Tonight’s my final fling with fast food:

thirteen mini-burgers nested in a pile of fries

between two apple pies. There’s one night of sleep

between me and the new me, you’ll see,

as the supersize gets dropped from my diet.

I’ll raise papayas and peppermint house-side,

six bushes of sage. Tonight, I allow

cheap beer and celeb tv. Tomorrow, I’ll start to run

three hours each day. I’ll learn Latin,

Swahili, enroll in an online course

in Australian. I’ll take up parasailing, teach myself

the harp. The spider webs can stay one more day,

since soon I’ll cast a spell to banish them and dirt

from my doorstep. Then I think I’ll bronze the bathtub.

Around the day-calendar’s corner each letter

will get three notarized replies, I’ll read

four books daily, memorize the star signs

and movie-star résumés so I can win games of Trivial

Pursuit. In a few hours tomorrow comes to flip

my switch. No longer will I have to walk, scared of a spill

at full-sprint. Tomorrow my plastic wrapper comes off,

and my wings will unfold to grasp the power

of the sun, which will somehow shed warmer light.

 

 

English and I are best pals.

He often completes my sentences

before I know what I think,

but hearing this Spanish phrase sail

through the cacophony of sidewalk

vendors on a summer afternoon makes me feel more

Cuban, shakes a drowsy lineage inside

me buried under a blanket of hamburgers

and twenty-four-hour cable that sometimes runs

out of programs but never out of things to sell.

Hasta siempre: until always, reads as a better

expression of forever. Forever feels distant

the way space stretches endless

and sparse with stars that dwarf my rambling

experience with their combustion of basic elements.

Stars remind me that this planet’s tethered

to a ball of burning gas not too hot or cold,

not too close or far—the galactic devouring of luck

at Earth’s inception. For the stars, forever

lasts until a time beyond us, but not

eternally as they burn out and implode.

Hasta siempre is my desire, prayer

condensed to two words. The phrase opens with the Ahs

of epiphany, tells me sí , yes, to begin the next word,

and whole, it says: Please make this moment

linger, not until some gassy giant blows

its engine.  Instead, infuse this feeling in the world—

oil soaked into the dark fabric of the universe

leaving a supernova-hued stain.  I offer it up,

a summons: Hasta Siempre, Amen.

 

 

—A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.

 

 

Even in translation, his grammar is cruel, uses

a semi-colon to deny tragedy a full breath, but to him,

this is polite. A tragedy would be his own

death, in the papers, tearful riots at the memorial, but Joe

doesn’t want to make this about himself;

it’s not about his end. The subject is you.

You wrote the play, handled the pamphlet,

drew the cartoon…doesn’t really matter who

snitched. The investigation is over. There will be no parade

for you, though gathered with your comrade

criminals, there would more than enough marchers.

Watch his good hand, free from trembling

as he pulls it from his coat to give you

his version of a spanking. Freed, the hand expands

into a granite cliff, and though you know

it’s still growing, the distance to the top

starts to look the same—fifty feet,

fifty meters, fifty miles, just goddamned far.

Joe wants you to know you’re a speck among dirt

so start thinking small. Think leaf of an oak

felled in summer. Think krill filtered through the mouth

of a whale. Think grain of salt dissolving

in the first-course soup of the King’s feast.

 

 

 

I remember my days using back in high school,

avoiding eye contact as I rushed upstairs

with a chapbook stowed inside my coat.

My bedroom door locked, I’d tear into the package,

eating pages so fast my vision would blur

when the work unhinged a valve in my head.

An electric tremble would hit my hands and feet,

push my arms and legs into a stretch.

 

I smashed my first car into another’s bumper

at a red light while inhaling lines of verse.

I stashed the book under a seat as I talked

to the cops. I tip-toe around my habit

when meeting new folks. I find that I get

a crush-faced no thanks from most when I offer

up a greatest hit. It’s my secret: how much I pay

for these tiny bags of books.

 

The high school teachers talked about poetry

like it was sex-ed, enveloped in mystery and danger.

Instead of diseased penises projected

on a pull-down screen, we were taught tales of heartbreak,

obscurity, never of the pleasure that could be released.

They squeamishly offered the wrong techniques, squeezed

the poem so hard it would turn blue and wilt,

cut from its supply of blood.

 

When a guy standing in a concert-side lot

opens his hand to reveal a couple confetti squares

tucked in tinfoil, I’m ready to experiment.

I’ve rolled whole tomes across my tongue, so what

could these wordless scraps do? Go ahead, I tell him,

drop some into my mouth, slide one into my ear.