Scarification

He's dressed just like his father:
A Yankees fitted cocked
slightly to the side. A hoodie
two sizes too big unzipped.
Sneakers that probably cost
twice the price of my vans
even though they could fit inside.
His big eyes of ripe citrus
look up out of a stroller
at me and wonder with
fear and awe who in God's image I am.
His jaw is on a hinge and suddenly
the Nintendo DS has become obsolete.
To stare back at him from above my book
could mean a multitude of things:
Tears
A smile
A bashful turn or
Irreverent words hurled like
a squeaky bike tire
and fingers pointed.

To this day I can remember
some of these moments from
my own irreverence.
I wonder if my counterparts in these
childhood observances can still
remember, as vividly as I can,
the time when my mother first told me
how to say "No, thank you"
instead of just "No"
Or how mortified I was when I hugged
my mom's friend's leg instead of hers
because my face was three feet below
or that when they hit their own child
with an open palm that I
felt that slap on my face and
it was me who cried though.

I wonder if the other little kids
I knew when I was little
still remember the day in pre-school
when I brought my father's knife
to show off or
if they remember when my teeth sunk
into Collin's back because
I had tripped and fallen
or his blood stained shirt
or my blood stained mouth.
Or if my third grade classmates remember me
being on crutches for three months
because of a tumor in my leg
and the resulting surgery.
How I had to hop up stairs on one foot
How ashamed I was if I fell.
I wonder if it struck them as hard
as it struck me.

I wonder if I ever flipped this on
it's head and scared the shit
out of some grown-up when i was small.
Drove them to tears, made them
turn away embarrassed.
But probably not because
I was different then.
I didn't have this scar on my lip
from when I fell on dad's toolbox
or the one on my arm from when
my brother hit me with a paint roller
and had to watch five stitches be
woven into my arm
in a sterile hospital room
on Christmas day.
I wonder what he thought to watch his
fourth grade brother be held down by his
father; he was in sixth grade.
Talk about scars.

I probably didn't scare anybody because
I didn't have this want-to-be
beard of peach fuzz on my face
I didn't have the anxiety I do now
I didn't have the consciousness or the
cunning or the twisted mind I do now.
I didn't have the friends I do now
or the fantasies or the lies or desires I do now.
These have molded and added to
and chipped away at me like
some kind of fleshy Jackson Pollack now.
I'm a boogie man now,
a specter, a goblin now
haunted by his actions and
haunting the lives of those he sees now.

I held open a door today for an old couple
even though I was in a rush
but I'm sure they don't know
that it was a demon who held it for them.
But I wonder if they did
because they've been there
and that's why their eyes
looked like raisins instead of grapes.

88th street, between Columbus and Central Park West

On 88th street, the ginko trees
glow green, illuminating,
they seem somehow to be lightbulbs
that cast impossible, midday shadows
against every stoic brownstone;
a bulldog sniffs my feet
and the man on his leash says,
come on, come on,
and in a second the thing
comes back from behind me
so excited I want to haul up
a big bundle of sticks on the curb
at our feet, we're both eyeing them,
and throw them into the air
like batons, want the whole block
to run from their houses shrieking,
mouths open wide, clamoring over each other
to collect the splendor of spring,
to clean their teeth on its branches,
to run circles around each other yipping,
to roll in the streets, bounding naked
and muddy! A happy golden retriever
trots by, then, a big braided
treat in its mouth, hurrying to the park,
and stops at the corner--a New York City
dog with a concept of traffic--and his owner
comes up laughing, an old lady
wearing appliqués, wow! what a smart dog,
I say, the ginko trees glittering back
from her eyes, she's a rescue! she says,
an explanation that makes much sense
to me, what with all the spring salvation,
and I'm still standing here by the sticks
alone and again I have the urge
to fling the twigs, sticks bouncing and bumping
the cars, want their owners to come out
of their beautiful, expensive homes
and race me towards the branches,
stuff them in their yapping mouths, hungry,
all of us running towards the park,
not bothering to stop at corners.

last night

sorry i haven't been posting, guys...i totally FAIL. anyway...

last night

officer
i swear
im sober

im sorry.
i promise
i didn't mean
to hit that ed hardy wearing fool
in the face with my blackberry
a la naomi campbell.

its just that
he called us prostitutes.

doesnt a girl have the right
to wear a slutty outfit
out in hoboken
without having ugly guys
with acne hit on them?

im sorry.
they tried to get us
to talk about doing dip.
didnt realize
that telling him to leave
would cause 45 minutes
of slut jokes
on the path train
at 3 am.

officer
i swear to drunk
im not god.
and im sorry too.

Day 16, Poem 16: Braggadocious Rantings? or WTF?

Keep runnin' on
'cause they can't win-
if they can't catch us
And they can't beat us -
'cause they can't match us
Somebody call Miramax
- they need to adapt this
Won't retract this
And if you sue me
for the record
don't redact this
Let 'em know the truth
Baby, I'm blunt, not tactless
And I might start slow
but I finish hard
-just out of practice
You lack this-
kind of energy
word art synergy
But baby I'm a renaissance woman
I ain't done yet
-just beginning
I got new stores
of stories
and imagery
restoring me
all guts and glory
all or nothing-spurring me
can't discourage me
My cohorts
All upstarts
Alcs Poetica
Whatcha want?
Pick a font
Comic Sans, Engravers Go-thic
or Helvetica
It don't matter
Your world-we shatter
All haters and fake asses
scatter
'cause our words bleed
fuck our demons
they can't read
insanity shifts
and flows and riffs
like a symphony
or the lyrical
go for the gut
no sympathy
Baby,
it's all cyclical

Day 15, Poem 15: For Constance McMillen Grand Marshall at NYC PRIDE, 2010

Once upon a time,
Summer of '69
Dykes and Queens
seized the streets
Stonewall Inn
Gay revolt
One night
we chose to fight
not crawl away
See, Constance
this is why we celebrate

They had government files on us, Constance
called us UN-American
They called us Communists
anarchists
evil
You couldn't walk the streets
of Greenwich Village, NYC
hand in hand with your lover
No touching allowed
They charged us with indecency
No kissing
No cross-dressing
If stopped by police, by law -
women had to have 3 articles
of feminine clothing
on their person
or risk arrest
Businesses weren't allowed
to serve us
or let us dance
If they did and got caught
they were shut down
They raided the bars
every week
They put our names in the local papers
publicly outed us
called us unfit parents
obliterated us
and it was all legal, Constance
On the regular the police harassed us
They protected those who beat us
or helped
They refused to protect us
Constance, they called us crazy
and it was a clinical diagnosis
until 1973.
They institutionalized us
experimented on us
with electric shocks
and mind-altering drugs
and lobotomies
We were fired from our jobs
in the military
the government
the post office

Constance, they took God from some of us

But who would want
to pray to a God they
said must hate us?
Our families disowned us
They called us indecent
perverts
abnormal

Constance, you knew better
even in Mississippi
And we love you
and your girlfriend
and your predisposition to
men's clothing
and vagina
Come on, sister
But as you parade down 5th Avenue
and turn down 8th Street
towards the river
remember those Queens
in a bar on Christopher Street
locked up for being queer
and because of them we're here
Rock on, baby girl.
Word.

A light between my houses

Run along the river ink,
take the GWB,
take the D--
smell all the flowers,
the garbage men swinging off
their trucks in the night.
Pass tugboats on the water.
Move your feet faster.

Shake the cherry blossoms
from their stems,
it's springtime, do it to me, sing.
Suck the salt from all the benches,
pet the dogs, if there are any.

Sing to me of the slate,
of the grey river slipping,
of the seagulls diving
towards the pavement or water;
fleeting as they are,
the ground is still thawing.

Sing to me, sing,
out in the open,
talk about thirst, the aether,
the earth, sing to me, softly,
I'll drink the whole river.

Sing to me, keep going,
the flowers keep growing,
sing to me of the sea,
of the food in the body.

Sing to me, salty,
move down Manhattan,
sing to me, sleeping,
the river's still flowing,
sing to me, sing to me,
the animals all able,
sing to me, sing,
I'll swig the salt
from your navel.

Happy National Poetry Month

We had just finished chalking the
stone studded cement sidewalk
that hugs the field.
Our scratches of poems caught from
the minds off-guard passers by littered
the path that hundreds walk each day.
I stood, hands dry and suffocating
with a panoply of multicolored particles
wedged in the creases and groves on my hands.
I was a true hippie: a smudge
of North Carolina blue across my thigh,
a bubble gum streak on the sleeve of my t-shirt
a lemony blur on my right hip.

She, on the other hand, was wearing a suit.
It was beige...
Enough said.

I stood speaking with an excited class mate
who, having no commitments, chose to spend
his afternoon scraping off shards of chalk
in to what he wanted to be poetry.
None of us could stop him.

Her heels clopped on the sidewalk
like a horses hoves. She clipped and
clopped like a mounted cop
and just as ready to bust.

"Have you gotten permission to do this?"
From who?
"Every time someone submits to do chalking
on the sidewalk, it's always rejected."
Then why submit?

She interrogated me, her lackey
steadfast narc
shifting eyes toward fellow students
and passers by who stood around
appreciating our work
and our commitment to this
project.

She asks me to wash it away
and i say, "You get me a hose,
and I'll spray it all down."
because it's not about the destination
the journey already happened.
She took down my name
and my professor's name
and I took down hers.
Bitch.

Then, from six
thousand feet up in the sky,
a cloud shed just one little tear.
I think it was laughing at how stupid she looked
talking to me, the chalk master
the builder of street verse. Box of colors on my arm.
The tear careened through sky and wind and
trees and thoughts above my head until
it exploded on impact with the breast of her jacket.
A splotch of revenge.

We both looked up and saw the dark cloud
dividing the sky with menace
and that good old "fuck you" spirit
that only a cloud, brought to tears from laughter
could throw down with wet and furious hands.
A laugh of thunder and
BANG
my hose became obsolete. I had buckets.
And she was soaked.
And I laughed, because clearly
if there is a god, he liked what we did.
I stood before her with my arms outstretched
eyes skyward, as she put her lunch over her head
and ran back to her cubicle
tucked into a dark corner of the ugliest building on campus.

I went back later to get pictures of the smudges
that our creativity had left on the road. It all had
blended together into a glorious chalk dust tye-die.
Our efforts had become one and the same
holding hands and wrapped in each-others smiling embrace.
I looked up over the field at the boisterous black cloud
hovering over the East Bronx. I waved and thanked him.
And this hippie, was happy.

The Dogma of Artificial Running

The treadmill has a
holy rhythm.
It's speed button
carries the plight
of generating
an electronic pulse.
The computed corpse
knows the struggle of stride,
the ambition of a size four,
the gluttony of late night shwarma.
It measures your saturated fat
in bowls not tablespoons.
The sin of Body Mass Index
blinks in flashing lights,
mocking your five mile entry.

The only thing in common
with your psychiatrist
is loneliness.
It doesn't understand
the death of an iPod,
the flesh of thighs
peanut-buttered together,
or pink blood spooning
light blue cotton.

Pity is an emotion
foreign to a CO-2 generator.
It only knows
failure and success.
An oxygen exchange,
hard enough for a back alley,
guilty enough for a blurry mirror
with an unlimited horizon.
Just step,
melt,
breathe,
beg.

The scene in Wit when Emma Thompson, who is slowly dying, is read The Runaway Bunny.

Reading The Runaway Bunny
to the tiny girls
I babysit, they climb,
eager, entranced, over each other
to crane towards the page,
their mouths agape,
like the extraordinary
wobbled shapes of a strawberry
or tomato, the little cosmic
knob or notch, and each one
glistens
with the salt-water
of the earth,
and is christened.
I hold them
close, wipe their drool
away; the clouds
are just dabs
of butter
in a saucepan.

3 Office Haiku

Typing in rhythm
like taps of rain on thin cover.
Equally boring.


I'm supposed to find
information on something.
I forget what though.


My phone is calling.
It's next to me flashing texts,
all of them invites.

Playing Rugby in Limbo

My neck won't twist.
I've taken four painkillers
and melted three ice packs
but this corkscrew won't budge.

My neck looks perfect
compared to my volcanic knees.
Smudged pebbles
on white snow,
my shin reeks the
rubble of a thousand broken cliffs.

The boned bumps
complement my
mom's own jewelry collection.
Her Bronx childhood
tattooed into her calf.
Schoolmates would take
an antique pole
and throw it at
a moving target.
A regular
duck, duck, goose.
When mom became
the prey
her short legs,
soft squeal,
branded her
before the first shot.

She bled.
Cleansed.
Wept.
The wound of
fifty years,
a motherless school girl,
broken steel in her bone.
Doc, what is your prescription?
There were no stitches,
or social workers,
or suspicious teachers.
The indent changed
cartilage with the light,
the composition of her toes,
and the validity of the story,
but her father
remained unscathed.

The hand print on my
own bicep
is it's own celebrity.
It remains intimate
but mysterious.
A mark by a stranger,
a woman's fading fingerprint,
close enough to my chest
to seem dangerous.
The bruise is a blurry siren
but it holds innocent truth.
My failed ruck,
lazy sprint,
skipped squats,
and unwrapped tackles.

The mark on a body
has feminized
into magical cover up.
I show my own
for those
whose gripped
impressionism
is jailed.
For a body
that reminds
me of laying on grass,
watching the clouds pass by.
The nebulous vein
and it's flooding rapids,
trapped and caught,
held for a week.

White Girl

Hello love, I can’t

hold you up anymore.

My back and shoulders are sore,

collarbones like crushed strawberries,

black and blueberries

painted on the canvas of my brown skin.

My friends ask me about you all the time.

I think they can hear the lie of you

on my parched breath,

starved from the drip down your throat,

licked from the grind of your teeth

that settles

in your tongue’s pores.

Whenever you step down from the strength of my omissions,

and shrink into the truth of you

I close the blinds,

draw the curtains,

kill the switches,

and fill the kitchen sink with lukewarm water

to let my heart slowly thaw

until I feel a pulse in my left wrist.

My daily habit of despair.

The take up and let down

of you and me which usually

ends with the sound of your rock on the step

and the rapidly syncopated beats of your strained muscles.

But today,

you didn’t come home.

Back from the roll of your white girl’s sack

and I escaped from the choke of you.

Will the Real Prim Lady Please Sit Down?!

Girls love me-

say I remind 'em of Eminem-

well, that is until

they realize I'm a gentleman...

This schoolyard bullshit has gone way too far.

GROW THE FUCK UP...

Sorry I won't treat you like you're worthless

and insist on making my motives clear.

Straight shooters are mate-losers.

Those who quit playing games with her heart

will never hold one anyhow.

Nice guys finish last?

HA!

Nice guys don't make it past the starting line!

Guys are only liked by younger girls-

yet, I cannot stand these younger girls...

Where the fuck are those mythical cougars?

Guess it's just me and Palmela Handerson

until these trendy feminists are no longer enticed

by wannabe men who don't like,

let alone love.

Please, get off of your pedestal of premature maturity-

you can't see who's truly down to Earth

from that heroine high horse.

Damn my mother for raising me right...

My conscience is an insurmountable cock-block!