Poetry

1. An object at rest will stay at rest unless acted on by an outside force.

Sometimes for sentimentality you need a catalyst so I turn
the key but all that follows is that tick tick tick of refusing to
start I know your ticks I know how this ends I’ve seen it
before the trend with mending is that it doesn’t it is much
more profitable to sucker up for scraps than to pay for
fixed problems my problem is I always pay with knots of
balled up hair twisted in carpet count them like pennies I
always invest in that negative trend ignore that tick tick
tick that warning your car won’t start your bomb will
explode my problem is I used to think that our love was
electric but it was not enough to power a car battery you
tell me my problem is hearing I’m inclined to believe you
all I hear all I fear in my heart is that

2. Force equals mass times acceleration.

Before I write the first word I know the ending I know my
pencil will fragment splatter shards marked by a dark dot
please blot before a sniper rifle is aimed between my eyes in
that period that deep sleep that black hole in those infinites
between our instants I want to dive in rotate towards that
singular vortex crush my lungs in dark matter break my back
into an infinite curvature ensnare me in your event horizon
where we’re past now already in the then truthfully I’m already
dead but perhaps I’ll speed up to escape your gravitational
pull it is impossible to outrun light even when broken down
into all my atoms I want to be the apple embedded in your
throat like you are in mine the unfortunate gravity of my
situation is that I want to be so close your eyes become two
dark holes become one

3. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

You are simply settling but I love to watch your pupils
dilate and pretend it is because of me and not chemicals
but your subdued sorrow is a chemical combination too
stronger than any love I could brew it soothes my moods
like the tablespoon of coffee I take every morning hoping I
wake up from last night when I was red minced words I
said I didn’t care what happened but you cared enough
that your words choked and hiccupped you cared enough
to cry tears branded hot white onto your skin please help
me skin my scars because all I can think when you cry is
which witch would I be if I couldn’t concoct crocodile tears
real enough that when I wipe them they gleam

Masked intentions and naïve innocence danced in the late December moonlight
I trail the outline of your scarred, shark bitten arm

I wish that it was a rattlesnake that had latched
Onto my calf – instead of you.
Leaving a visible scar, a treatment plan
Instead of a worn, tattered heart

Masked intentions and naïve innocence danced in the late December moonlight

Your residual venom lingers in my vein, seeping
Into muscle, bone, marrow

I trail the outline of your scarred, shark bitten arm

Snakes act out of necessity –
I think you just liked the adrenaline rush

Masked intentions and naïve innocence danced in the late December moonlight

An oxygen thief – your pleasure, my pain.
I catch glimpses of you
Hiding in myself
When I treat them how you would have.

Masked intentions and naïve innocence danced in the late December moonlight
I trail the outline of your scarred, shark bitten arm

At times I think I am the Mariana Trench,

a place once thought empty
because life shouldn’t survive in a sunless place.
But of course, it is the horrific
creatures that thrive here. The ones
with poisonous tentacles,
and gnarled faces, and no names,
except for the most notorious.

One scientific team in 1985
spent three hours wrestling
with the line of their underwater research craft.
When their mangled vessel saw the light of day again
one of its scars held the tooth of a Megalodon.
The team lied in their reports,
for fear their revelation might be true.

Scientists say if Megalodon
or any of the trench’s inhabitants
were forced to the surface
they would turn into bombs,
exploding before they ever saw the sun,
and cause incalculable ecological damage.
So long as we resist the urge
to plumb the depths, we are, supposedly,
safe from the horrors long thought extinct.

 

No, I am not so understood

as a fact of science. I am
a historical matter, subject to interpretation.

 

I am the 26th of July,

a day when Fidel and Company
failed to take the Moncada Barracks,
and were arrested
and, possibly, won the revolution when Fidel
martyred himself as Bautista’s prisoner.

Ask ten historians about the twenty sixth of July,
and you will get thirty-six answers
about politics and perspectives
and questions that exacerbate your questions
and you will question the definitions of words
like “revolution” and “victory” and “freedom.”

Some say Cuba won its freedom that day,
but if a machete and a bayonet can both
kill you, is one better than the other?
A bayonet has one purpose, to slice
through a heart, but a machete wears
the camouflage of utility
while the sugar canes cheer
and clear a path for him to roll into their capital.

 

No, that’s too grand

for me. I am stagnant and translucent
and I do not warrant this much scrutiny.

 

I am a town in Montana full

of empty Mexican restaurants and lacking any culture
besides a poverty of motivation,
where the sun blinds from its place in the sky,
and threatens to melt the ranchers
through the holes in their moth-eaten jackets,
and all signs of modernity
seem transported from a future of abundance
that will come soon, but not soon enough.

The land is hungry here, threatening
with every step to swallow
the town’s inhabitants
in hopes vegetation will live again
without the help of alien chemicals.
The land throws animal waste
into the water in desperation, but the bodies
humanity returns are inedible, tasting of
disappointment and formaldehyde.

The living people here trade hollow smiles
at the drive through window
and niceties in the firearms section
of the Walmart. All Walmarts
look the same but nobody here knows that for a fact
because they’ve only known one town’s Walmart
because they’ve only know one town.

Nobody has a heroic journey story here.
Nobody remembers how they arrived here.
Nobody is from here, but all anyone remembers is this town.