Friday, February 20, 2009

How to Give Great High Fives

The trick? Look through
the elbows
inside, where muscles
are, the place amino acids
dissolve, how reflexes
happen, verbs of action
or something like sleeping.

Two children stare
at each other with their
eyes and their mouths
are showing rows of
connected white lights.

Not moving eyes or lids,
it happens, the clean
noise, a tree cracking,
or axes landing straight blows.
This was
a success
Although it usually ends
like a rubber chicken clapping
when their palms fail
to meet and then, strike

Friday, February 13, 2009

It moves without us

"Don't write about man, write about a man."

-E.B. White


They build, we build
out of straw, stone, and soon
plastic and space metals.
They thrive, we live on
the backs of women, then
of slaves, and now for
wage slavery. They fight,
we war for meager crops
and hollowed-out, crusted
loaves of hard bread. Still,
their pain is our pain, the
opposition, the others,
those with better grass
and short brick fences, those
with rifles and we with arrows
or knives, those with clean
water or those in drought,
the sun burning their faces
lined with years of squinting,
staring into the distance.

The fields are level, but saying this
to a man born on a mountain
and one born in those fields, well...

Can anyone say the man from
the lowlands can't feel the
earth beneath his bare feet, and
know that it moves without him?

Monday, February 9, 2009

White People!




Sometimes they shove
their elbows into each other’s
soft, trendy kidneys and bend
their knees in pointless, unnatural
ways. This is called dancing,
a constitutionally protected
form of ‘acting out’. This happens
on nights when the moon casts
identity aside and embraces the
orange of the sleeping sun.
Sometimes they can see
themselves-- in the bottom backwash
of cheap painted tin cans, or when
bouncing past clean store windows.
Willfully abusing their insides for the sake
of tradition, white people will
always die, and when they do
their remains are secured in a
plain ceramic tomb, always
to be turned on its side and
rapped on the base, forcing
the fog of ash to catch a
flurry of cool wind, lowering
them to the waves crashing into
crooked coasts of crystal sand.