Pig Ears - 20161230

Nights before new years

Smear like dripped paint under toes

Noticed after the wall is painted

The room is cohesive color except for this patch of carpet

Muddled in the remnant of unnoticed motion

Inertia of focus in the brand of claustrophobic insular Americanism

Making rooms great again

That possessed the landlord to slather the sheetrock in white

To attract the best possible tenant like an Israeli settlement realtor’s yard sign

Trying to swallow speeches about who friends are

Palestinian poet talks about not losing hope

Like a man of recycled internments

Of inches and margin spacing of what gets to fit on the page

Friend of mine, we decide to go do something conventionally American

The Knickerbockers are in New Orleans and so his Queens

Orange and blue Metropolitans affinity bounces towards Poydras Street

Stubhub and nosebleeds, seats seven and eight to ogle the comfortable

To not feel like an ass-hat pricing one’s vantage for big men

Thinking of atheist sauna Christmas and my grandmother saying how not-insert family name

My father’s sons are for not hunting, basically an octogenarian called me a pussy  

My grandmother and I played poker at her table

She salted the cabbage like gargling for a sore throat

Gave me a Mary Catholic calendar for 2017

As I thought about talking to the woman I was almost engaged years ago

Past three a.m. last week and holding her feet in my hands like tiny cups

Drinking time’s dirt off in the red pressure geometry of women’s footwear

And just the way she walks in and over and exits flipping light switches

The smell of chocolate martini’s and Sam Cooke songs

Sucked into a vortex of sofa pillows and holidays

My friend thinks about how his grandmothers passed away by the time he was hatched

His engaged prematurely leaving this Earth in angelic tragedy

That bouncing ball of faith to see Jerusalem without weeping

The levee bonfires of Persian Phd cultural anthropologists painting canvases in his head

Confronting coffee baristas like a gangster for sequestering beans and shutting down speech

For a private party he is not invited

Baby fat liquid courage middle fingers and millimeters between fists through glass

Bursting sand like an AK47 in a Palestinian car trunk  

MSNBC Trump squawking Israel is a victim treated unfairly

Stomach in bends churning the cheeks of a goat head

To swallow every morsel from a carcass’ face at a P.L.O. campfire

Assemble, clean, and reassemble a rifle: testicle verification

Looking forward to a basketball game and fandom

Crossing from the west bank of the Mississippi not the Jordan

Ready to scream at tall men for dominating or failing to dominate

Other tall men while some dude who dropped out of Ball State

After one semester riding the bench for forty minutes

Makes more money than I do in a year

For clapping and standing up to congratulate players

That make him their bitch in practice every Tuesday

Shuffling through Ochsner healthcare bills on my desk, doorbell, game time

Parking next to Regions Bank

My friend sees French tapestries hung on the wall through a glass window

Herd down Poydras to the arena

Remember where my grandfather would walk us through

The Hyatt to go to Saints games in the Superdome

Katrina, renovation and that path ain’t der no more

Stairs and scooching ass in front of face in narrow mountaineer rows

Shoot the shit about Kristaps Porzingis Latvian giant 7 foot 3 and 21 years

Gets compared to other white dudes because the privileges of supremacy

Dissipate in an egalitarian acquisition of athletic prowess darkening the NBA’s color lines

So my friend’s brother and St. John’s and Chris Mullin and Dirk Nowitzki come up

Me living in Dallas post Katrina and a woman named Shyla we will meet later

Rings in my head of opportunities and windows in life of half spoken out of sequence

Contemplations squished between Anthony Davis’ unibrow

As a bomb goes off in a Baghdad market as Germans prost blah blah, words, numbers

Halftime four points up, beer run, yogi leg I step to the row below, let two black guys sit

Bar line and two blond Spanish guys, one with an HSBC credit card

Allow a third to cut in front of my friend and me

Escalate to commit the New Orleans sin of not knowing what the fuck you want to drink

When occupying the attention of the tender mulling thirteen minutes and sixty-three dollars

Into this trio of six-foot-four muddling Mediterranean’s and my Napoleon complex

Is soaked in the setting, of finally getting two Abita Ambers on draft, a twenty-dollar bill

Keep the change and return to something sacred in second half of fervently cursing

With a buddy about sports, international politics, war, and poetry

As grown men dribble for our entertainment and he says something about bread and circuses

Rome Juvenal 100 A.D., inauguration January 20, 2017

Final buzzer, lanes into stairwell, enjoy walking in the street when I can

Johnny Sanchez Mexican food on Poydras, think of work and menu prices

Magic jalapenos into pig ear chilaquiles with salsa and yard egg

Conchinita Pibil enchiladas with the other end of the Yucatan pig

Take my fake temporary teeth out and cover in a napkin sipping tequila and hibiscus

Day of the Dead Mural for Madre Maria and my friend thinks of his mother

And we share the swine’s hearing appendages slow roasted in spices

He says he misses the aftertaste

Shyla comes to and fro; in between I mention reading the Qur’an

For research for the book I’m writing; watching the Last Temptation of Christ

With William Defoe and my friend remembering when the movie came out

And his parent’s thinking about blasphemy and I say,

“What Jesus is never supposed to get any pussy.”    

Whiskey and Shyla makes my friend a tote bag as past eleven p.m.

Closing time and she stops to talk in the emptied restaurant, living in Dallas, Houston

Rolls her r’s about ancestry D.N.A. tests of being raised in a small Texas border town

First generation American with French parents and Paris is a city

Moving to New Orleans she thought it would feel like a city

But an apartment in the Quarter and it doesn’t, it feels intimate

A place where you can feel the dead around you

We flirt and I do not realize in that box-not-checked life I have held on for this year

Of thinking of car wrecks, job loss, daughter gone AWOL

Teeth still in a napkin and words of asking for a number

Do not come out and I feel that what if I want to be alone and I don’t get to be

And the mud of pig’s feet and smeared steps of yard eggs and painted walls

Dripping in the dance of the coming year

Of more surgeries and feeling like my body is a caterpillar eyeing his wings

In a painted spring or this, this moment right here in subtle brush stroke

To know the sunlight approaching midnight in alcohol and brunet locks

Of what men choose to say and when

Feel wanting to be in one’s body

That when a woman makes a point to startle the scene to tell you her name

Touch your hand and you revisit leaving a note inside the credit card receipt jacket

On the extra slip afforded to make up for muteness you start with half a sentence

Then you slip it in your jacket pocket

Tongue mouthing the gap between your canines

The quartet of incisors and the first time you ever kissed a girl 

Christmas Eve - 20161224

Sometimes all you want in life is a moment of clarity,

a sliver of vision in the woodlands like a gleam,

a piece of the universe to be naked,

crystal and jarring to the texture of a breath. 

You break bread with midnight in words on a page

bartering in aged sentiments fermenting in the barrel

rotated and left to preserved air. 

The memory of transparency in youth,

the way a body could know variables like direction,

dreams of chimneys and magical forces

that would grant wishes or prayers in silent starlight. 

You stare until vision blurs and

a heart thumps dizzy and pacing that love actually is

a breathing mocking bird fluttering in nest,

a tree of sounds reminding and surprising in a morning song. 

Smoke Alarms - 20161210

Fiddling ceiling smoke alarm beeping once a minute

Ladder, nine-volt battery exchange, placement, warning sound stops

Four hours later back home, beeping continues

Misfit, power connection failure, no determined solution

Voted Louisiana election, afternoon check Facebook of an atheist buddy of mine returning from Standing Rock

At Oceti Sakowin camp who cleaned port-o-lets, chopped wood, washed dishes

Prepped camp, held a body shield to a pipeline in arctic water cannon to let indigenous people speak

Letting friends know back in Providence, “I’m in R.I.” continuing an anti-capitalist revolution

Past sunset to Blue Oak BBQ in New Orleans talks heading with my poet-friend Paul, late out

Memory failure of conversations humans keep having

Of Nicaragua, Grenada, and Palestine, pigs shipped in Cryovac, slow roasted

Victims of white meat fires, red, all red 

Ordering, crossed-over menu items of what has sold out by nine p.m.

Pork is unavailable.  Chopped beef plate, once every six months

Eating cow and somehow, here, now, the decision has been made

With a compatriot to inhale sauce and meat and sip cup

Of water slipped button on dispenser spritz Coca Cola’s Powerade

To blend yellow in the ice melting discolored form purity

Wooden table, pickle, fork, Brussel sprouts, and animal

Talk Hamas and P.L.O. and Arafat corrupt money-taker lived in Tunisia

Conversations inside a people for a people to support and yet self-criticism

Misunderstood externally of splinters of fundamentalist thought-space exploiting

That corrupted bank account vibrating the memory of climate change

And 125 degree deserts and the Israeli pen of no water access or trade

Intellectual people cut off from the world in that heat and time basting in Zion

Of inside Gaza to Jabalia, to Nuseirat, to Khan Yunis

Of Northern Nazareth east of Haifa north of Jerusalem and walls

Of contemplating the second coming of if

The savior was real, of where said Christ would be reborn; it would be in the Palestinian ghetto

Ice caps melted, temperature homeostasis suitable for humans lost

A child born and blown up by a Jewish bomb or shot at a checkpoint 

To understand he was Palestinian the first time too

To say he was Jewish or Christian and somehow not Palestinian

Or to mix the character up in this duck, duck, goose chase triad of Abrahamic monotheisms

Misses the genetic blood chain of doing a test on any of us

And we get hybrids going back to Africa if you could sip far enough

This man of immaculate embryo, sanctified of spermatozoa focuses on some Portuguese portrait

Blue-eyed acorn to the world to seed Christianity west, laughing at triads to destroy temples

Of Palestinian does not mean Islamic, but what if this sequel it did

Just to fuck with the assumptions of picket fences with barbed wire and bullets  

Drinking more water, get up on-own to fill cup

Eyeing the remaining pickle on my friend’s plate

Heading out towards the Marigny to pick up Peter

A black Honduran from New York getting off-shift at the St. Roc market

The three of us head down Spain street

Park next to a steampunk Madmax-looking motorcycle

Paul says the space in the curve is owned by Solange Knowles

Well-press-suited black Muslims stand by a fifteen-foot tin door

Into the warehouse with D.J. music and shadow

High five to a guy in dreads and hoodie

Behind a corner of two-hundred-year-old brick work

When labor was all done by hands

See a buffet line of beans and rice, bread pudding and a family atmosphere

Solidarity community of day laborers party

Paul got the invite after our trip together to the Palestinian film festival last weekend

From Jesús an organizer, Mexican indigenous weathered face and hands

Shake broken English started after Katrina to stand up for the men and women

Standing outside Home Depot to rebuild a cracked city with callused hands

To safeguard a day’s pay for a day’s work under the exploitation of green card politics

To rebuild walls and roofs from seats in the back of pickup trucks hunkered with no seat belts

To have a voice in sanctuary city, someone to speak in the taken spoonful’s

Electricity run directly from the panel here for stringed lights, music

Candles at tables of humans playing gin, Tamika has a hand full of spades

Thinking of Oakland, no sprinklers, and one tip in the system, sounds in my head

John Lennon was shot thirty-six years ago, this week 12/8/1980 

Working class heroes and something to be

A yellow fist up black lives matter mural on one side the room

Day laborer’s brown body in the sun mural on the other

Bounce rap music cut and a brass brand’s horns blaze through the door

White caps, yellow rims and New Orleans black bodies

Tuba, trumpet, trombone, base and snare drums rolling

A cover of the Soul Rebels Let Your Mind Be Free

Step into the second line dance floor and shake that ass

No thermostat turn up the heat of bodies bend into the blend

Of cold concrete and disheveled rubble zone walls and space to feel the music

Women, men, drinks in some hands grooving comrades

Of what that word means and the fear it strikes in certain people

With heat in homes or air conditioning or iron domes

Head out to St. Claude avenue to the Art Garage next to Siberia

With street lights and a collection of post-Katrina hipsters

Selling homemade art and food shares in a shinier community on a variegated fringe

To the left of the entrance are framed cardboard homeless interstate signs

In a who-would-buy-that art recognition and flipped exploitative spectacle

In the rear a twelve-foot papier-mâché elephant with Sharpie pens

Where people could annotate their broken dreams

Peter and I talk next to the trunk of the African animal

Trump and a timeline ticking of people understanding what is coming

Amnesty International has a table and pictures with letters

Humans can sign to support the freedom of imprisoned activists

Farid al-Atrash, Aser Mohamed, Francisca Ramírez, Leonard Peltier

Big Fredda is playing later and someone signs for Edward Snowden

Head out to a vampire Spitfire bar on Decatur in the Quarter

Closing down tonight, Paul knows a woman and a bartender

Stock supplies dwindling and so it is Evan Williams in a glass

Listening to goth dance beats and pale faces mimicking ghetto booty

Paul contemplates his Uber app for some late-night income

Drives Peter home then me, piss break, fist bump, call it a night three a.m.

Six I hear the smoke alarm battery warning firing off again in the blur

Of zombie body waking to look at the plus and minus signs

Making sure the polarity was correctly placed in this ceiling machine

It was, but I had to use force to slam the white plastic covering shut

To activate the connection to keep the safety sensor from malfunctioning

Because the damn thing just wants to spit out the energy trying to help it 

One Seat

Pull door open, Friday, High Hat, Freret New Orleans

Head phones, Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson biography

Ironic Zen, Dylan, Ram Dass, sleek iPod Nano audiobook

The look of the please-be-seated assessment

Is one alone, holding a copy of the Once and Future King in hand

As a dining mate, to please the logistics, the mathematics

To seat a human at the bar, starring at open tables for more

Says I do not have anything right now, but you can sit…

Oblige to the tender, professional solo diner

Knowing this is normal, the rambunctious rabble den

The outings of discourse in ordering and imbibing

The evening of release, a reward of company and observer status invisibility cloak

The soundlessness in the symphony

Noticing and unnoticed tremors, energy surges in reaction

The pulse of presence, of nutrient acquisition

In peeling the jawbreaker angels and impish forces of the naked recess

Cloaked in coquetry and companionship

A mother plays with her daughter who cannot sit still

Sweater in the December night duckling under a table

I order flounder with paprika grits and crispy broccoli over a sweet potato puree

A pale ale draft, jingle bell earring waitress behind the bar

A seventy-something gay couple waiting for take-out order a Dewar’s and a Chablis

Quartet of twenty-something females scanning big eyes like a bumble bee’s flapping wings

Fold my prosthetic teeth into a napkin

Read through fifty pages with the Wart learning about spears and boars

The safeguards of protruding sideways to prevent a pierced charging animal from splitting a man

Ants in hills taking up legion for Merlin to deliver magic

To make boys believe the world is a cup of possibility

Drank yoga earlier in the evening in twenty-six postures once over

Fire introspection toe stand the portal inside a man’s head

The thoughts in humid heat, ancient languages, and crinkled time

To smile into a limpid mirror through illusions laughing like a phoenix being born

The ash of sweat to crack union with alone and together how to do both, be both

We are continually born and reborn, birth is not a singular event

Memories of lives we have forgotten we lived, taken like whispered beautiful ravens

And the touch of a mother washing a son’s bloody shirt in the cold water of a kitchen sink

Forgetting what you think you know, what is gone, what is present

A fork, fish and vegetables to a mouth, soft and palatable

Unanswered phone calls and remembering it is not your fault you did not do anything wrong

That portable warmth one carries intractable no matter the shelf of the universe, one is

My Happiness

I found my happiness.

On my own

In terms that resonate in fractals years bent inward

Beaming in a testament to what I have chosen

There is nothing, but how one reacts

I found my happiness

Underneath my anger

I would tell myself I am not mad at her anymore or him or it

There was the initial male rivalry of older brother

Physical and submission to muscles that do not push back

In a strand lesson of Catholic masochism

Of who takes turn the other cheek literally

Pummeled and spat crack toothed

Blame for bicycling into prohibited territory

Thinking to break rules was to invite destruction

Like swallowing glass heated beyond stability

A dish of cauliflower in the oven puffed hemispheres with rosemary

Exploding upon placement on the counter

Shards catapulted into the crannies of the kitchen floor

Slicing feet and smiling that this is what one chose

To heat the oven keep the cell walls broiling into adolescence

To marriage, to divorce, to eight years of holding single fatherhood

Until the fire burns anyone that attempts to come close

To say I am trying to help

I found my happiness

In recognizing I was mad at me

I was angry at myself for not being better at the social game

Or figuring out there was a margin for error, but you have to take it

No one can give it to you, but yourself

If you are angry at anyone else

You are not.  You are only angry at yourself

For feeling like you failed at preventing the pain or acquiring the pleasure

Your perception led you to believe was ideal or warranted

And you are the byproduct of this perception

Hardened in years of attempting to stare people in the eye when they ask

How come you can’t be happy?

Depression sits on the shelf like two inches of whiskey at the bottom of the bottle

That reappears each morning in a Sisyphean endurance binder

That no matter what you suck up, that solution returns

Brown and odious for you to contemplate on how to be better

And one day you realize vulnerable and sober

That it is ok to live, that you need to give yourself a break

Quit being mad at yourself for this impossible standard

You would never hold anyone else to and in that pocket of acceptance in the now

I found my smile, teeth missing and beaming to say good morning

On the street passing up the forlorn heaviness of self-contempt

That I am worthy of my happiness and no one,

Not even me, has the right to take it away

I choose, I choose to love me, to be happy 

Nothing changed, but perception; I am still alone 

But I love myself in a way people approaching me might emulate 

Instead of the anger at myself I projected onto them bringing forth repellent

That I somehow did not deserve to be giving circumspection 

Beyond the immediate and in this self-liberation 

I am alive like laughter in a smile 

Kindled in solemn appreciation of existence