I met a ghost named Lazarus

he was once a boy wild and turbulent

he was then a laborer who hammered every window, door, and port

nails and knives 

sailors warned of his rages and storms

boarded up at night everything he grew frightened of

one day the sky kicked in and he was a man

he foraged for years for a love given so rarely 

he gave away his skin

came back with a heart that didn’t recognize the bones and cartilage 

he lauded my capabilities in the beginning 

but he couldn’t locate any miracles inside of me 

dullness and an absence of coffee I waited at the booth 

and then moved the stars and earth to meet him 

aglow from the moon on the back porch 

he said your hope was something I birthed before you 

if you had only recognized it 

The wind has died

 

- Charles Simic 

in this lifetime and the next 

I am a spectacle of dust, depth, black husk 

asking the moon did we make it home yet 

You had spirits take the front teeth out of you

I wish I knew what god could fix it.

If I had understood the stars in their beginnings

our dark passageway could have gone on living.

And when I lie awake staring at the night line

you stay out of my peripheral sight

blacked and bruised from the tides of our past lives.

Is the question open ended and unworn?

Can your fangs take back everything I withdrew?

Did the spirits resign all of God from you?

Open Season

ICE agents are building America back from the ground up

Taking the reigns from the police pyramid scheme and imperialist soil dreams

‘Take lives, alive or not!'

'Shake and throttle the social contract safety nets!’

‘Soldiers of land placement enforcement put my community into bankruptcy!’

The weather of the foreseeable open season:

snow, rain, freeze, sleet, gun range fire, funeral pyres

the merchants don’t miss a beat

- ‘OBEY! Wait not yet…sike!’

- ‘Let’s check your background, before you deploy settle in, bite into the

void....'

- Homeward bound rupture?

‘Broken ribs and Jesus in a headlock, you and I’s fellow man twice removed.'

- ‘Good for you.’

- Domestic explosion? Are you a loose and lost cannon? What is the

bandwidth?

‘Dear leader, the feminine I took care of back then was a symptom of

structural disturbance. I do best as a carpenter as thick as God’s boots to

stomp my home in. We now submit to wail and worship.’

- ‘Glad you took care of it and broke them into allegiance.’

- No name?

‘My signature is every man is ready made.’

- ‘Sign right here.’

- Who dropped you into this part of town, into this space as the planet

levitates?

‘I’m mad. I’m game.’

- ‘Sounds good to me.’

- Sleeked masks, high pay, brother your words are a grenade, so what do

you say?

‘Yippie ki yay! On the floor! Up against the wall!’

- ‘That’s the answer we have all been waiting for!’

- ‘Now remember sons, every interaction is a possible weapon.’

‘Sergeants, we love the phantom limbs and haunted plains that host the

Americas. Our adrenaline of USA was born for the new era of citizen and

constitutional reconstruction. We love the fear. We’ll take it from here.’

what kept me alive was the hope of the pulse of midnight dancing

at least I grew into my jawline, caught in the mirror recognize time is meant to redesign you

The life you dreamed and the one you woke up to 

in the morning 

soaked to the bone in the attic 

the search party still remembers 

you calling out to them through the static 

I’ve been sitting in the dark waiting for the light to come in, bad strategy

Let’s cut and try again

Because bread was so difficult to come by 

let alone wine 

I settled myself in for a ritual 

that out of all my catastrophes 

there would emerge the best miracles

when all the gifts wrap around you like cellophane that no one will end up opening

 

You dream of a mad yet loving country between us when my most permanent memories are scorn and blood seeping under my armor from your words and borders

I've used up all the love inside every emergency and ocean that saw promise in me

I didn't want to lose and I didn't want to bargain

I didn't want to try again

so I padlocked the box and I returned it

Mr. Rogers is On Neighborhood Patrol Watch

 

Mister, may I call you mister? 

‘Fellow I’m your neighbor Roger, what’s troubling your trembling? I won’t question. I’ll just listen to your troubles and the pulse of your vibrato.’

Roger they are killing the helpers

life here isn’t in disguise anymore

they murdered two angels 

a poet and a healer 

they are desperate to deflect they cry:

‘a state terrorist, harming our brave armed men!’ 

‘a state terrorist, who didn’t even salute those red and white and blue angry eyes!'

Roger I’ll be honest this seems familiar in my recent intake of life afar

the pattern of Gaza

sledgehammering and massacring the lives and loves of doctors, 

students, artists, bakers, tea makers, 

booksellers, EMTs, family archivists 

an International assembly (yes really) 

claimed no helpers or angels existed in the strip 

a land without people before the chosen they labeled

luckily because of the 21st century people saw right through their claims

who did they think they were fooling when they said  

that humanity is not among mothers, fathers, aunts and children 

grandparents, olives, texts, soap, makeshift kitchens, 

prayers, cats, hummus and Jesus draped in gauze

Roger these weren’t normal reactionaries spewing this

they despise the masked men as long as they are American 

they contradict love and borders and nationality and familiarity 

Roger I think as I speak this, they may come for me

they are patrolling speech because they want impunity to not grieve 

they’d rather steal and gather skin and organs like crops

then ask their own heart beat for empathy for Palestinians

and eventually here the pattern will be completed  

warehoused immigrants to harvest the hard harvests to come

and supply tissue and biologies 

erasing lineages is the conquerors lust fulfillment 

come first for the residents who do not claim occupied

the obsessed with possession of Palestine 

I cannot in my heart recognize

those slandered, their so called backward lives that they accuse: 

‘They are here to steal our standing, our souls, our patriotism, 

rewrite our borders, OURS’

Roger does this sound familiar? 

They’re claiming birthright and nationalist rallies? 

like the recent descents of the US democracy events 

fifty percent closed their eyes to 

and the other fifty spilt fighting themselves as rats in shoes on a sinking ship

Charlottesville, the capital on the 6th

they won Roger they did

why did no one halt these marches 

expose the architects of the coup 

that transformed in stardom and legislation

Mister among us are there collaborators? 

How else can a modern holocaust get funded?

artists and nurses of the highest spiritual order do not die 

for other writers and doctors to be exterminated 

borders mapped as weapons to be cut off and quartered 

the people who claim the holy land 

and the people who claim the greatest in terrain both as birthrights

wear and divide the same cloth

are the same tattered coin

the same tired mirror Roger 

how do I live without the camouflage holding on anymore?

‘Fellow friend, do not tremble or get stuck in frightened vibrato. 

You must love and bear witness and hold those exposed delicate and tearful. 

Whether passed, whether bleeding, whether alive. 

We mourn, we break, we love, we remember. We’re tender, we survive.’

I looked at all those alternative lives like a gift horse in the jawline

that ran out of time and got taken out back to be shot

but it escaped it’s captors like a landslide 

it hangs around a meadow of vines, willows 

soft clouds and beaming grass 

After five days 

a low night 

a faithless light 

I dreamt of your return 

You had spirits take the front teeth out of you 

I wish I knew what god could fix it

I spend most of the time at the far side of the windowless room 

near where I put a hole through a needle that lead back to the moon

If you could have hit me with gold and hallowed dust 

the pain would have seen me through enough 

they caught me in this light one day 

told me to no longer move

I have remained a thousand lives this way

somewhere in the past I was pulled onto the ground of snow with blood coming out and said 'can you believe I made it?' with no one around