1. Boy, don’t let a shadow in you, I never want to see the devil in your eyes, a traceable line of your daddy’s.

2. If you dream about fish or a river, somebody’s pregnant, we need the water more than it needs us.

3. Dream about snakes, you haven’t been living right, wash your hands of it.

4. They’re shooting boys who look like you. You know my number, use it, keep all your blood.

5. Stay

6. Alive.

Even the water

I was baptized in

isn’t safe.

I knew God

was a man

because he put

a baby in Mary

without her

permission.

There are moments you can hear God

say things soft-spoken, the sun

settling between thin pines.

Collected crickets in 2 liter bottles,

dropped them on a path far from the house

one or two at the bottom drowning

in the last swig of cola, the smell of mama’s

leaf pile faint and almost gone.

My mama would say

to kill a cricket

is a sin against the night.

I imagine my daddy’s mind

looks most like broken
 

dryer machines

scattered in a forest,

field mice living

in the leftover lint.

I imagine it looks

like stepped-on

syringes, too,

flies stooping

down to sop up

all the sweet.

in the house on the hill

we hung coyotes on the wall

and our lab bark-whimpered,

confusing them for mirrors,

or oracles, maybe even, a premonition

of a strung up future.

they hung there and i pet them, combed

them for summer shed that wouldn’t come.

i’ve never seen a wolf

in the wild. elusive dog.

but i’ve seen bears, bobcats, & lions

built exclusively for the mountain,

appalachian cats—

sphinxes riddling away at me,

boring holes.

& daddy was always taking shots

out the window

exploding them

to rorschach.

In early Autumn I’d fire up the woodstove and feed it

infestations of everything. I’d exterminate the house,

rip the silverware drawer from its track and choke

the stove with the carpenter ants that crawled there.

I’d toss in sprung rat traps and shovel in the still wet

wood I had hauled, ripe with termites and wood worms.

By Halloween all we smelled was apple cider

and burning bark. The vat of cider boiled

from October on and my mother would toss

in citruses, cranberries, cinnamon sticks. I’d contribute

ears: deer, fox, coyote. Sometimes their whole faces, ripped

into masks. Sometimes my own. Red-blooded, it burned

hard on the way down.

Masters, never trust me. Listen: each day

is a Negro boy, chained, slogging out of the waves,

panting, gripping the sum of his captain, the head,

ripped off, the blood purpling down, the red

hair flossed between the knuckles, swinging it

before him like judgment, saying to the mist,

then not, then quietly only to himself, This is what

I’ll do to you, what you dream I do, sir, if you like it.

For the drowning, yes, there is always panic.

Or peace. Your body behaving finally by instinct

alone. Crossing out wonder. Crossing out

a need to know. You only feel you need to live.

That you deserve it. Even here. Even as your chest

fills with a strange new air, you will not ask

what this means. Like prey caught in the wolf’s teeth,

but you are not the lamb. You are what’s in the lamb

that keeps it kicking. Let it.

Rachel comes to the porch holding herself and asking for

my uncle. We say he gone to the store but he’s years dead.

She keeps holding on to herself like her body remembers

what her mind lost. When he get back, tell him he owe me $5.

We offer to pay. She says, No. Tell him.

Dear god of armed robberies and puff-puff pass,

a chalk outline unpeels from the street, smashes

every windshield, and leaves florid temples of crack

on porches. Burnt-black pleats of joint-pressed lips

prophesied your return. Please accept these nickel bags

as offerings. Brick bastions of piss-stench thresholds

and boarded windows require a weekly sacrifice.

Is there a tarot card called “The Corner,” a shrike

shown lifting a corpse from the pike of a middle finger?

           [Ten Crack Commandments]

It’s offensive, our most brilliant forced to pray

to getting paid, forced to spray or get sprayed.

It got so bad folks was scraping and sniffing

the ash off their knees. Cities full of prophets

that could only see as far as their own decease.

Who can give           an account of occasions

Can     mechanized description so falter

Can move toward gesture to scissor the outline

Each to enable a series of seconds    breaking or burning

Can undo the work of a million years         of human love

if I curse you just right

It’s raw to have no hobbies except chasing objects small enough to pick up and carry in your mouth.  Adorno says it is not bourgeois. It is never all that clear whether Adorno is cursing a thing or what, but Lourdes can never be bourgeois or want pants. The form of our togetherness forbids her from spending money. Getting anything, getting freedom or pants, costs money.

Lourdes reminds me of the pilgrims. Gloriana—was dead, a generation of her people sagged into the grave before the action began, perished on the rocks before the evolutionary whoosh of fleet violence. It was Lourdes or them. Choose Lourdes. To worship, to smooth over wrinkles, to light candles, to stroke, to be unable to separate, to walk without water toward, to faint, to be falsely pregnant, and immured, to bite and be bled, to be strait-jacketed, to sanctify, to accidentally kill with fire, to make rich to confound these predators. All this from Lourdes, to her miracle as alleged icon of late maturity.

The subways could be anywhere because a state of unhearingness prevails there; unless there is an emergency, and people begin to speak.

From the Old French comment and before that the Latin for “invention, contrivance, enthymeme.” Speech from or with mens: Speech that has wishes, wishing to be more than sound; that non-talk for which the poetic so painfully hopes.

Also, commend. I commend to you a period of abstinence. Preferably from drink. I eked out the most moderate drunkenness for many lonely days. I poured thimblefuls of white wine and still staggered under the same motherfucker of a headache. My liver was tender, very tender. I wanted to say, “The principle of this body is to put out. Invagination is a cosmic scam!”