Revision: Brooklyn Dervish

Around and around, inward revolutions

             Inward and around, still increasing speed

                        To you and around, won't you join her?

                                   Around and around, all through the night

This night:
I saw a woman spinning
on the street corner
like a Brooklyn dervish,
holey sneakers
smoothing the concrete,
kicking up gravel
and old candy wrappers                                       

This, the story
of her life:
ecstatic visions
born of mean streets,
now muttering mantras
One of a choir

                        all
unheard & unheeded—
again and again

for so long,
why expect
different this evening?                                        

I try to listen,
I want to see
what I might learn
but quickly find
I lack the vocabulary:

palms too soft,
my shirt cuffs
are unfrayed                                        

I have nothing to offer
but cold change
culled from couch cushions

I wouldn’t dare interrupt.

Dirty Laundry Haiku

A collaboration with Derrick DeMaria.

Worn this shirt six days

Seven cum stains, two blood stains

You can't Shout this out

.

Cornfield Elysium, a composite eulogy

I wish you
had met my Papa-
gotten to know him.

Please don't ask me to explain:
January is cold and blue

Like you
when
we found you

and freed yourey rise to plains-as sou knotted bicep-
let valll rose to peaks-

But cold and blue
is blurred for both

So this telling is only
existential stenography:
a carbon print rolled hard

This telling puts you in the backseat
of a rented car
tearing through
the cornfields--Baldwin City, Kansas
after a too-long funeral

My mother at the wheel
her set-jaw and quiet eyes:
Definitive eulogy;
a testament to father's daughter

    Years later, Ma
    I'll thank you for
    teaching me about death
    but right now
    we're just kids
    ten years
    and one younger
    and we're terrified
    and shucking tears
    like corn stalks

And even though
I'd known Papa
the way youth knows
Christmas
as sweets and treats
with no long-view
for blood or betrayal

Borne by
oak bench
brass tube
vibrato shock
I learned him

And in simple black
bolt-straight
I learned my mother
as she whipped vitriol
Gale force
to the cosmos

but wish I'd learned you, too

fuck-all if you
could have
sat the pew
with me and
heard that hardscrabble
Methodist organ
ring out with
stories:

Of ever present
overalls,
farmer's habit
worn long after
his palms had worn soft
as middle school principal

Or of the basement steps
he and my father started to paint
before the divorce
that stand as relics still
like the half-steps on the piano
where Granny reared my mom, and Steve, and Fred

I wonder if these stories could have been yours,
could have soldered soul-cracks

So that
I wouldn't have found you
cold and blue

On a January day
just the same.