Grace

Grace holds no book
by Rimbaud. She clutches the Bible
into sleep and dreams
of Jesus. I don't know why
this girl raised by church summer camps
was there at the house show
where everyone was drinking wine
out of Solo cups and howling
old soul songs to the piano.
Her drunk cousin had brought her there,
who grabbed my ankle and put her head
in my lap, but I was more interested
in Grace. I'd always wanted to meet
a girl named Grace and she introduced herself
apologizing for the blonde who was getting pissed
because all the boys went for her cousin.
We left her on the floor to do
the Twist and, with her best innocent
shrug, Grace told me about
her frilly underwear waiting
in a drawer for her husband. She pulled me in
and breathed in my ear she was married
to Jesus.

She confessed she'd left a fiance
here on earth spun
into dementia from a bomb
hidden under the sand of Iraq.
She cried when she walked out
of the Institution for the last time and
even though she's married now
to a strong handsome boy
and they will go swing dancing
every Thursday until they die
in the same breath, she cries
every time she thinks about
that thing she had to give up
which she never really wanted,
the mistake she was pardoned
from making. It's her duty
to feel guilty. This is what love looks like
to God. She's sweet.
Her name is Grace.

City Lights

How does he fight
                              the gargantuan bellies
Of bullies
                 With eyebrows
                                          Of thunder?
A little white flower
                                 The mightiest rage
Of a torch
                  Plucked
                                From a dirty wool-suit
Offered to a
                     moon-skinned
                                             Woman

In a Car Speeding Out Route 40

I'm going to the Midwest
to be closer to the night;
The rusted pipes and tired bridges
of Pittsburgh,
The angelic lamplights hovering over
empty spaces in parking lots,
Indiana, the great Old West
before the great New West,
Cincinnati on its muddy river,
Cleveland on its infected lake,
Bellefontaine, Mt. Vernon, Marysville,
The poisoned land, the Midwest;
I am wrapped in its vast night.
Route 40 is a vanished road
lined by silent oaks,
I walk through its darkness
across the blasts of Broadway
I walk through its darkness
as the drifting clods of memory
fall through my sleep

Cesar Vallejo

A whole civilization walks
by Cesar Vallejo sleeping
in a Parisian gutter.
His stomach resonates,
the canyon of his word,
speaking something
he can't transcribe.

His mouth has forgotten
the taste of words..
His tongue hunts
the craters of his
teeth, the squelched
ribs of the roof,
dehydrated apple skin
of gums, which
have given all
of their blood.

"That's Vallejo,
the great poet.
He subsists on
words. He must be
given pain
so he can make it
into poems."

His pen is out
of ink. His mind
aches for something
that cannot be
given through words.

The flying wings
of Spanish grasshoppers
are singing their
ride towards
this moment.

"Cesar, just one
more poem!"

The throne of the gutter,
he renounces it.

Indian Summer Layover in Grandview Heights

Birds by the thousands,
their cries arguing with the air
like a storm
Where do they come off
being so confrontational?
the great trees lift them
into their sky
which only knows it could easily tumble them,
unfamiliar with their ally, the ground

The Woodhill swings down
Mulford, a road you climbed
all your childhood
to school, to friend's houses,
it's slope feels to have slumped,
it's grade lessened, though
the trees you now are awed by how tall they've grown,
they've always been mostly that tall
Your hometown becomes a demonstration
of the pliability of how things are seen
You've begun to experience the difficulty
of any thing's survival
into all that air pressing down,
the miracle of a thing learning
to turn the violence of a storm
into drinking water

The birds that you remember never hearing,
you now glory in their storm,
and the branches too,
stretched into the gray
over the houses and sidewalks
you know by heart

A blonder man sees the sky
and his ambition says
it belongs to him
If he gets there
he is a hero
if he falls
he is a tragedy
if he remains still
he is sodden and trampled
like a piece of grass
stuck to the mud

You are not an ambitious man

Two Little Girls in Yellow Raincoats and the Empty Stone Battlefield of a Chessboard

There's life running all around me,
The peaceable caretakers of genetic code,
God's true scripture, speaking the universe.
I understand none of it.
Above the blue shelter of our sky
All is black, All is rock, All is fire
And here on earth, our soft-bodied earth,
the fire burns off into light:
only lost galaxies held within eyes.

Andy

I read some of "The Philosophy of Andy Warhol" the other day and I think

Andy(I feel like we all have the right to call him that)'s right.

Andy says he doesn't know why people don't like being alone.

Andy says all the James Deans are incapable of inspiring romance (On behalf of failed James Deans everywhere, I agree).

Andy says it's movies are real and real life's the fake.

Andy says that no one even knows what they're feeling till it's over and movies give us a way to feel everything without having to live through it.

Andy says be what you love.

Andy loved plastic dolls.

Andy says things beneath what he says, around and above what he says.

Andy is smart enough to say less and mean more.

Andy Warhol may be Frankenstein.

Andy Warhol may be Dracula, but most likely

Andy Warhol is just one of his mother's broken little dolls.