Marfa Lights

West Texas Breakfast wakes us.
The road rides the land, its hills,
over the old dinosaur shells.
The universe was made
to become aware of itself
and then die. Dinos proved incapable
so God blew them to smithereens
and passed the tasks to us,
the gunbarrel He puts in His own mouth.

Out in Marfa, the ghost lights are burning.
Stars whisper secrets to the desert
that the city can't be trusted with.
This is something else though, something
we repeat only to ourselves,
light from Route 67 caught
in North America's darkest sky.
The compass finds its destiny.
The feet step. I read the road.

Van Gogh: giving bad artists an excuse to think they're neglected since 1898

It is an appropriate response
to a rejection slip
to tell them loudly
in your mind
"Fuck You People"
because you're a genius
and it's all politics
and you gotta know somebody
and you don't know anybody
and what the hell does anybody know anyway?

You know Vincent Van Gogh.
He's a close personal friend.
He's you,
who will blow his unknown
genius brains out
in a dark blue garden
redecorating the sky
with a spatter of new stars
and brain tissue.
They'll scrape bits of skull
from the walls
of his pages
and smatter it into
a posthumous retrospective
but you're not so lucky

cause nobody pays
108 million dollars
for poetry
at Sothebys.

Pale Blue Dot

Isn't it funny
that from outer space
it is the earth
that looks like heaven?

Questions Are Remarks

Questions are sides you're afraid to take
Questions are statements you're unable to make
Questions are curiosities you're trying to fake
Questions are gambles with nothing at stake
So bend your sickle into a rake
Drive a point through your sentences for everyone's sake.

Your breath can't support a declarative thought
They die in your mind and what have you got
A body filled with nothing except what it bought
A net full of butterflies easily caught
A life gaining nothing which after it sought
A wine never matured but only did rot
Don't surrender your battles before they've been fought
Force your heart through and become what you're not
Let impulse fly before it's forgot
Send your words like an arrow definitively shot
Believe what you feel and forget what you're taught

The War On Kids

Why do the shootings happen in schools? because they are made by the same people who make the prisons and have the same chairs and tables. Because they have no windows and no wood. The children are amputated by the blank, textureless walls and subsequently their own eyes like nothing they see and their imaginations, schooled by darkness, can only articulate themselves through violence. They fire bullets into the dead walls to hear the only thing that has resonance: grim fame and death.

In a place where nothing grows, where no one listens, where the teachers are police, the loudest sound you can make is a well publicized murder. If these environments were more alive, if there were knotted wood and old brown books and trees imploring against the windows the kids could not understand murder because they would understand that the world around them is indeed a world and is alive. It's a problem of alienation and big guns are a symptom of that. These children are so powerful they never have to leave the throne of their armchairs and are fed genocidal images on command. Increasingly the schools are incorporated and so the minutes and the mentorships and the epiphanies are portioned out according to policy. Spontaneity and beauty is actively discouraged. At a time when people are already heinously self-conscious, that self-consciousness has been stoked and embellished to a point where by the time one makes it to the end of puberty (if), they have forgotten entirely who they were born to be and so can only relate to each other in terms of consumptions. What you buy is who you are. They can be whoever they want, as long as it will not ostracize them from the group and said identity can be sold to them.

Their inner world has been erased too. Words, which used to give them a way to share their hearts, have been withheld from them. Language is the way we detect an decipher what's encrypted inside of us. The whole language could fall in the space of one generation, one technological leap. When confronted with the forgotten, threatening traces of real language, the real texture of living things, they will learn to reply with guns, with seeming power and dominion over nature. We can't seem to locate our old hearts, the hearts perished by indoctrination, and so we drive the hearts of the innocent against the overhead projector screens and dry erase boards smeared with the afternoon's answers in an attempt to get them to speak to us, to know that there was blood in those veins after all. Our hearts will be written in a confusion of blood across the inoffensive walls.

The schools have been made into war zones, but not by the kids.

Poem About Our Politics

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Girls

An apartments the size of a grave
and just as expensive. It costs a life
to be buried on Avenue A.
Two girls reunite in their street corner booth

where many nights have been spent confiding 
about boys, the plausible deniability
of taxicab blowjobs, flights home over
one bridge or another.

She's just returned from a semester in Africa.
The unencumbered smiles beaming from
the children's faces linger like a sunburn.
Her friend is agonizing over a guy who believes in her

wholeheartedly. She commands him like a drone
with the send button on her phone.
She asks her friend if she saw the article in the Times 
about women in Afghanistan who die for their poetry?

Is it still warring over there? the friend says.
Her laugh is ambushed by a new feeling, something like
regret at having allowed herself to be wrapped
in the personality of her dresses for so many years.

First thing when she got home she pulled her grandmother’s old fur
out of storage and wrangled the antlers onto the cat
but the smile didn't come. Tonight, we're going dancing.
The boys are meeting us there. Does that work?

She nods. A button is pushed and a car carries them
to a warehouse in Bushwick which twenty years ago
was a wonderful crack house. Oh, it's so good to see you again!
She laughs and pretends she is living the night like it's her last

the whole time thinking about a young girl
across the world speaking her poem
into a telephone so someone else can hear it
before the line goes dead.