The evil version of me is auditioning for The Bachelor.
The evil version of me is running for city council
on a platform that features charter schools
and anti-homeless architecture.
The evil version of me is Airbnb’ing his three-bedroom
and setting up a pup tent in the garage.
The evil version of me just bought another labradoodle.
The evil version of you is a life coach, a Christian yogi,
a wellness influencer and a personal brand strategist.
The evil version of you refuses to eat seed oils.
The evil version of you wants to have six children
for all the wrong reasons.
The evil version of you thinks bisexuals aren’t real.
The evil version of me is at Whole Foods,
snitching on attempted shoplifters.
The evil version of you is at the same Whole Foods
intentionally misgendering a cashier.
The evil version of me just met the evil version of you.
Our evil twins are going to Buffalo Wild Wings for their first date.
Our evil twins send each other podcasts on financial independence.
Our evil twins are logging into their joint Facebook account.
Our evil twins are using ChatGPT to write their wedding vows.
Our evil twins have never waited a table or restocked a shelf.
Our evil twins have never overdrafted their bank account.
Our evil twins have never had sex while sober.
Our evil twins have never cried when they weren’t sad or angry.
Our evil twins live in a gated community.
Our evil twins enabled push notifications for their Ring doorbell.
Our evil twins own multiple firearms.
Our evil twins don’t know the names of their neighbors.
To the monsters, we’re the monsters.
Our evil twins are terrified of us.
Tag: poems
At the hospital that was a shopping mall
I wait in the former food court to see my dermatologist.
A cell phone dead zone so everyone stares into the
greasy mirror of locked screens. The spectral imprint
of free sample bourbon chicken, an olfactory haunting.
A nurse walks out of the old Hot Topic and calls us back
in pairs, puts us two to an exam room. She confirms
our birth date and coughs directly into our open mouths.
Days pass. The doctor asks us to agree on a single
set of symptoms to avoid confusing the AI transcriptionist.
I hold my fellow patient’s hand as the doctor sprays his
warty knee with liquid nitrogen. There is nothing
for us to do with pain. It’s not “for” anything. My fellow patient
writes me a prescription for a free Subway footlong
with the purchase of any Apple device. A text message
from my insurance company denies the claim I haven’t filed yet.
My 6-8 week follow-up is scheduled for Junetober 51st.
Following the arterial exit pathway past the nursing unit that
was once a Sears, the morgue that was an escape room, the
Starbucks that has always been a Starbucks. One can be
sick and well simultaneously. This is, in fact, the natural
state of things. Outside the pediatric unit that was once
a Build-a-Bear a chain gang of child convicts waits
to have their polio vaccines reversed.
In the empty cavern of the parking garage I press the unlock
button on my key fob and a chorus rises, the immortal screech
of every bat in the elevator shafts, every bird nested in the
skylights, the roaches and mice in the subfloor feasting on the
leavings of private equity strip mining, the black mold
in the ventilation ducts and the severed roots of the pecan grove
beneath the foundation,
all of them singing
in a single voice asking me to
please rate the quality
of the service received,
on a scale of 1-5.
Sometimes good things happen
(after Garth Greenwell)
In preschool, on the
playground in winter.
I don’t know why I’m here.
Nose running, swingset
chains scalding my palms.
Another child took
my hands into hers,
put them to her mouth,
breathed through her mittens
to keep us both from freezing.
Someone did that for her.
Someone taught her how
to help another body
stay warm. Taught her that
there is no need to endure.
Please forgive me if
I repeat myself.
I really have only
one thing to say,
which is that we are dying
and I love you.
lessons from secret park
What you deserve is a prize
for your unique composition
and salubrious quality.
Recognition for your
mineral effervescence.
Your greatest asset,
however,
is your bafflement.
Your doubt is the air through which
the harp string oscillates.
How dull would life be without confusion?
What I’m hearing is that
you might be afraid
of a little mud.
That’s okay. The earth
is no less eager
to embrace you.
Please imagine your fear
as the peeling layer of birch bark,
feeding the beetles.
Please imagine your fear
as an okra seed,
surviving impossible journeys
to blossom everywhere
only because it is very hard
and very small.
What we deserve,
all of it, the silk and
the cake, the jasmine and
the moonlit swim hole,
everything
spills forth unimpeded.
Please do not take umbrage
at the smell of reptiles,
living and dead.
Please do not let
the coyote trick you
into leaving your home.
At least stick around
until these plums are ripe.
Stay here with me
while the kudzu spills
over us like syrup.
John the Baptist offers unsolicited advice to Jesus on his thirty-third birthday
Listen up.
I’m only a few chapters ahead of you in this book, but lemme tell ya:
it does
not
end
well
for either of us.
Well, nothing ever ends, not really.
But I promise,
it’s going to hurt.
When they braid that crown of thorns,
be thankful you’ve got a head to hang it on.
Circumstances are
a funnel.
A cake, a sieve,
a cloud.
They will separate you into your constituent parts. Turn you into
something else.
A pincushion. A Christmas ornament. An effigy
of the God of Abraham.
The doubt and the pain are more than momentary,
they are the water you walk across.
They are what binds you
to the distant shore.
The surrogate sustenance that fills our lungs until we are born,
they are the medium
of your baptism.
Here’s the good news:
you can stop weighing your worthiness.
You. Are. Ready.
When you turned down that deal in the desert,
you placed a bet on your own infinitude.
So stop asking for permission to enter
and walk straight into the temple.
Audacity is the key that opens every lock, it’s the only reason
these motherfuckers keep getting over on us.
Don’t worry about that, though.
This empire, that empire.
It is impossible to interfere with beauty.
And in the morning, shedding
the cocoon of your burial shroud,
stigmata scabbed over, face still puffy
from crying your eyes out in the garden,
wondering why your father left you,
press the perfumed mug of grief to your skin,
cast worshipful noticing on the landfill of creation,
Love uncritically,
and dance yourself
out of the tomb.
Just start.
(for David Lynch)
You’re someone’s favorite song,
a needlepoint dialogue stitched into their heart.
You, too, can channel photons into a tidal wave of despair.
You do not need permission to excavate your secret joy.
To build everything is your birthright.
When you’re gone they’ll hang pieces of you in a museum.
Tour guides will direct their attention:
“This is the scar from trying to jump a fence when he was twelve.”
“This is the temperature of their forehead after three hours of dancing.”
“This is the color of her iris when she saw her beloved for the first time.”
High schoolers will grind you into powder and snort you.
Ants will be inspired by your temerity and begin to unionize.
Adults will stroll past and find themselves aging in reverse.
Flies will enter your orbit and have heart attacks.
Perception is, in fact, our only responsibility.
There will be roadblocks
(wooden sawhorses, really,
firewood in disguise),
officious directives to stop,
to be serious,
to forget.
In exchange for a smallpox blanket,
you will be asked to stub yourself out like a two-drag cigarette.
Don’t.
You must let go of the anguished belief that your life should have turned out differently.
You are free, and therefore dangerous.
This clown college choir needs your voice,
and the chord we hum in unison can sink battleships.
If.
take me with you, big homie
(for Hanif Abdurraqib)
What’s good, big homie?
Me, I’m just trying to find a way to stay with it.
Just trying to crack the shell
that separates us.
Just trying to be a fabric sample
of the softness that will save us.
We can do so much better than holding on, big homie.
There’s more space than that. Stop scrunching yourself.
Stop shrinking yourself. Stop eggshell-stepping
in your own damn house.
Lemme rephrase the question:
which desires do you have shame over?
It’s cool to care, big homie. To let it be
important to you, to let it be risky.
God has fucked around
and made you too powerful.
Keep showing up, keep noticing
the constant becoming.
Open wide and let it filter through you
prismatic and warm.
Nobody’s stopping you but
you, big homie.
Get in there
like swimwear.
Just say it.
Say it how it feels, how it hums
like a tuning fork.
That’s plenty, big homie.
That’s all you can do.
There is no opting out, big homie.
You cannot omit a single part of it
without changing all of it.
Fuckin butterfly effect, big homie.
All mistakes are the fulfillment of a secret wish.
All mistakes bring you one step closer
to what you need.
All of this was inevitable.
Friction is the only way to make fire, big homie.
Slow down, big homie.
Come back.
Walk with me.
Life is so incredibly long
how many times
we can be met
and known
and parted
and forgotten.
That sunshine you asked for is on the way, big homie.
Lemme rephrase the question:
what do you yearn for?
The yearning,
big homie,
the yearning is the point.
pledge of allegiance
Free as in undisciplined, as in formless, uncontained. For, meaning intended, the betrothal of cause to effect. All as in “may all beings know peace.” Yes, even him. And yes, even you.
Free from owning and ownership, take a penny leave a penny, dispossessed peoples of an anarchist moon. For you, this gift of grief, this rotten jar of gritty roots, to soften and soothe. All, like the radical unexceptional acceptance of newborns and the dying.
Free like the poem that saved you, like the text that stopped you. For, as in the fellowship of reconciliation, love revealed and interpreted by forgiveness from sin. All, meaning the sum, the just and unjust, the sun abandoning none.
Free as a story, a you-shaped seat at this table of laughter. For as in due to, as in what we owe each other, which is everything. All as in everyone’s invited, barking carnival cattle dogs herding you precious to the hearth of the heart.
Free just like “I made you some tea,” like my hand is held by yours as my freedom is wrapped up in yours. For, which asks: how long must we wait? All like many, meaning pluralistic pluperfect presence, the indivisible prime number of universal personhood.
Free, meaning not alone, all patches in the quilt and threads in the sweater and holes in the net. For we know not the miles between this world and the new one. All like one, which is what we are, which is all there is which is neither yes nor no but both and and.
Free meaning decriminalized liberty, bound and bonded to brother-sister-siblinghood for the why which is and cannot be anything but love and love and the inexpressible unbounded inequivalent irreplaceability
of all.
beat the clock
I was trying to save time. I ate
the canned soup. I bought my panic in bulk.
I outran the moon, she couldn’t keep up.
I doubled my body. We worked as a pair.
We velcro’d our sneakers. We cut our own hair.
While frothing the solvent of business and pleasure,
I got pulled over for texting and driving,
pausing the mindfulness podcast on 2x speed.
“Sir,
you need
to slow down
Now.”
I’m trying to make time. I’m
s t r e t c h i n g
a minute
like a ham hock in greens.
I’m walking.
I’m talking.
I’m reading out loud. Stepping
out of the office
and into the river (there is
only one). Steeping
mint that I swiped
from the Garden of Eden.
Folding the batter
of motion
and stillness.
It’s three minutes
to midnight:
do you know where your breath is right
Now?
How many heartbeats escape your attention?
The space in between them:
does that count as
Death?
I made some time,
for you.
Here,
take it.
Open the box
that contains a box
that contains a box
that contains a box
that contains
your candle,
lit at both ends.
Blow it out.
Breathe it in.
Now,
cough.
hangin’ in there
Sounds precarious.
What’s below?
Sun-warmed earth,
covered
in moss,
waiting
for me
to let go.
tacohole dot net 