earning potential.
Her legs are HALF as long.
Men don’t turn their heads for her – full of
television and body lotion
- in the street.

Hey, whatever.
You now know how to hit a woman.
I look good in purple.
I always look good.

But I repent.
I repent.
I repent.

It serves no literary function.

Still I repent. I ask
For forgiveness.
Come.
Come back.

What can you expect from a single oil company?

Even the American President is not God,
Says the priest on the other end of the line.
It’s still summer here, I am doing interviews
Up to my ankles in seawater.
Never forget to be grateful, says the priest.
(I don’t see the point of mentioning that I am on a nude beach -
Though something tells me he won’t be awfully disapproving,
Just mildly so.)

Details of the Gulf get their edges worn down,
Like pieces of bottle glass – the Old Gulf as we knew it
Won’t be waiting for me. I keep whatever is left of it
In the wrinkle that emerges between the eyebrows
Whenever conversation, going over mountain, sea and steppe,
Meanders back to sobriety.

The Old Gulf is like a first wife – lying somewhere
In a chaise lounge, round sunglasses briefly able to contain
Medusa’s eyes.
Well, her outrage is well-deserved, I’d say.

God’s ways are not our ways -
It rains on Pakistan, boys by a Moscow metro station sing “Ring of Fire” -
But the Gulf glares back at a NASA satellite with its cataract,
With a look that says: there are no accidents, no coincidences.

the house is surrounded
by air and by sea on land and on siege
there is someone dangerous inside
no two no three no ten
twenty dark specters with hate for bodies
but very real guns inside

they storm the house they throw lightning inside
the door is gone the people screaming
the girl is dead but they got the one
he killed one of his own her body is burned

the girl is dead this is the part
where borders count become real over graves
thick dark lines over little girl bodies

the girl is dead we want her back
the girl is dead her body is burned
the girl is dead but she is in Iraq
the girl is dead but she is in Afghanistan
the girl is dead but she is in Detroit
but we got him and the others were there
they knew what he was

does it matter much her ashes are scattered
if the girl is dead and she is everywhere
if we did everything right we can’t let terror win

not in the streets in Fallujah
not in Kabul not in Detroit
not in Chicago

night raids when their searchlights
cross my window past midnight
will they drop something on my building
in Baltimore what did we do when

we don’t know what room downstairs
has the rock in Iraq they come for us
don’t let your light cross my window or
this little girl will die she lives inside me
she will burn fast

we don’t know what room downstairs
has the bomb but we know where
our little girls are we bury them in
basements and stroke their charred hair

we wail loudly in the streets
light candles bind teddy bears to lamp posts
we shake the walls of white houses
we yell outside of embassies police departments
barracks city halls departments of justice and state

we cry for her blood in new tongues
we cry for her blood and hate uniforms
we hate black boots we hate campaigns
we hate all who won’t bring her back

we hate everyone until we need them
and then we hate our needs
we need her back and she’s not coming
they have forced us to ask their help

as they burn our girls away
they deliver death without warning
and kill little dark girls what if she
birthed che or harriet what if
sie was che and harriet

it’s as unknown
as what day you will bleach our doorways
burning our noses burning our girls
bleaching away dark blood on our stairs
so we can’t warn the angels of where
we are

we can’t tell them what we’ve seen
enough death just pass through
our doors are marked protect us
our sons will leave us they will join you
take a sword fan the flames

Well, I have had myself a spring:
Jacket blown open like a door ajar,
Eyelashes matted, hem puddle-wet,
Pink petals waiting in an outstretched hand.

On bridges over rivers
Engorged with the thrombosis of melted water,
Men spit over their shoulders,
Women cross themselves.

Your paw prints sign the asphalt
Where roads meet land.
You stalked my scent, and I got tired.
Run down, wrung out my skirt,
And fed you with my body -
The only thing I had.

“No matter how much you feed the wolf,
He still stares into the forest.”

Photo by Sasha Andrusyk

Lover-
here-lover-now is tattooed
in luminous ink on the thinnest
skin of my chest, so no one worry:
This is one we’re both in.

Can taste today on her tongue
the vodka-dipped mouth she could have,
really should have, but never managed to
kiss into oblivion so those black
cherry lips bleed their wetness
over her chin, onto her chest, past
her thin, bright skin and down
into the place where dragons
might have been.

Never, there were never, dragons.

Is growing old with desire,
sometimes, but nevertheless
knows: at any age, she can stand
on the front porch bare-chested
and shine her thinskin tattoo to lovers
gone, and yet to have been, who are looking,
always, for that weekend c(o)untry home.

Today, people ask you for your signature.
Last night, you autographed her collarbone.

You should really be careful with your ink
And where it goes.
You don’t want to start any new chapters now -
Chimeras that bloom in your head
Between sleeping and waking,
And the parted curtains of her yellow hair.

You can put your mind to better use,
Than attempting to wrap it around her;
Your arms too;
Your tongue;
Your life.

The trouble with an ending is knowing
That you could have written it better.
If only someone up there would notice,
And ask for a goddamn draft.

1.

The rivers are dry
and open. There are grooves
in the skin of the earth
where the wind drove weather,
once, but now only the ghosts
of cows wander – and young
drivers speed across tar with romance
in their eye for all the rivers
that ever ran this face of earth
that I’m now swallowing with my wheels.

I wish I could wash on the banks of
any one of these giants. Dip my loving
hands beneath the skin of river
to scoop out the pulp. And drink.
I wish I was so brave as to step in
and sweep away my self to a chorus
of water gods, hordes over Jordan,
swing low, sing the name
and dissolve once, and again, into froth.

2.

The sky is heavy; and this tin can
speeding on a ribbon of black tar
crushes all its passengers. No
angelic horde will speak to you now,
not until you dig your heels in dirt
and breathe again the air that came
natural to the land. No revelation
at the water’s edge, no reprieve,

not until you dig your heels in the dirt
and find the core of bone that scaffolds
the land, find the armature of dry, open
rivers and rutted hills red and bare,
salted veins and slate edges.
Not until you level
the heap of anxious
you have horded, pat down
the collected treasures
of thirty years of arching heart
and stammering knee, dug
your angers deep into the centre

and tented it all with that purple
sky of love – not until you
bare your head to the rain
not until you loose your own veins
will the rivers fill with wet and gush
and holy holy, not until you flood,
not until you flood.

Hell begins at six and has six lanes
Damp black asphalt, slashed by hard white lines,
And crawled by insect shapes of steel and glass.
Unfeeling calculation sees them pass,
Presses the loud pedal, hearing as it whines
The engine’s harsh combustion, brutality of motion.

My hasting mind knows nothing but the goad
That striking, stinging, makes me traverse hell,
Awake too early for the driving fit.
The signs that guide, written and unwrit,
Compassionless and hopeless, daily spell
Lines of raw futility drawn into infinity.

Six lanes are parents to the grey of tenders:
Mapped out to lead to half-disguised indentures;
Bearing husks of drained humanity,
Unthinking cargoes of necessity,
Who go where they would not on bootless ventures
Through arid years that drink unshed our tears.