delicate days

thoughtful empty weather
makes a place for you to
love in and love you do

in a cartoon of a house
a dormered window me
fists under my chin dreaming
eyes under my brows calm

singing,
mandarin songs
only mothers know

the roof is also old
so father invents work
in a white 2000s model
Dodge Ram 2500 van

armoring immigrant
owned businesses–
corner stores, beer stores,

all along Old York Rd
I delighted in all sorts
of Vietnamese delicacies
squatting on asphalt flats

softwar

0830 meetings non brutal
remote life means remote war

50k a drone in the back of a bed
it can play CDs and'll kill you dead

i read today black skies shroom
the strait is closed––there is no food

there is soon to be no water
just the black rain all over again

tomorrow say the wicked and dumb
it was a war we justly won

but was it a figma of my imagination
or was it just a piss poor outlook

from here

rummaging can be
an act of time travel
especially the basement,
where the past
dwells in the dark.
in an old letter
from eva + baby,
she calls me a fabulous person.
it's nice to be called
a fabulous person
by a woman you don't know
but you help her anyway
in the dead of night.
all I was looking for
were my old paddles.
later, during dinner,
lauren notices some
blood on my neck.

water has many uses
if a masked man comes
splash his face with water
ever wear a wet mask?
it's like waterboarding yrself
in the dark afternoon,
I help another woman
cigarette in my teeth,
metal pipe in my wet hands
breaking up the black
glacier that encased her car
she asks me where I'm from
my puffy hands stung red
from the ice and pipe steel
I didn't wanna get into it
I say I'm from here

transparent night

Hey, can we chat?

there's no one here to see me as a dumb transparent

the mirror reflects a tiled bathroom

your scent catches me quickly––

when I sniff at my cat, I sense his nervousness

he doesn't want me to think him unclean

but anyways, what's new with you?

what have you heard? the new girl on the block

with the giant Great Dane, dropping great loads

on the corner. In my anger, I thought if I were mayor

nobody living downtown would have two dogs

or maybe you get taxed for each additional dog

but turns out the epstein list is everybody

the neo-nazis and the zionists are takin' up all the ping-pong tables

they have bad form and even worse sportsmanship

and let's not even talk about style!

idola canna effect

Man gets to the top of the screen
and clicks to join the pigs early
for the secret joys of that blue dawn
I have nausea, cigarettes, and coffee

Pure water for my night throat
I find cover for shy covert looks
four faces at an intersection
whose quiet cannot wither

Whose graves carve a black moon
into the earth soaked with runoff
spit at them all on the streets
crush their toes under their vehicles

The good mother has songs planned
her pale babe spittle sunflower seeds
their bright sound and skin bless'd deep
by an aging poet, flap a Chinese fan

building the wall

my dear tender power

it's really muggy out 

here in the back yard

the old wall is down, 

the foundation partly poured

one and one half column poured, 

slight skew

and beam for the steel door

the city is poured out onto itself

the air thick with the passage

and mating of flies

in their fucking death spiral

like mathematical orbit

or us swinging round

our elbows hooked

we're hooked onto each other 

with sweat in my eyez

human poem

this is my stop
a bus stop
should have
some humanity
in its design
somebody fixed
an umbrella
to the top
of the pole
she showed us
as we walked by
the corner of
10th and Morris
whole neighborhood's
damn changed
but my favorite poets
stay where they are
a block of houses
a corner where old men sit
a house is always for people
like a harmony hung
for my passing ear

true western

is the sexy shooter going to unite 

the left and the right? she texts

i've got a headache from waking 

up between news cycles

my director puts me on 

the spot in a virtual meeting

he asks me to tell a joke 

and i tell him my hourly wage

everyone laughs 

with their audio muted

everything has spread 

itself out in front of me 

like a complex menu

i take the bits and pieces, 

chew em up and shit out views

remember Colin Powell 

went on national tv and said 

that the enemy could be right 

within our own country

i don't want ownership

i just want to figure out 

how to keep writing

for myself and the few 

people who read me

it's no big secret, it's no big 

secret that we love

a white man with guns

when they shoot the way 

we want them to shoot

what do U.S. presidents 

and the CEO shooter

have in common? 

they both like McDonald's

but no one laughs

and each screen goes dark

flirting scholar distichs

The orioles, 

the swallows, 

the emerald green, 

the red, 

the harmonious and 

harmonious everywhere

the rain,

the wind,

the flowers,

the leaves,

year after year,

morning after twilight

Millennial Dust pt. 5

public access poetry 

on youtube bounces 

red lamplight off electric 

blue lemonade vaporizer

what a treasure!

one of the comments buzzing 

with the air scrubber

as i cross my legs tightly, 

squeezing and releasing

thinking of reading to you 

again in a small space that's ours 

for the moment then it's gone

you go inside and i'm outside leaning

on dirty frank's wall 

with rob the navy cook

frank says that's a young marty frank

but no one knew who that was

rob said the drugs were good in vietnam

i asked him how much weight 

did you move out of vietnam

camilla posts a photo of a sign 

outside of the buddhist temple 

that read 

South Vietnam

Gone But Not Forgotten

but you came back for me 

and we held each other tightly

and walked out of the crowd smoke

and into the dark 

our heels clicking

and you and you

and you and i laughing

Millennial Dust (pt.4)

i won't pretend to understand suicide.

thich quang duc did not commit suicide.

he gave up his life in an attempt to save

others. like in an old buddhist tale, 

where the buddha would cut the flesh 

from his arm, down to the bone, 

to feed a starving animal. 

so what's it like, then, to be healthy 

and of sound mind, in a sick world?

Millennial Dust (cont.)

Fruit from the Hawthorn tree

craggy, quickthorn

shame on these poems

and live comfortably

on the company

its all lies says Fat Joe

at least 95 percent of it

you lie in creativity

and brush back your hair

Dream Labor Dreams

my surgeon has a new boss

and she toss like a boss

I thought I'd go back to work-

work on a poem that is

170 pounds and Chinese

in its many forms

At the art museum I looked at a drawing

of a Chinese man, hands up over his ears,

he wore the queue hairstyle

called the Sandlot Riots of 1877

a violent three day attack

on SF's Chinatown

at a labor rally organized

by the Workingmen's Party

now the Socialist Labor Party

I wake up from my Labor dream

my surgeon is now my boss

my boss of white light and she pulls

out my heart and lungs

but a poem in my fist

Millennial Dust (cont.)

silent and unsilent

about the pain of others

all I can do here

is reexamine our long
standing friendships

some of us who have 

want for nothing

can only criticize fantasies

talk about the same films from

America's heyday

even that name, America

sits in the past

at my one on one we talked about

Home Alone 1 and 2

and I thought it to a point sadistic

the way Kevin toyed with his invaders

and I thought of him not

as a victim but as a maniac

written by those who sought pleasure

from pain and we call that now

a classic tale of Christmas comedy

Millennial Dust (cont.)

wounded, shuddering,

a child that is the source of blood

we'd been out,

a van pulls up

and out comes normal

               everyday people

a woman sits down

she catches her breath

lights a cigarette

artillery smoke fills

the reflection

of her thin sunglasses

my friend didn't get

the job he wanted

but it became a million poems

I wish I could take

those hardwritten poems

and fuck all you sons of whores

with 'em

I gave him my Heinekens

and some of those

fat blueberries from Wegmans

they're as big as grapes

he says

when I got word from my

mother that our relatives

abroad, a maternal uncle,

his wife, and two young

adult sons, successfully passed

their visa interview

a dull dread fell over me

Millenial Dust

The night is a beautiful night––
I let go of yr hands as
you cross the room toward
                        the light

my face is flush and wild with flowers
I'm drunk on the brain like a
poem in a new used book
and before morning I'll be
swollen with love

I want to give someone
a recommendation for a volcano
but I've never been
to the islands

--

Generations of Color

there I am and here we are
generations of color
might ween us
and like all mustered
feminine power

and all we have to do is
destroy the legacy of
                       legacies
until then I might
be nowhere with you

you can have whiskey and
Portuguese donuts––
malasadas
and the body is still here
loose, whip-like,
and itching with the new
generational love drive,
not death––
its own thing

old light

you read old light,

take sips of smoke,

yellow gatorade then yr

stomach turns

it's all making yr own

inspirations

linguine in one end,

poems out the other

a flea market in the

lot of yr father's union hall

Local 19,

like that old swap 'n' shop

across the bridge 

an ocean then,

bought the swords and the

stands—

it sits like a menacing

joke in the corner

of the bedroom

the point is I've gotta

create a drawing for the

front cover of ryan's

book

while my beautiful

fiancée rides 

the stationary bike

my neck is a thousand

pebbles

new poem

another hard day at the wawa mines
a 12-hour shift makes the mind mush
an 8-hour shift makes the body crumple
graphic designer or laborer it doesn't matter
i turn off the computer to turn on another
and in a spell i read several poems by warren and cindy
it makes me remember for a moment how to be a person
and of course my instinct is to take a photo of one of their poems
and post it to my instagram stories since it's the way
i keep in touch with most of you
and when i see that you're the first to view it
it makes me want to write this poem

there's a lemon behind that cat

Two rocks fell into our backyard
each rock was partially painted
as if they broke off from a mural
but I don't know if they came from the same place

the rocks sit on the table outside
covered with lemon-patterned cloth
one night during dinner, I looked out the window
at the two rocks and worried

that Orphea the cat may hurt herself
if she jumps down from the wall to the table
where she suns herself
a black cat rolling on yellow lemons

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falling

think of what you'll write
in one thousand years
think of the unbearable art

in the urge to create I stumble
before I hit the ground
I make Falling art

but now I'm old
and Falling hurts
more than it did

remote

it's okay
i work
better from home
i've seen the sea
on both sides
had my feet in 'em
dreamt up friends
who then came
and gave me love
if you crouch
the wind passes over
because you are not there
to resist as smoke curls,
streams, and pirouettes

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