Knife Bright

The way there's too many questions
you could ask the people you pass
on 42nd Street so you ask none. Half the reason, always,
you aspired to be a doctor or a teacher:
you're allowed to ask the questions.
Supposed to. How long as this been happening?
What would help fix the problem? Last night
you found your friends curled up on pool chairs,
like mummies, at 4 in the morning.
You'd fallen asleep on the couch inside,
 the TV screen blue on a classical music
channel. How you couldn't sleep because
of the stars. Couldn't remember the last time
you saw them, made a mental note and lodged
it with the growing pile behind your heart: leave
the city. Find someone. You wonder
about that sentence. Find someone. What it says
about the girl you love. You never think,
anymore, that you found it. Stopped picturing
raising kids. Going back and forth on who you
picture, now. Stop kidding yourself. Do
right by her but don't look into anyone's eyes
and lie. Keep finding yourself under stars
in the dark, startled by the shooting ones,
knife bright, slicing the sky like the rest
could fall out of the dark fabric, loosed
by the incision, both the questions and the answers.

Snake

I swipe right desperately, dreaming
of love behind glass. Swerve
left, dodge the sodden mattress
on the Jersey Turnpike,
heartchoked as we drive on
through the pouring rain. Turn UP, 
my students jeered in 2nd period,
earlier today, volleying the N-
word, F-word, words
I didn't recognize, up
above the desks, my head,
threshold for patience,
lately grown thin,
underfed like the snake
in the back of my room
(named Ronnie by students,
a nod to the Jersey Shore
character). That thing never eats
when I feed him dead mice
that I warm in a beaker of water,
and I never feed him these days.
I'm tired of teaching. Worn
to the bones of my face
which I feel beneath flesh at the end
of the day when I'm two hairs away
from losing it, all of it, totally.
Somedays my pants fit and
somedays they don't and by some
neural path I tread as a kid, this
is the ruler I use to measure
my worth, stuck in some
rut I dug years ago. I want out
of this classroom, this glass box,
this body, this city where trains
snake underfoot to take me
one dump to another. I read
the manifesto of a murderer,
a neatly typed PDF I pulled up
on my smartphone, a rambling
account of each year that took him
towards killing. What chilled
me was the way I felt the same
blind rage at my own loneliness,
at times. A whiff of it now. My
eyes are mirrors that shine that fear
back at myself until I'm wrapped
in it. I decide the mattress would have
killed me if I'd hit it, going sixty
on the road out of this place.  

Blooms

Everyone's sending something important at the post office,
laboring over the licking of the envelope, adhering to the still-preferred
sealing (ceremonial) of the paper vessel even in the era of self-adhesive
stamps and self-seal flaps. Sending mail is an act of faith. Standing
in a line is an act of faith. Stepping outside is an act of faith.
Getting out of bed each morning is an act of faith. Kids are afoot:
a black girl, a white girl, and a Hasidic Jew with long blond locks
sticking out of his yarmulke. It's five and the call to prayer comes on somewhere,
must be set as an alert on someone's smartphone. All the sad music the world can't
evoke what it does in me. Seeing my grandfather prostate, praying. The only thing
he'd ever bow down to and even then rarely, the holiest of holidays, maybe.
He has his own mythology about how the way he came to be. Royalty of the mud,
roots spread round the world, blooms he'll never see: gay granddaughter,
Simon carrying the torah to read it on the altar, Momo climbing mountains
in wilderness rehab in Utah, his blackness no bloom in my grandfather's eyes. 

Slowly Growing Older Than the People on TV

All knife and no incision, all dog-eared corners and no words on the pages.
All branch, no leaves. Four left turns make a square. A square stretched out
is a circle. Circle the thoughts you want to keep and pin them close to your heart.
Google it, google it. You're slowly growing older than the people on TV.

the city and the stillness

i live in what once was the largest city in the world, a sprawling empire that's crawled its shadow over three islands that meet at a river, bored through the earth that gave rise to it, riddling it with tunnels that one day will fill. it can't go on forever you know; always predicting the ends of things, only seeing as far as the end of our noses as far as history cares. i grow cold thinking about this city growing old on me, it's subway trains stalling. when the storm wiped them out for a week or two the stillness was eerie, a city laid wayside by the swell of the sea, a warning, no doubt about it.