National Book Foundation
I I
I I

We Monsters

At work every day for weeks I’ve been drowning.
People pestering me for answers to questions that have
answers they don’t want.

Yes, you have mice.
Yes, you have cockroaches.
Yes, you live in a nice apartment.
Yes, your apartment has a high rent
and you are an important person.
Yes, you are smart.
yes and yes and yes again.

But, no.
Think about this for a minute.
You live in New York.
The sewers are lined with roaches.
The Chinese restaurants swarm with roaches.
The rats come out each night from burrows by the parks
and feed on your leavings.
Drink from the last drips of your iced coffee.
Nibble at your spilled salad.
Slide insistent into your restaurant’s basement and
scurry happy through a world of food.
Not unlike you.

You’re the only living thing that should be happy here?
Flies haven’t the right to light on your cast off soda?
Fungus gnats shouldn’t graze happy on your drain?
Cockroaches shouldn’t congregate in the dark spaces in your cabinets?

You’re their landlord.
You’re their parents.
You are their God.
Why not be happy with that.
Why not stroke their hard skin, their rough fur.
Why not offer them some wire for gnawing, some toy.
Like you do your dog.
Your cat.

They have no right to these things?
No right to joy?
Jammed up thousands at a time in the tiny spaces behind
your cupboard?
Forced to forage on your leavings like wretches?
You, the rich landowner, throwing them scraps and bits and still
you begrudge them even that
and call me to bring their lives to a close
because you pay so much in rent.
You tyrants.
You monsters.
Filled with privilege and power unable to spend one minute with
them and their stupid little lives.

There may be some parable here.
Perhaps you are the cockroach.
Perhaps you are the rat.
Perhaps one day you will scurry out from the subway platform
onto the train and sing a song begging for food.
Perhaps you will turn away.
Perhaps you will say, I have no time for this.

All of us huddled in this mess.
Hunting for food.
Sipping at tiny draughts.
Taking brief respites.
All of us rats and mice and roaches and ants.
All of us monsters.

My Fucked Up Heart

It's beating too hard, or else, too fast
It gets broken, like an egg,
too often.
Sometimes I feel like I'm
making omelets every day,
breaking all these eggs,
breaking this bruised muscle.

How did it come to this?
It was fine.
Except for the one time all the
blood drained out my wrist
it's never faltered.
Two marriages, cheating girls,
lying friends, messy affairs, all
that shit and it held up fine.
All of a sudden it becomes
fragile when I'm happy.
When shit works, it doesn't.
Wretched chunk of meat!
It betrays my courage,
sits me down on my bony ass
and guits.

What am I to do?
I can't just get another,
like a pet or a girl or a hooker.
I'm stuck with it;
stuck with it's crumbling
chambers and encrusted arteries.
Stuck with its foolish whims
and false bravado.
Forced to limp home
each day thinking that
today will be the day
it gives up the ghost
and leaves me a crumpled
heap of old rags
lying on the sidewalks
of New York,
people stepping gingerly
around this sad, ruined pile.

Love Poem at the Beginning of Summer

This is a love poem about empty places.
About blank walls.
About light in the night and noises on the street.
This is a love poem where no one is there.

This is a love poem for you.
This is your house.
This is the light you make.
The soft light of a summer night.

The noises from the bar down the block.
The girls screaming at their lovers.
Your clothes spread across the bed.
You spread across the bed.

The sun in the afternoon. Too hot sometimes to bear.
The smell of your skin.
You mixed carrots and soda for tanning cream.
That taste is this poem.

This is a poem without you in it.
Like every love poem should be.
A poem with an empty heart.
A poem with a smell you can’t quite name.

I say, you smell almost like cotton candy.
You show me your perfume and it’s cotton candy.
I say you smell like my life.
You show me getting up and going to work and coming home tired.

I say, I love you and you say ,I love you
and we could say that over and over and over.
But what I know is the spray of tanning oil on the deck.
The spilled corona.
The taste of your breath, thick with beer and tobacco.

This is a poem with no one in the house but me and two dogs.
This is a poem with the deep sighs of my dogs.
The breeze from a summer night.
The wail of a siren.
The music from my neighbors radio.
Cumbia.
Soft mountain music.
Music about places and islands I’ve never seen.

Your hair is scattered on the sink.
Clothes are tossed on the bed.
The dogs are snoring.
The girls and boys from the bar are yelling.
It’s a loud poem.
It’s a poem that won’t let me forget.

So I wander out and look at the pale Hudson County sky.
I can’t see a single star.
The moon is hazy with neglect.
The dryer is turning and turning.
The dogs are tossing.

Everything in the world is asking about you.

Astrology in the Year 2003

I live in a town where you can see the stars.
Where I can tell it's December because
my beloved Orion twirls above my house.
Where I can imagine all my friends born in December
to be full of drink and bluster and luck
and perhaps leaning
over towards someone in a bar
to tell them how important it is to live
to really live
and of course they have all of twelve dollars
in their pockets but they're in New York City.
a city that always has Orion twirling overhead.

My friend Linda writes about how angry she is
with the world.
With George Bush and his band of cronies and
the collapse of kindness and the bodies in
the passes of the hindu kush.
Me too.
Except I sat in the Campbell Bar
in Grand Central Station
and listened to Carolinetell me about Henry IV on Broadway
and Hotspur and Falstaff and the actors spit flying six rows out
and my drink, old whiskey, and this city, this theater, this bar, this
brief flirtation.

Fuck George Bush.
Fuck everyone who can't
sit on their porch with a glass and imagine the cold winter
to come and fuck people who can't imagine
the angel of death at their door.
Fuck them for opening the door.
Fuck them for not leaning back against the porch rail,
for not pushing back their chair at the bar on this first
cold night of December.
Yes! It's the Angel of Death at your door!
Who else?
And behind her Spring and Summer and Erato and Desire and
just past that the Stars.
Winking.
Winking.
Whispering in your ear
in the Campbell Bar in the Grand Central Station
with it's angel on the roof, it's
rails running to the far corners of this world
and she's saying "take my hand".
"Let's walk out under the stars"
and she says it every December, just as I grow older.
and I take her hand
and lead her out and
I show her the sky in my town!

Belief Systems

I don't believe in god but
I believe in you.
I believe the world spins
and that if you step on a crack
you break your mother's back.
I believe I broke my mother's heart
when I left my wife and
that there was a crack in the world
that I fell in when my mother died.
I believe if you find a penny
and pick it up
that all the day you'll have good luck.

I believe that this is a sad, sad world.
That men pushing shopping carts loaded
up with seven up cans is not
good.
That I have been a cruel and selfish
fool and that if god could see;
if he could reach out.
He would touch me,
and I believe the touch of god
is the rough heave of waves
on a thousand storm tossed seas.
I believe the gold spire of NY Life
is wrapped in dense fall clouds.
That taxis come and go and try
as I might I can't
make them stop for me.
This is world of loss.
Of cracks stepped on so often
the mother of god
can't stop weeping.
I believe I've stepped on a crack.
I believe I'm wrong
too often and I believe
I've got a long walk home from here.
I believe that I believe
in too little too late and
that somewhere in New York City
you can walk on a street that's lit
just a little by that light from that
huge golden spire.
I believe that's you walking down that street.
I believe that I'm lost
and its dark.

The Poem Where I Say Thank You

You know, it's really not that bad that I get paid
two fifty an hour for work that needs to be done.
Work I would do for free.
Work that needs to be done.
Like a farmer who has a second job so he can afford
to bring in the hay each summer.
Like a painter who labors as a printer
then goes home to some dirty loft,
paints for five hours,
alone,
to make something people might never see.
It's not the money.
It's not job advancement.
It's the accretion of paint,
the tufts of hay glowing in the late summer,
the roar of the tractor,
the shouts of the boy in the back of the truck.
It's the great deep gulp of water after hours of hard work.
It's the mumbled gasp of awe when a friend
walks into the studio and says,
Oh, my God
Oh, my God

We go to work.
We buy our coffee in paper cups and pour in cream.
We want to do well and
we get frustrated when we fail.
But we still have the loft.
We still have the field.
The field our father left us.
The farm eaten by sub divisions so all that is left
is six small acres and
only my brother cares about the farm.
He still gets up at five and
trudges out in his boots
to see to the cows and the pigs and the scraggly chickens
and when he tells people at work he's a farmer they laugh.
A farmer.

Why do you get up early to feed the stupid pigs and
come home late to plow the land and
ask the boss for a couple days off at haying time and
he says haying time what the fuck is that.
What indeed.

What about the crisp smell of turpentine and oil?
What about the rasp of knife on canvas?
What about the question of white?
What about the happy rush of pigs to the trough,
the satisfying turn of plow through earth?
The deep smell of things long buried?
Who else knows and who else cares and still
you take up brush and knife and cleaver and plow.
Dig deep in the earth and work and work
and think this is it.
This is it?

Oh, but my friend this is it!
This is the glorious rush of fruition!
This is harvest.
This is pumpkins dotting the soil everywhere.
Potatoes spilling up out of the ground like angry bones.
This is ugly red and awkward gesso and the spread of manure.
This is the man with dirty boots walking at 5am
in a field in South Jersey saying what the fuck am I doing?
This is our job.
The housewife rising at 6 to put the sandwiches in the bags
for lunch for the kids that are so sick of peanut butter and jelly
they'd kill for bologna.
This is the mechanic sick with a hangover
sliding under an engine at 7am
that's got to be ready for some old guy by 9 and
you think he could wait at least a little.
This is the girl in the WaWa filling urn after urn of okay coffee
for league upon league of men in dirty boots
spilling out of pick up after pick up after pick up.
She says last night my daughter and
I made a mountain out of paste for her project.
It was a map of the universe and
I didn't even know where Wanaque was
but there it was right where my father grew up.
Right next to the factory where he worked for
twenty odd years till he had sense enough to move.
Who works?
Who paints?
Who are we?

People who farm.
People who work.
People with courage and kids and
jobs that pay okay and
at least I have benefits and
I think every day I wake up that it's a blessing
I have today.
A blessing.

So the farmer turns under the crop.
So the painter smears white over everything and starts again.
So you get up and take a shower and drink your coffee and kiss the wife and think your kids are ungrateful but then on the way to work
You notice the way the air smells today.
You see the golden tinge of sun on the fields you drive by every day.
You notice the brief brush of clouds over the sun and the fog hugging
the deep places on the back roads and you say, maybe, maybe
It's a blessing.
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