LAST FIGHT

He ran the engine ragged, true to form,
but silly highway tricks could not distract her.
She asked again: return her to her dorm.
As if he’d picked her up atop a tractor.
So he just u-turned back, without objection;
no college boy, but still: he knew from fated.
He’d always known her road went one direction;
he’d lost her dust the day she graduated.
She’d thought she needed something that he had;
she’d thought she needed him to keep her real,
but, absent stars, the bad boy just looked bad.
On city streets, a wheel is just a wheel.
She couldn't quite come up with what to say.
He revved the engine as he drove away.

ROOM

The boy in the wheelchair wears special pants;
the boy in the wheelchair wears special pants.
They have one long leg and one stump leg;
they have one long leg and one stump leg.
Special, boy? Have wears the leg the leg.
And long, they wheelchair pants. In one, stump one.

So he lost half a leg defending our country;
so he lost half a leg defending our country
And now he wants to ride the subway with us;
and now he wants to ride the subway with us.
Now, a subway country, and leg to ride the with.
Us wants defending, so he half he. Lost.

His girlfriend wheels him through the doors;
his girlfriend wheels him through the doors.
We all give them plenty of room;
we all give them plenty of room.
Of doors we wheels through him.
The girlfriend, his room, all. Them give plenty.

He have through with defending us, so we give him half the pants.
Now girlfriend wheels a wheelchair to the long subway ride.
They them plenty special room, one wants.
One boy in all, and he wears his stump.
The leg, the leg, the leg—
and doors. Of our lost country.

UNIMPRESSING

I wish they’d know my whole self quick
for, over time, I’m very pleasant.
But first impressions with them stick
so I am unemployed, at present.

HURRY GOD

My money stalks me while I sleep.
It’s closing quickly on my soul.
So: if God wants my soul to keep,
He’d best be getting on a roll.

DIVORCE COURT

When love is lost, rich spouses lose discretion,
and lock each other out of their new houses.
They let their anger rule their public battles
and waste their therapy on private vengeance
and waster their fortunes fighting over dollars.
The end of love leaves quite a poor impression.

We foolish young folks carry the impression
that love grants us great powers of discretion;
that love is blind and doesn’t care for dollars.
But please do put those padlocks on your houses.
Don’t think you are immune at all to vengeance;
you need to steel yourself for ugly battles.

Yet…if we spend time contemplating battles
we walk away with quite a bleak impression,
believing love leads endlessly to vengeance.
Perhaps we ought to exercise discretion
before we tear down other people’s houses.
Perhaps our jealous eyes begrudge their dollars.

But wait! How did they gain those deadly dollars?
Does not gold flow, like blood, from rich men’s battles?
They use it up with building extra houses
so they don’t have to share; that’s my impression.
(Though I’m still sorely lacking in discretion.)
These buccaneers deserve the Court’s swift vengeance.

And yet, in calling down this holy vengeance
Do I not also slave myself to dollars?
How could I so abuse my own discretion
to waste time recapitulating battles,
thus giving the unfortunate impression
I care at all what happens to their houses—

No! I say; good riddance to those houses,
and let foreclosure serve as public vengeance;
let everyone depart with the impression
that life is shit if lived only for dollars.
I’ve had it up to here with rich folks’ battles;
I’ve lost the heart to grant them that discretion.

There is no love in houses built on dollars,
so they deserve their vengeance and its battles;
love makes a poor impression on discretion.

SHE JUST CALLED AGAIN

“I called to ask you if you are still writing;
perhaps you’ve given up on earning money.
You waste your time on all this petty fighting,
composing one-line jokes that are not funny,
and dreaming of the life you could be living
if you got off your ass, put on your shoes,
and got down to the business of forgiving.
Give it a try. What have you got to lose?"
I didn’t take her call: ignored the ringing
and let my voicemail catch her latest nagging.
She’s left them since she left me, each one stinging;
these messages have filled my cell to sagging.
So now they’re spilling out onto the table,
like I’d be spilling, too, if I were able.

WHERE YOU ARE

Five or so hours from now
my uncle, seated next to his ex-wife of twenty-odd years, will almost ask me, in his way, just how long I intend to wait before I bring someone special to meet him.

Now
halfway between the farm and home, I am stuck in a small town’s annual traffic jam, behind a parade of teenage would-be kings and queens who wave and smile from their perches at the tops of back seats of convertibles, preening down main street in Colon, Michigan, at five miles per hour.

In eight months
I will blow straight through this town without stopping, and it will be spring, and I will be distracted, my heart so recently broken by a girl I can’t even imagine right

now
trapped at the back of a parade. I wait, and wonder how many times I’ve failed to look up at the right moment, boarded the wrong train, chosen the wrong school, driven past you but been looking at the wrong side of the road, away from you and toward loneliness.

In twenty-six or so hours
I will be driving too fast on a dark country road and run over a possum’s tail.

In four years and nine months
I will marry you, and we will be happy.

In five hours
I will meet the woman who broke my uncle’s heart. They will sit next to each other, and smile at me in a way that is beyond happiness, beyond sad knowingness of life, beyond the wisdom that comes with age; beyond my understanding. I will wonder which of them called the other first, to begin the reconciliation.

But here, and now
the parade does not abate, as if smiling is always the same thing as happiness. And today, it is. And here, in Colon, any of them could be king or queen; I'll be gone before they know, before the smiles of this moment give way to wisdom and time.

A MARXIST VILLANELLE

The greatest art is art that no one sees.
This art, whose mark on men of consequence
is small, exists in the basic mysteries

we keep inside ourselves. It flows with ease
from callused hands on sunburned continents,
this greatest art, this art that no one sees.

The supplest odes are written to the breeze
as blowers cast an eye toward coughing vents,
their verse devoured by noise, sweet mysteries

that vanish as composed. And in Belize,
the heir to Rembrandt's strong strokes paints a fence.
The greatest art is art that no one sees.

Alone, in fallow fields, on war-scarred knees,
a dancer reels with practiced eminence.
So many muse-touched hearts die mysteries.

Great art, it's true, adorns known histories,
and well-viewed artists gird our elegance.
But the greatest art is art that no one sees;
it’s fleeting, birthed in piecemeal mysteries.

PARADELLE OF A PLASTIC SURGEON

He believed in the sanctity of a face;
he believed in the sanctity of a face,
but not of a soul, so he slowly cut away the flesh;
but not of a soul, so he slowly cut away the flesh.
Slowly, in the face of a soul he cut away
he believed the flesh, but not so of a sanctity.

His own world was full to bursting;
his own world was full to bursting
with starry death symbols, to which the stars were blind;
with starry death symbols, to which the stars were blind.
The blind world was bursting with death,
full to his own symbols, to which were starry stars.

With a scalpel, he carved his initials;
with a scalpel, he carved his initials
into the cheekbone of a woman he once had loved;
into the cheekbone of a woman he once had loved.
He had into a woman with the scalpel of his initials;
he carved a once-loved cheekbone.

The slowly bursting cheekbone in the flesh
initials the stars. He carved not so full into a death
the symbols of a starry scalpel.
He loved a cut-away woman, which were his face,
of a soul he had once believed.
But to, of his own sanctity, he was blind.

THE MARK

We know, because we feel it in our own improving souls: redemption is possible. But who is truly redeemed, and who is only pretending? Good murderers and bad murderers look too much alike, and so we wait for the invention of telepathic machines, which could see into the minds of the seemingly repentant; wait, for the permanent tattoos we can etch upon the skins of those who are faking; wait, until we may build our prison for the branded few whose filthy souls stare us squarely in our faces, their shadows giving our light its stark brilliance; we will shine so brightly on the other side of the walls.