I remember when it was just a chevy. A thing to get you from place to place. It had a name. And it was no superhero. But you treated it like one. Like the greatest goddamn thing to ever guzzle a gallon of gasoline. And you patted the interior, talked to it, made it feel special, and no wonder. Your life wrapped into this goddamn thing. This one goddamn thing that seemed to define you. Why did you let that one thing define you?

But this is forgetting rum. And Coca-Cola and ROTC and the times you woke me from sleep because when I’m sick I snore, so I had to be woken with a fever, with a fever of one hundred and two, and I slept in the hallway, slept terribly in the hallway of the dormitory, waiting for morning so I could actually sleep, when you’d gone off to class. God how I hated you. Have never hated anyone so much as I hated you that day. Insufferable and unforgiving.

But today, as I remember, you and your car, the Beat Bomb, the Chevynova, I say my prayers that when I say “I forgive you,” there is not an ounce of irony in my voice, in my intent, in my forgiveness, because I know too how much, just how very much, every day I need to be forgiven for things I don’t even know I’ve done, and never will.

Let’s agree, I don’t know you, and you don’t know me, and we’ll go, we’ll become whatever it is we become. Me this. Me this now. And some day, if we get so far as that, perhaps grace.

So much depends upon

When the boy
in the kindergarten class
asks if I live
in a regular house
and I do not know what
he may be talking about
I think
I wonder
what we’ve taught him
about having a book
about having a thing to hold
and read from
that we can say is ours.
We have taught him the
wrong thing, and I am there
to tell him yes
, my house has four children
one of them dead
who chew gum and
blow bubbles
and the greatest noise
is always the silence.
Just as that
you hear reading
to yourself, the words
coming to life
as you do.

Is it not the same
, striking the match
without you and your
brother
and half the men
from the department
of useless pass
-times just as we
listened always
to the scratch
sound of the unlit-to-lit
match catching us
out of the darkness
like that, like that
we would repeat it
like that. And burn.

Get Lit

We fought
like cats and dogs
they said
though if anybody had taken the time
to watch our cats
or our dogs
they would have found those animals sleeping
and as we know to let
sleeping dogs lie
and sleeping cats will hover three or four inches above the
bed, we did not argue
or complain
but went our ways
yours that and mine this
a sprinkler left on in the yard
so the grass will grow
so the worms will be left a good home
a worthy place to dwell.

A good friend, someone you do not even know,
named X, of course, as all such friends have been,
claims that “children change everything – but
we remind them – we shout
that nothing has changed but change itself
that the world has been the same
, the world did not exist before
these children – that the world was created by
and will be destroyed by them.
If this is, as X says, what X means,
then X can have it, along with
stupidity, along with the liquid pleasures
and the long window from the den.

 – White Chicken 

Down step again, turning down again.
I find his fastball up in my eyes,
, rosin
step again forwardown to the basement
socks, pants, shirts, towels thrown wet
together into high heat

thrown up at my neck again
backing out, thrill, flame, falling away
what will be done must
be done by me,
on my ass
up again brushing the scuff dirt away.
If he’s going to hit me he’s going to hit me.

He’s going to hit me,
the coins pushed
fall into square tin sound collected
and begin the turning tumble dry climb back
to where I live. I must live here, dig in
watch the sky, the red blur seam
the corridor walls toward and past me into the bright
white gathering sun, struck, hello I’ve been
hit. Massage pained and hold the
bat, I hold the bat, smile.
The pitcher down gathering nonchalant, dust
dry, I return down around time between me and
time I’ve returned the hot stung static
clothes shocked continue to massage my arm,
nod, hand off my bat, shrug,
take my base. Now I’ve a new endeavor.
First to second. Second to third. Third to home.
I turn the key in my door, enter, fold
, arm over chest, arm over chest
chest fold, fold again up, signal on
next up, batter up.

Hillbilly
If living in the hills
with the name of Billy
are you not a Hill Billy
and if so
what insult must there be
in the word
in the direction
in the hills
calling your name
Billy
as they will
after you have gone.

link: http://dailypoem.bainbooks.com/2007/03/19/daily-red-wheelbarrow-%c2%bb-hillbilly/

Some time ago
before I was married
to the woman I’m married to now
I began the ridiculous process
of learning to speak Chinese.
Not because I needed to speak
Chinese. And not, as you might expect,
to educate myself.
But to impress a woman.
This woman. Who would one day
be the woman I married
may or may not have been impressed
by my having begun to learn the language
commonly spoken in the city where
she then lived. But to this day,
if you ask,
I can recite my phone number
from those days so long ago
as such: ba san ba - yi qi yi ba.
Do not call this number.
It is not mine anymore.
And anyway, I haven’t told you the
area code, because the muscle
that pumps the blood
that moves the oxygen to my brain
has no area code.
If you learn one thing
from having read this poem
learn that.

Via: Red Wheelbarrow.

Once a man
I’ll name him Leo
tried to make me
become a Lion.
“Become a Lion,”
he said.
So I roared.
He said,
“Not good enough,”
he said.
So I ran
faster than any
human can run
and lay in the sun
amongst my pride.
He said,
“Not good enough,”
he said.
So I ate him.
And he said no more.

via: red wheelbarrow

The shortest month
is one you know

as that
during which we gambled

our independence
on hundreds of bills

and bartered
for each other

and while there bumped into the
former President and his

Secret Service (where was his wife do you suppose?)
and eavesdropped on elevator performers

and thier well-formed Cirque buttocks
complain

bemoan, bitch, and tongue-kiss
bewildered why so many

asses would choose
to watch theirs spin

and the painted ceiling clouds
were like nothing

but paintings
as everything but you

was nothing but a painting of itself
though time

buckled and raced and tripped
and fell

arms flailing
like that murder of children

chasing their mother’s
Pontiac as she pulls away from the house

to make a fool of some bitter
assistant today

just as she does
every day she wakes

dreaming of those painted clouds
how torrential the rain.

via: Red Wheelbarrow » The Shortest Month