Look at the homie, 

                                        even when in a gang 

              he came home to crack Nietzsche, Beyond

              Good and Evil, Will 

to Power. Believing everybody dies at twenty-four,

not seeing a future in pump-faking, even then.

              You ever try to read philosophy high?

Gone to the hole and hoped for the foul,

                                        wished only to finish. 

After rolling joints in two Zig-Zags, 

after an hour of starching pants,

he transferred trollies and buses.

                                             He’s going places.                   

Look at homie, trying to fix himself. Thinks,

out of repetition comes variation. 

         

                                        It takes a lot of effort

to look

                     like you’re not trying.

It should be an air ball

                                        to go to college

               at twenty-one, the father of two, just

                                     to play basketball. When

most folks say they want to change the world

                                       they mean their own.

            Wet Charles dropped by the homeboys
in his busted high-top burgundy Chucks, hand 

            out for a buck, or two, from us young bucks, 
also rocking Chucks, trying to cop a couple ends
for a few gallons of gas or diapers for his newborn
daughter. Wet Charles could spin into splits. Quick
to say

             he never begged, traded, or borrowed
anything he couldn’t first steal. The highest point
in many homes is the attic. The jester’s hat
            jingles. The dope fiend’s pipe rings.

Is it the fire or the smoke that makes a comedian?
Even when I mad-dogged Charles, telling him
            to kick rocks with them ashy-as-hell Chucks 
            I never actually looked into the stones

of his eyes. I had known him since childhood, 
we all had, before he began chasing a rock 
                                     up and down a hill.

Stoned every day. Think of addiction as never being
able to find your phone. We were not embarrassed

by Charles but by what we might one day become.
The way bigger sand tiger shark embryos
            feed on smaller embryos in the womb,

we served classmates we had joked with in gym.
Slanging dope smokes up your sense of humor.
We never understood why the police chuckled

“circumstances” as the reason for harassing us
when we stood in a circle smoking on the block.

            Charles didn’t dozen about dope, just surged
            in his circuit, looking for ways to get high.

            Biking from the trolley to the Four Corners 
of Death, the intersection of Euclid and Imperial:

Greene Cat Liquor, Réal taco shop, the gas station,
                                    what was Huffman’s BBQ,
            where the only constant were entrepreneurial
            young men setting up corners in front of constantly
changing businesses with hastily painted front windows,

            where the persistence of the C
            in “Chicken Shack”
            could still be seen on the glass door
            of the new no contract cell phone store.

Archetypes have a way of worming into beauty.
The flaw is the small writing of a hero.
            Through what crack did Orpheus
                        sneak a minute fire from hell?

The sweet chemical scent of someone smoking rock
in a broken light bulb is a plasticity I can’t forget.
I didn’t pay any mind to the moralism of Nancy Reagan’s 
eggs or D.A.R.E. commercials in the eighties.

As we went most of those dampened days lighting 
something, or other, listening to the mercurial philosophies  
                               of Ice Cube, Wu-Tang, Spice-1,

            or Sugar Free. We smoked water, or what a hip
                         toxicologist might nasally call angel dust.
            You can be full of agua and not well.
If you’re not careful, time will find you a fiend.

I’m told
that rappers name themselves
            now with Lil or Young followed
            by randomly chosen abstractions: Lil e.g.
                                                           Young i.e.

                         Back in the stone age of hip-hop,
                         in the early nineties,
late eighties, so the stories go, rappers

            went into the kitchen and whatever
                         they had milk and honey
            of, voila, they had their stage name.

I was just another empty, scattered wrapper
on a sidewalk in the city.

            That’s how I became Slim Jim.
Though, that was more about stealing
cars than beef. 

We would spend summer evenings at the wooden
roller coaster in Pacific Beach, never going
on the ride but circling the beautiful
boardwalk that was only slightly less majestic

                     than the older homie’s
            primer-painted Glasshouse

convertible with three tall
white walls and one ever altering spare.

Everything was so gorgeous in the back 
seat of that Impala.

The moon was so brilliant in the sky.  
                         It was quite the shiner.

I’d watch the women around my way 
rub petroleum jelly on their forehead,

then their cheekbones, before a fight. 
Taking off your golden earrings
             does not make hearing

the truth any easier, but that water 
made the bass and elasticated cadence
of “Pocket Full of Stones” even more

resonant as we waded the highways home
from the rollercoaster with a trunk full of

18” box speakers rattling our bodies:
six sixteen-year-olds in the cramped 
back seat of a Datsun Wagon trying 
to release our own trapped music.

Other lads, their ways are daring:
      Other lads, they’re not afraid;
Other lads, they show they’re caring;
      Other lads—they know a maid.
Wiser Jock than ever you were,
      Will’s with gayer spirit blest,
Robin’s kindlier and truer,—
      Why should I love you the best?

Other lads, their eyes are bolder.
      Young they are, and strong and slim,
Ned is straight and broad of shoulder,
      Donald has a way with him.
David stands a head above you,
      Dick’s as brave as Lancelot,—
Why, ah why, then, should I love you?
      Naturally, I do not.

I never feel so alive as when I am    
writing and have no right    
answer for what this means   
for the lives of others, how

to live in the after which after    
all means the now of our living   
together when together    
means death for all

those forbidden from   
entering the home so    
methodically built until after   
they are dead. Only 

after will locked doors    
swing amply open to   
admit the murdered    
into rooms of vast

crushed comfort, whose    
inhabitants eat and sleep   
on furnishings carved   
with corpses, stepping

with hospitable sorrow   
around the bodies of the   
dead, speaking dirges   
into the phantom

darkness. What happens 
in the quiet grave where  
the living make themselves   
at home, where noisily

they intend to thrive, where  
the poem itself concedes 
to suffering so it might persist   
in blazing against it.

The autumn equinox has reached my land,
And on the sundial weary night and day
Resolve their quarrel for the nonce, and lay
Twelve hours of sun and dark on either hand.
The yellow smoke of fern is blowing away
Over the hilltops with the vagrant band
Of southward flying ducks.   But understand
Though all these follow summer, I shall stay.

Go thou with them, I know thy hopes are set
On warmer gardens than this fading place,
But someone must remain, lest earth forget
Her calendar, and sleep in the embrace
Of endless winter; lest the snow efface
The river’s memory of the violet.

Bowed beneath the dead'ning weight of Woe, 
Crawling 'neath the galling yoke of Owe:
     Obligation's hand
     Beats him with his wand,
And his restless bed his burden knows! 

'Neath stern Justice's ever grinding heels, 
In Debt's prison now he sadly kneels;
     Fettered with Due's claim,
     Pilloried with shame! 
And no tongue can tell pain he feels.

Fortunate is he if now he bear
Not a greater burden than this care;—
    If his soul is free
    From sin's misery
He may work 'til life again is fair. 

My native tongue doesn’t allow
imperfect tense, so it’s difficult
to say how something might used
to happen but no more. Elizabeth
used to walk among these trees.
She used to walk among these trees
but doesn’t anymore. Elizabeth
is no more though she used to be.

She doesn’t anymore but she used
to walk among these trees because
she used to be happy but only
for a short while before she descended
in despair. Elizabeth we could say
used to walk among these trees
because they made her happy.
Elizabeth used to be but no more.

I slapped my chickens with a ruler
as they looked at their privates—
they were ashamed and walked
as if they were kings.
I had punctured the chest
of the cavity rooster.

My dog was licking my ankles
and giving me wedding rings.
It was too much to care—
so I took money from women
by pretending that I was a husband
and then left my dog in my place
when I woke up in their beds.

I saved dimes in their mouths, though,
and then I’d pull their chains—
I’d pretend that I was the tooth fairy
then take all their money.

I.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

II.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

III.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

A four-armed flutist took me
to the blue avatar: stone-blue
monkey, whiskers silver,
broken beads silver–
paint dashed by the artist on cheap paper.
Bought for a few annas, God
kneels, looks left. Intense concentration.
His ink hands rip open his chest,
pull skin aside like a velvet curtain–
Rama and Sita alive
at his core. And what devotion shall
my flesh show, and my broken-open breast.
His blueblack tail flicks upward, its dark
tip a paintbrush loaded blue.