our evil twins

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.

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.

miraculously

Miraculously, no rain.
Miraculously, all of us
woke up today.
Well, definitely not all.
Miraculously, some of us
met the end of our suffering.
To be in a body is to suffer.
But you can’t kiss
and eat Cheez-its
without a mouth,
can you?

If found, please return to:

the place of your birth. Notice new trees, a traffic circle replacing a four-way stop. You’re the same age as the mayor now. Your soccer coach is dead and they named the field in her honor. Pull into the driveway of your childhood home, turning the wheel familiar to avoid scraping your bumper. Observe the odd impulse to knock. Overcome it. As the family dog hobbles toward you, obese and blissful, see recognition in the slow swing of his tail. Walk past your father’s chair (empty), and into the white light and chicken fat of the kitchen.

Look into your original face.
Embrace the only other body you have ever lived in.
And here we are.

And here we are.

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.

I-10 High Rise Bridge

They could have built
anything.
They built me:
one hundred and fourteen feet high
six lanes of concrete and rebar
soaring over the Industrial Canal
as natural as a donkey in a lab coat.

From my peak you can see
everything.
The skyline of
the world’s northernmost banana republic.
The Superdome.
The river, whose tranquil permanence
fills me with envy.
A quilt of flapping blue tarps
and subsidized solar panels.

A baby or two has entered the world
while passing across me. Birds
have long enjoyed nesting in my girders
and there are some tough fucking turtles
in that canal.
But I’ve seen more death
than anything else.

I tasted blood for the first time
on December 17th, 1966.
A truckload of drunk fishermen
about to miss the Downman Road exit
sideswiped a sedan
carrying a mother and two children.
I drank them all up
like a six-pack of Dixie.

I bore witness
as they strategically distributed
the consequences of their actions
among the least of themselves.
I watched fertilizer runoff
thicken the Gulf
into a turbid bowl of gumbo
saw the Gulf eat
into the coastline
like termites
turning their maps into lies.
I watched the Army Corps of Engineers
throw together some slapdash bullshit
and call it a levee,
knowing exactly which neighborhoods
would be decimated when it failed.
I saw those flood walls crumble
when Katrina whaled into them.

Six days later
I watched
still as the September sun
while seven New Orleans Police Department officers
drove up the Danzinger Bridge
in an unmarked box truck
armed with AK-47s
as honorable as pirates
as civil as coyotes.

I saw them jump out in street clothes
to face
their neighbors.
Their neighbors
who had been abandoned to drown
abandoned by a nation
that was happy to use their bodies
for war
for wage labor
for imprisonment
now looking for lost family members
looking for food
looking for water.

They murdered James Brissette
a seventeen year-old boy.
They murdered Ronald Madison
a forty year-old developmentally disabled man.
They shot him in the back.
All seven of those officers are walking free.
Ronald and James are still dead.

Things are winding down.
They’ve stopped the music
and turned the lights up in America.
After sixty years
of watching them
speed distractedly through
the miracles that surround them
I have no expectation of care
no illusions of longevity.

They could have built
anything.
They inherited
all the accumulated wealth
of creation
thirteen billion years
of the sun’s blessings
and they decided
to set it on fire.
They invented Keurig cups.
They invented ghost fishing.
They fed it to leaf blowers.
They sprayed it out of riverboat-mounted flamethrowers.
They turned all that promise
into trash
and noise
and wind
and death.

They could have built
anything.
They chose this.

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.