Shadows

The Light is not the only soul in the room with a teaching credential.

“Learning to Spell”

Spirit says: “Your words create 
your world. Shoot for the stars.”

I say: “I’m 17 again...
only this time, this time!
I’ll go straight to the SavOn
(remember those?)
and buy hair-clippers to 
shave my back and chest and arms
(I can handle the chest and arms
but I’ll have to find someone to
do the back – maybe Grammy, 
she always seemed to know
what direction I was headed). 
I’ll work out and run with my shirt
off, and then when I see Jason
at the Dales Jr. liquor store
and he gives me those eyes I’ll
ask him if he wants to go to
Carney’s to get food and he won’t
take his beautiful eyes off my
hunky arms and chest.”

Spirit says: “Don’t say will. Say Am. 
BTW, he was already into you. Why shave?”

So I say this: “Okay, wait. 
Maybe just the back. 
Maybe that’s the way Jason and I 
become friends because he is already 
giving me those deep blue eyes
in class, so I don’t think he 
minds clipping my back as we talk
in French and he tells me I’m 
smart and I tell him ‘Let’s go get
food at Carney’s’ because I’m an
idiot, but then I see I’m being an idiot 
so I give him a kiss and we roll around 
for an hour or two until his Dad gets home
and we race to get dressed before he
comes upstairs laughing because
he already knows.”

Spirit says: “Don’t say MAYBE.
If you’re sure, it’s happening.”

Happening? 
What did happen?
Forty years happened. 
Life happened. Death happened.
Dave. Hmmm.

So I say this: “I’m 17.  I’m at 
Dales Jr. I’m skinny and hairy and 
think I might be gay but I don’t know
because I’m scared of all the prostitutes 
over in Santa Monica and it’s 1986 and 
there’s AIDS and no one to talk to.
I’m buying Jim Beam for my Dad and
run into Jason. His hair is perfect
eighties, swooped back and free. 
We talk. We’re shy. I want to kiss.
He leaves after waving goodbye.
He doesn’t want to go.
I float home and have a drink with
my Dad. He says there’s something
different about me. I say nothing.
But I know how I feel.”

Spirit pauses: “That’s what happened.
Those were terrible years.
Jason broke your heart. Badly.
Why go through all that again?”

I can hear hope in his voice.
He only wants me to say what’s true.

So I speak truth.

I say: “Why mess with perfection?
What I want to know is:
will I remember any of this? 
It’s been wild so far! 
Wait!
Don’t tell me! 
I don’t want to know!”

Spirit says: “Good answer.”
He laughs as I fall asleep.

Such a bastard. 
But a good bastard.

⤒

“Mind”

It’s exhausting preparing for every future.
When you’re nearing 60, escaping sounds good.
A quantum jump, not the other kind.
They tell me not to think about it, but
I keep hoping I wake up in another life 
so relieved there are tears 
and a huge smile, reset. 
It’s happened before. I was being convicted
of a crime I didn’t commit. Then I woke up!
I need it to happen again.
Maybe it will again.

It’s exhausting preparing for every future.
One of them is might be good.
They tell me to focus here:
wearing underwear again in the locker room,
or walking naked, flexed. “You got this!”
To get there means hope,
but every permutation is a possibility,
most of them breath-taking.
When am I going to wake up,
relieved I’ve escaped, a smile on my face,
reset but somehow, still here?

It’s exhausting preparing for every future.
I’m told there is no future, not really.
“It might never get here.” 
The past can’t get here either.
“Not if you don’t let it!” 
Nothing to plan for, 
nothing to run from.
Just this Now. Always capitalized. 
A typewriter. Music. Peace.
Maybe a frozen fruit smoothie.
I should have a frozen fruit smoothie.
I’ve always liked those.

It’s exhausting preparing for every future.

⤒

“Letters”

They put a pencil in your hand, a big fat one
made for little fingers to copy out
letters drawn around the edges of the
ceiling.

They look pretty, so you draw them again
and again, over and over, 
pages and pages of letters,
and get awards for how perfectly they
fit together. Everyone is happy.
You are happy. All those letters 
copied over and over again –
everything should be that beautiful –
copied until you can spell out: 

"There’s no escape."

Words that belong to someone else,
generations of else’s,
carved with your fat pencil onto every 
piece of paper you can find.

That’s when you stop winning awards.

⤒

“Two Dramatic Poems”

We're in it now.
Walkers and wipes from here till the end.

People will say "How wonderful they
take care of each other."
People will say "They have each other."
Smiles will barely mask pity
as I become your good deed.

I don't think I'll care about good wishes.
I'll be grateful for you, I hope,
in-between bouts of awareness.
You'll love me until I die,
and then love me more until you smile
for the time I was once whole –

when there was no walker,
no wipes –
when we thought death was the worst, 
some far-off place, some mirage.

*

We thought we'd escape –
took long walks across the bridge
and ate food, fun food, hamburgers.
I took stairs two and three at a time,
and you attracted guys in the showers,
just washing yourself you attracted life.

Jealous old men shot proverbs:
"Enjoy it while your can."
"Things that don't go wrong before
fifty...do after.  Beware!"
Pity crossed our lips but we stood sure
age was someone else's war,
someone else's ward,
the cost of ignorance.
Choice.
Never bad luck.
Never true.

Now everything we do is timed.
Weighed. Purposed.
My body isn't mine anymore
though I placate it with spinach
and cardio and porn.
He's tending toward home,
breaking me into the grave
slowly, surely, 
ready to lay down
as I conjure stairs
taken two or three at a time
and showers, those showers,
filled with beauty,
mine for a few minutes more.

⤒

“No need”

I wonder where my hand is in all this, 
this marsh where moss floats and webs 
stay put, bugs plane pond-skin unafraid 
of the sleepy-eyed frog just back from the edge 
and full.  Here is safe and here is calm;
nothing ever happens here that wasn’t
fore-ordained, announced by ripples or
sudden silence.  
It feels like death.
Happiness would be a shock.
No need.

I’ll bide my time, lay here wild, 
skim this unmade life, this greenish 
eden-bayou, this unfriendly not-mine
as all eventually devour this man, 
whispering via mosquito-buzz: 

there’s nothing you can do to stop me.

⤒

“Oxnard Street Poet”

Older than the sidewalk cracks and
street, settled on his flaking porch,
he remembered the Valley when it was trees.

“I’m ready to not be old,”
he said as I passed by.
His eyes were uncommonly blue,
for an old man.
He said: “They published my poem.”
I was on my way to school,
about to not stop.
“Once I get the book,
I’ll read it to you.”

*

The book cost $49.95.
He held up the flyer they sent.
But he was proud, 
so I said nothing.

*

“Hallo,” he’d say,
waving from his chair.
“Hello,” I’d say,
not wanting to be rude.
Lovely day,
awesome morning,
top of the world,
hello, hallo,
have a good day.

Joe was great-uncle wrinkled,
and I had class to get to,
I was a Senior.
But everyone should talk
to a grandpa sitting on a porch.

*

He asked if I wanted to read his poem.
The book was thick with cheap paper.
I was late but said yes
and the poem was about apples
and I didn’t have to make something up.
It was worth more than the book.

“Do you like it?” he asked.
“I want to read it to my English class.”
Joe gave me his book.
He said to be careful with it.
“I never got published before.”

*

We sat watching cars
speed down Oxnard Street,
heads moving left to right
then back again, ready.

*

Joe made coffee
and I listened to stories.
He voted for Roosevelt
and Nixon, twice —

“bet you no one’ll ever tell you that!” —

He didn’t like his grand-daughter.
He said I wouldn’t either.
“Uppity.  Ugliness is inner.”
He said if you wanted to get 
a pothole fixed in LA,
put a movie-camera next to it
and the mayor would come fill it himself.

He so near the end
talked to me so near the beginning,
said we were bookends on God’s shelf.
His hands trembled, so I carried the cups.
“That’s what age does,
shakes us loose
from the inside out.”

*

The Oxnard Street poet and
an uppity kid who learned to listen
to words warmed by coffee
and care
and age.

⤒

“Mine”

He’s a poster.
He posed for it,
flexed.
Baseball player
who’s won —
wife, kid, God, arms.

Good.
Yes.
I wish him well...

and then plod
up my empty street
soaked in past
and full of dark.
The house is on the right.
A light is on.
He waits for me.

Posters aren’t made of me.
My triceps don’t act like that.
Fans?  No.
My shy love
and this quiet plot,
beautiful,
mine and silent and 
home.

I’ll choose mine
every 
time.

⤒

“Weight”

Where did this weight — 

solid rock
crushing my chest
into spine — 

come from?

“You know very well.
That fight? Fourth grade?
Wyoming?”

Yeah.
So maybe it's time
to build a house
with that old stone

and move.

⤒

“Lorca”

     Hey, bro!
     I did her!
     With sunglasses on!

     — Memorial Acclamation

Go do it, then,
whatever it is that you do —
sex someone, buy that ring — 
film it, even, make
a record of your elementary courage
and then social your accomplishment
to your kind.
After all, you have the keys — 
     (Secret gesture.
     Secret gesture.
     Secret gesture!)
— and I should want to be
just
like
you.

But, 
no.
If you’re going to do it, hijo,
choose a field where 
you will get caught
and shot
and then I’ll know you’re real.
Let your body stand erect 
as rifles are raised by priests and soldiers;
stand before their righteous hate, alone,
knowing you die for your desire.
Then I’ll follow.

In your childlike voice:  
“It was just a little fun!”
“Why do you have to be so serious?”

Mi pequeñito, you have a thousand ways 
to explain your survival — 
as his blood sings from Spain,
intones a truth known only to me:

Divinity is a dead body,
sinking and stinking,
unliked and unfriended,
shot by justice,
abhorred by Church,
buried nowhere but my heart.

     Cristo amó.
     Cristo murió.
     Cristo murió.

⤒

“Dolores Park, SF”

I should write something,
here from this perch above the city.

But what?

Walking up 14th,
I saw a guy shooting up
between his toes.
He'll be dead soon.

And then the perfect couple
modeling their perfect lululemon
exercising their perfect dogs — 

already dead.

⤒

Back to Poems.

You know — there’s are books…

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