That damned birthday just kept making you cringe. Your mother wondered if you would ever notice your freedom, but you insisted upon your faction shackles. If you blink, you lose the moment. If you yawn, it will be obsessed with your reluctance. Blow out those candles, familiar brother. You are unjustifiably wanton, and tonight cannot beg your admittance. Wreck the blockade of these years. Free your spirit as a luxury.

Wyoming

This wind

Will melt you

If you allow it.

Winter was our refuge

From the lonely fist of man.

You,

Fence-bound and bleeding

I,

Unaware of you

Until too late.

Why did they take your voice?

Rip it

From behind your tongue

With their miles?

With their sunken brows.

And how?

You are famous.

And nobody

Is happy about that.

The Street Sweeper

The Street Sweeper

Only sleeps

After the mockingbird reminds the world of his name

He sweeps the streets clean

Of glitter and sweat

And he likes to remember decades ago

Here, his still Greenwich home

Was a catalyst for change

Decades ago,

He sat atop the hotbed tabletop of a movement

A movement which would soon forget him

The Street Sweeper likes to pocket

Patches of camouflage corduroy

And drop bits of gold and nickel

Likes to give back to the streets that made him

He drops his mop

And races the rattle of his eardrum to the ground

Anxious of the clamor

It sounds almost like gunshot-stunted footprints

Named Stonewall

The Street Sweeper hums melodies that sound

Like gravel topped black top

And the stop signs they would hold

Were they painted green

This pavement is still shaking

In the meter of 1969

When a lady who called herself his boyfriend

6 days out of the week

Took her place at the front line

Glass in hand

And a face that took days to paint on

On that night,

The Street Sweeper’s cock-sure Concubine

Uncaked the gold mane her pupils proudly poured from themselves

Cast a courage-emptied bottle

Full-throttle at the band of blithe badges

That bore the continuation of her trauma

And she begged them to demi-perm her eye shadow

The Street Sweeper shines a light post

The light post stands erect

Where starry-eyed boys

Forty years prior

Hid books empty of them

And changed into themselves for a night

Where there was darkness

This street now exudes

Where there was silence there is now a faint buzz

A buzz begun when the Street Sweeper’s muse

Fused her fist with her past and put her father’s

Memory to use

When she raised it to Dionysus

When she called for Carnival

And a contract that she could love

Baton browed bastards

Ripped that fist from its growth

And plastered her last linkage to her father

Across the wall

Like a crimson cascade

Where the Street Sweeper now naps

When he gets too tired of dancing for dusk

The wall she peered up from

The day they met

One and one-half limp-wristed fists fighting back their feelings

The wall that refuses to break down

Even after her T Cells fell lonely and done

The Street Sweeper

Only sleeps after the mockingbird announces itself of existence

And he only sleeps alone

Because he alone

Fights the crusade

Against the monster of a world turned

By forgotten sacrifice

The Street Sweeper sweeps his street

Until the mockingbird remembers that he has a name

The street he has chosen to remember

Because his force-fed freedom

Was bled from these cracks

The Cross-Atlantic Swimmer

The Cross-Atlantic Swimmer

Was not born into her namesake

She loose-lock keyed herself free

From the wrong side of the line

And made a swim for it

Two days and a slue of clanked doors later

She found herself beached

Breathing hard for the first time

And hoping to learn to live without her gills

One of the hardest skinned fish

I have ever met

She gnawed the bars of her new home jagged

And sawed the scales from her skin

Here,

Rib raw and smooth

She looks just like the silently armed men

That take her from room to room

Insisting she grow legs

And learn to speak through the flaps

She once used to breathe from

These men make their language ugly

A broken beam of light

Which should fill rooms and create

But instead blinds

And forces a seclusion it refuses to allow

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Has only a handful of her past

A picture

And memories of a home she hoped to rebuild

Back of the wrong side of the line

She stole her son away

From the shark of his father

Spilling red wine

From the tooth-broken taught skin of her leg

She stowed him at her sisters

And made the break

To take back the freedom she

Wasn’t even allowed to fake

On this side,

Sanely contained

Behind bars

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Screams asylum

And falls on ears which refuse to unplug themselves

Here,

She knows only

Cactus-wrapped love

And no gloves

She sits frozen and foreign

And stands to be called both

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Wants only for her son

To know that she can still wade in the water

When she is granted the chance

To know that the shark

Did not drink itself drowsy on the wine of her leg

But alone and shackled

She can only tell the story

To outside legged and gilled visitors

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Will sit silently broken and gasping for breath

Until we stop capturing the broken

And the hopeful in America

Until asylum can become itself

Instead of the ugly mane of reluctance

It now knows

Until we treat the swimmers of the world

As wine emptied victims of sharks

With stories what need to be told

If we refuse to swim

With these women and men

The cross-Atlantic swimmer

Will have to stay

Wretchedly creature

Until she paddles her way home

Remembering how to breathe

And in disbelief of the day she can live

Chances are

I will be the goodbye

To your hello.

I have gained

A century of pounds

Since that first day.

Weathered hands

I refuse to accept.

Love learned roughly.

Love maintained

I have, regretfully

Taken idle.

Paint my life,

Let us try to make the

Most of our time

My promise:

That these remaining days

Will not lose you.

Remind me

Until that future day

Mother, Father.

Strangle The Misanthrope

Somewhere you are brushing your teeth.

Or you are not.

Your polo rests unbuttoned,

And my mother is still ripe to your face;

The likes of which

I do not stand audience for.

I know you have a name

Because it is on the tip on my tongue.

My dry and simple tongue.

Your clean-shaven and foggy face.

Do your palms sweat?

I've imagined them sweating.

The clammy drip reminds me

That this need not be easy

For anyone. Do we

Have the same maker?

If the truth is caked

In shaking necks,

Don't worry. I am not here

To judge on the basis

Of deity.

I have never been that kind

Of star-catapult culprit.

And I can not blame him

For clinging too long

To something so perfect,

Afraid another attempt

Would stand

Blasphemed.

If the sculptor of your clay

Does not approve of mine,

If he is an outcast among the crafters

Of beautiful form,

We will assign ourselves capulet sashes

And make sin a beautiful anomaly.

A force to be reckoned with.

A bitch with connections.

I can not wait to encapsulate you

Fully clothed.

To remind you what you have forgotten:

Your worth.

Beyond the flesh:

That cracked and stumpy artifice

Which can decay.

Your beauty is indelible.

Friend,

Where have you gotten to?

It is time to find the home

We will not question.

I am sure you are preoccupied.

A mission trip,

The tough-as-nails defense

Of your mother,

Your back-breaking research.

But please be gentle,

Remember

I am waiting.

The lift:

Palm to Jesus

Beg for notice.

The heels are printed,

Taped from within,

And Chicago-December salty.

Unlike that which they shell

They were made

For a woman.

Lips unstained,

Mascara scarred fingertips,

And a violent hip.

Just one.

Like a moment frozen

She does not feign this.

Her mother forgot the anniversary-

Misplaced that microphone.

The song, once popular,

Is now a memory for its own sake.

Dresses have come and gone.

Littered the floors

Of the seediest bars.

She once scalp-shattered a beer bottle

On a skinhead

On a whim

To prove that she was sharp.

Heel in arch

Back in arch

Stiff calf

Breasts upward with truth

Smile painted to the ears

Hair grown;

That sort of commitment.

Sometimes

We are bred for this beauty.

Sometimes we learn it.

No matter.

We all have pain in our hearts.

Here You Are Allowed

If the light finds you,
It will be difficult
To avoid the tendency to find shade.
Avoid it.
Inject it into your wrists
By way of tattoo
And scar.
Ambivalence was never
A good color
On your kind of righteous.

But the flower did not bloom.
Not like the others seemed to.
This flower was a different shade
Of punctual and mis-reliant.

I sat crestfallen,
Wrapping my wrists in ideals
And making stuccato
Their inner beats.

The flower hated its water.
It rejected mist and prayer
With the flick of a stem,
And ran downward to rejoin the earth.

I wrote you a eulogy,
Belated and far too long.

I hope you will not fault me
For finding your bible,
And assuming it as my own
Without practice.

You, as the story of my hope,
Seemed to gain from its weather
And I, reluctant mortal
Am looking for osmosis.

Like lighter-fluid to water,

You lit me

Taught me how to feel breath.

This was more than a moment,

This was how I felt myself

And you did not yet know it.

Take your notes to aphrodite,

I will sing my melodies

To those who can embody them.

Yours is a faint rose;
A mother to mayhem.
Your blockade fades,
Yet pushes its roots to Brutus.
If you cannot find
My centered explosion
Release your two-handed smile
And sever me.
This is charity.

XVII

The afternoon hangs

Like a swollen willow suicide.

The dog does not bark,

She does as she is told.

Your hands can cover mouths.

They do.

They can not fight forward.

They try.

This trust was battered

In a seventeen-layer crust.

I do not know

If your mother hugged

Her typewriter, that day.

If she had one.

If your father was not

A lark.

I do know that they injected you with teeth.

But my jawline broke its back

To forgive you.

Ten miles

And a lifetime of hours

To walk them.

This was your gift,

You starry-willed monolith.

You forgiver of self,

I traced your name more than my own

And plagued my ears with your story.

Escape is not bred from captivity,

But from the relinquishing of pain.

And so I have not escaped,

But I am free.

The sky is hotter here.

The grass less green.

You are very much alive,

So I hear.

The Pen of The Tongue

First person
To reconcile the self,
Second person
To reconcile the self,
Third person,
The self to reconcile herself.

We do,
Each of us
When presented the chance,
Curse our maker
And beg forgiveness.

My promises are not lies,
They are your wishes,
Succumb to their remission.

Conversion. Therapy.

When the Shiksa blessed you,
Tongue in cheek,
Your eyes rolled upward.

This was not of
Your mother's condoning.
Your father sat
Stocky,
Malignant.

She asked you,
"Are you ready for dinner?"
You asked her,
"Does my tie
Feel a bit heavy to you?"

To this day
She has not blinked.
That moment
Like a Dahmer calling card.

Winter fell over August,
The dew ceases to vibrate.
Your pockets are filled with hands,
Mine with letters
I could never keep from you,
But did.

Only the wind remembers.

The earth is destined to
Disarray
And broken promises.
A safety depleted to fortresses.

His back could topple towers.

His arms refused
To breathe the foundation away
Though it was their destiny.