THE DROWNING

             July 20, 2012

Something massive—the unbearable and impossible

of violence, random and ugly—big,

bigger than the hole in my chest—bigger than the stall

of my mind—bigger, even, than all the words. 

I am without recourse, without exit strategies, strategies

of any kind—my mind and body colliding

bursting for beauty or love or forget

like a man held deep under water.

This is drowning—struggling to empathize with a man eating

the face of another man—or with the bikers, gripping their handlebars,

glimpsing, riding on—or even with the boy two bowls stoned,

watching the youtube surveillance video in a cold apartment

he shares with his father, who will wake him one morning

to explain there was another shooting in Colorado, at the premier

of a superhero movie, and that twelve humans are dead

this instant for that reason, and his voice will tremble

not with those specifics but with everything that burdens—

the senseless, the horrific, the daunting, the inevitable—

the heavy and the unyielding.    

UNISEX RESTROOM IN THE COLFAX 7-11

The plastic placard labeled Employees must wash hands before returning to work 

stares at me as if it invented passive aggression amidst the fresh rank, feral

combustion, the kamikaze rainbow of browns on a canvas of bleach.  I am Clint Hill

frantically climbing the trunk of a Lincoln Continental stretch limousine. 

Maybe his sphincter felt the crack first, for his brain to catch up he had to abandon 

his digestive fail-safes.  Or he fancied his asshole a fire-hose, relishing the moment

of singular inertia.  He’s a sadist, finding comfort in his fecal closet, praying

his heart to stop, so he can rest, locked here forever.  He hates me, my excesses,

my employment, my splendor of dying retired in a luxurious tomb, buried

alongside a PERA account held from my checks.  He’s a student of revolution,

finding the seams of civilization for which to wedge his silent protest, degrading

the pillars of the free world, till they crumble around his pantless legs.  

He's Serrano, seeking grace through the profane, chasing the perfect timbre

of piss in a jar, to make sunlight soar.  Or maybe he's Pollock, just going for a shit,

the plainness of vinyl walls calling to him

with a sadness, quiet and infinite.  

INNINGS

In a time they called 1983,

a man called himself Michael, a woman

called herself Cathy, and they invented

partitions of activity

called innings. 

They stacked nine, composing a game

called baseball.  They grew a town

called Baltimore, and created birds,

called Orioles.  They named

Baltimore’s baseball team

after the birds.

They invented apartments 

fabricated air-conditioning units

for walls, so they could stay cool

while the Orioles sweltered

in Baltimore. 

They sprouted other towns

with names like St. Louis,

Toronto, created more birds,

so the Orioles could compete

while they watched, cool

from air-conditioning.

When they grew tired of watching Orioles

in Baltimore, and the air became too cold,

the man called Michael, and the woman

called Cathy, took the seventh inning 

and split it in two, inventing

a time to stretch, together

in their apartment.

Nearby, in a place

they called Arlington,

across a river

they called Potomac,

thousands of mushrooms

popped from the soil,

spaced in perfectly measured

columns and rows.