if it doesn't come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don't do it.
unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don't do it.
if you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don't do it.
if you're doing it for money or
fame,
don't do it.
if you're doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don't do it.
if you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don't do it.
if it's hard work just thinking about doing it,
don't do it.
if you're trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

if you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
if it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

if you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you're not ready.

don't be like so many writers,
don't be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don't be dull and boring and
pretentious, don't be consumed with self-
love.
the libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
don't add to that.
don't do it.
unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don't do it.
unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don't do it.

when it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

there is no other way.

and there never was.

like a snail with a shell of sticks

    — she loads them on her back —

Like a camel with a hump of sticks

    — on her back, on her back —

Like a horse with a knight of sticks and a stick for a sword

Where is she taking this load of sticks?

    — on her hump, on her hump —

She has no house, where is she taking the house she doesn’t have?

    — in the fire she is taking it in the fire —

In the fire she is making a poem entirely out of sticks on fire and it goes like this

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

^{What you think is the point is not the point at all but only the beginning of the sharpness.
Flann O’Brien, The Third Policeman}

It’s hard for
the master
sharpener after
all that work
to have the shaft
taken for the point.
People run themselves
through right and
left and don’t
know they do.
The point is
sticking out their
back and they’re
still waiting
for it, looking
down the track.

^{Whitney cottage, Hermitage Artist Retreat}

You could write about the windows
all nine of them. You could write about 

the gulf, red tide strangling Florida’s 
shore, the opaque eyes of dead fish

caught in the algal bloom. You could write 
about the sky—long as a yawn, sky blue

chasing cerulean away, stretched wisps
of white determined to be the canvas 

for another sunset showstopper. But the body
has its own narrative in mind. Neurons hustling 

pain blank out any page. No writing can be done 
when an electric snare corrals the brain. No ear 

searching for song while one temple pulses 
an arrhythmic lament. Mercifully there’s triptan, 

a black curtain over this inflammatory act. Strike
through today, uncap the pen again tomorrow.

^{“It isn’t right to despise one’s country
I don’t deserve to be loved and left.”
—Faysal Cumar Mushteeg}

Say you are reading Barthes, or rereading Barthes, 
two acts which are hardly independent of each other.  
Say it’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, and you are all aflush,  
your finger tracing the outline of flight, Either woe or well-being, he writes,  
Sometimes I have a craving to be engulfed.  
And even though this could mean anything, you think you know what it means 
to shiver with well-practiced yearning.   
Not for provincial beginnings, nor Moroccan boys,  
but for lip-shaped crescent moons left on teacups. 
An oil splash of a man with scarred hands.  
In this poem, he doesn’t have a name.  
Your own dumb luck pools around your ankles. We skirt around it, a kindness.  
It disgusts you, the depth of this need,  
like the slick walls of a well.   
Your bones ache most when held. 
Eventually, you’ll have to stop impersonating a skimmed stone.  
There are other ways of parting. 
You annotate Barthes annotating Keats, half in love with easeful death. 
Over-identify until you are light-headed, until you remember a hot, loud classroom.  
Breathless bluetooth blues, a free school meal in your belly, 
the easy cruelty of teachers at under-performing schools,  
so unlike their counterparts in the movies,  
those loose-tied English teachers who promise you 
a world so much bigger than this. So much easier than this. 
Chipped neon nail polish competing against your prized set of highlighters,  
you mistake a poem for a blueprint. First the odes, then the Jane Campion film.  
That night, you dreamt of lavender fields, bruised eyelids,  
the shape of Rome’s dying sunlight on a poet’s grave.  

                    Here lies one whose name was writ in water 

No name. No date. This was all Keats wanted. Convinced they knew better,  
his friends contextualised their grief, added the rest.  
This Grave contains all that was mortal, of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET,  
who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his heart,  
at the Malicious Power of his enemies,  
desired these words to be Engraven on his Tomb Stone.  
You think of how casually our bodies are overruled by kin, by blood,  
by heartaches disguised as homelands.  
How you can count the years you have lived for yourself on one hand.  
History is the hammer. You are the nail. 
In another dream, your mother is barefoot and young,  
wearing a scarf the colour of a wound. By Fontana del Moro, a Moor adrift  
on a conch shell leans over her shoulder,  
as she unpeels her wet dress from her legs.  
Unmoored, she laughs at this new country calling itself an old one.  
These fictions she tosses like loose coins.  
We don’t dare dip our hands further than they can reach.  
Her gold bracelets slide down the silk flags of her wrists.  
Nightly, you strive to write a loose translation of this. 
Arterial blood is theatrical, like the desire for a time before your time.  
The world will not stop when you do, or even before.  
Yes, being the one who survived, the one who made it to this side,  
is a full-time job.  
But no-one asked you to take it.  
Diaspora is witnessing a murder without getting blood on your shirt.  
Your body is the evidence of its absence.  
Of course, there are other definitions.  
Namely, a freshly scraped scalp, dome of your rock,  
the inevitability of fajr and late-night texts,  
each lie about how good the exchange rate was.  
That time he cried telling you the story of why his family had left Sweden,  
the image of a younger brother held underwater by wild-eyed classmates.  
Definitions, like flags, lay claim to what has always existed.  
For now, these will do. You can’t speak for the future.  
It barely speaks for you.  
Pick a mask and ask me to wear it. You only know love like this,  
an interpretation you can’t outrun.  
A footnote to haunt the page.  

I want this job because 
it sounds like something I could do 
and I’m hungry, physically. 
I have extensive experience 
in studying what water says as it plummets.
Yes, I can carry more than 35lbs, but what 
does that have to do with anything? 
I’ve wrestled angelic beings 
and the nine lives of pathological compulsion.
I have sworn an oath against the roman calendar 
and its derivative mutations. 
I can be firm as cold turkey. 
My two letters of recommendation are
f and u. They can be used in surf, which 
is one way to step on what wants me drowned. 
I have heard the hinges of the doors of the sea 
creak, so I read a book beneath a tree. 
I think a lie can be worse than murder but also 
I have never died. I can definitely think of a time 
when I had to multitask while under immense pressure, 
but would prefer not to. My goal is to recall my past lives 
and be free in each. My strength is being scattered 
and rooted at the same time. My weakness is entertaining 
a party of every kind of consequence. 
My kink is a copless land where no one hoards anything.
I can start on any day you are prepared to train.
I can end on any day that ends in why not, 
for real, I don’t need this, 
the people got me you know, 
I’m with the people. 

Editorial Assistant.  Executive Assistant. Administrative Assistant. Writing
Center Director.  Writing Teacher. Receptionist.  Poetry Fellow.  Technical
Writer.  Barista.  Waitress.  Applying  for three jobs a day  doesn’t get me a
job.  I get an offer from the diner and then the diner burns down.  I flop an
interview  at the local  Subway.  I make a couple  hundred a month writing
blogs for hotels  I cannot afford.  I write a  blog about Benjamin  Franklin’s
Ghost House.  It’s a chalk  outline in the ground where his house  was torn
down.  I have a   Ghost Life.  My friends  all get jobs.  I know  because  they
each come to  the bar with a polished eye around their neck.  The eyes can
foresee  only positive  futures.  In the future,  my  friends  eat  takeout and
rescue  a dog.  They  have children  they’ve  made  on purpose  and  call  by
fashionable  names.  I try to  look into  their job-eyes,  and  the  eyes  close
their bulbous lids.  The lids make a horrible smacking sound like someone
closing their mouth to go hmmmm—then not saying what everyone knows
they  want  to say.  Was my phone  voice too  weak?  Did my neck  look too
brittle  to hold  a  full-size job-eye?  The lease  is running  out  much  faster
than my life is. Every day,  my apartment gets one-cubic-inch smaller. The
walls  get  so short  I only have  room for the bed.  I lie there and dream of
having any real job. 

We painted dawn into midnight  
Out of cement ceilings  
we made skylights  
From gravel, we crafted fine and delicate chandeliers  
hung them with fishing line  
so they appeared to float in midair  
We turned copper piping into rings  
Venus circling our fingers  
the oxidation turned our digits green  
our limbs transforming  
into ferns and orchids  
We breathed and our condensation  
Created clouds  
Our tears fed the sea  
We prayed to all the living things 
We sat in silence with the trees  
Our feet rooting into the ground  
To touch the highest energy  
The evergreens and us  
We breathed in tandem  
And inside our lungs  
Sprung a forest of veins  
Mimicking their cousins’ limbs  
We sprouted two intricate flowers  
In our minds 
For the left and right hemispheres  
And we hung our thoughts there  
Believing that the petals would keep them safely tucked away  
We recognized ourselves 
Didn’t need mirrors to see our likeness  
Even the dirt felt like us  
The sand, our bones in a trillion pieces 
We walked atop these beaches 
Sinking in, their legacy holding us 
There was silence  
and we were not afraid  
There was peace  
And we were not anxious 
There was a world  
We did not conquer

Out of the ashes,
rose a helicopter. 
An unwelcome phoenix. 

Surveillance feeds on death.
Grows stronger each time we mourn.
Learns to be more nimble each time it feeds.

Each murder, a thinly veiled fundraiser.

A vehicle to assuage guilt,
an admonishment with adornments,
A pittance for our pain—

—And, somehow, a payday to a patronizing protection racket.

The long arm of the law extends itself
to tuck us in with a sniper rifle, after a 6 hour stand off,
Sings us a 9 second lullaby in the dead of night, and now we sleep forever.

I wonder,
How an agency can have the tools to zoom in close enough to see the crust in my eyes
Yet still somehow manage to get the wrong person, so often. 

It’s almost like,
The cruelty is the point 
A wink and a nod to their homies, to let them know they still got it.

They watch us mourn in 4K.
Show force to “keep peace” 
like an ugly victory lap

But don’t worry, the speeches will be so pretty y’all!
The statements will be strongly worded,
the censures will be swift and, still, hollow. 

That’s how it works, right?
Pithy sayings turn into a police state?
The phoenix’s wings make the windows rattle at night as a reminder to grieve silently.

They see us, 
and we should be thankful
or else.

I’m not brave because I leave gently. It’s not mercy

when the kill lives serving self. I told my therapist

I’m through with villain portraiture but I keep leaving promises

to wilt. Even this is vanity—garden of self-importance. I’m rambling.

What I mean to say: Love is larger than declaration. & chrysanthemum

don’t thrive in starless night. Who am I to light the sky? I know, no one

loves to end any more than we live to die, but I’m learning not to clutch

the ground so fierce. To trust life is a series of orbits;

worship mercy in routine. I know this part like lost love:

gripping sheets, curling toes, tongue feels righteous but don’t fill

empty space. All hollow goings. Carving fresh cavities to become

known. Nimble fingers, sigh & sweat. Fill me full

of hope. After, glow

again fading.

Back to wilting,

gentle kill.

You up?

There is no silence lovelier than the one 
That flowers upon a flowering tree at night. 
There is no silence known beneath the sun 
That is so strange to bear, nor half so white. 
If I had all that silence in my heart, 
What yet unfinished heavens I could sing! 
My words lift up and tremble to depart, 
Then die in air, from too much uttering.
It must have been beneath a tree like this 
An angel sought a girl in Galilee, 
While she looked up and pondered how the kiss 
Of God had come with wings and mystery. 
It may be that a single petal fell. 
Heavy with sorrow that it could not tell.