with clear-cased woofers for heads. No eyes—

they see us as a bat sees

a mosquito—a fleshy echo,

a morsel of sound. You’ve heard it:

their intergalactic touring coach

purring at the stratosphere’s curb,

awaiting counter intel transmission

from our topped laps and our ear

pieces, awaiting word

of humanity’s critical mass,

our ripening. How many times

have we dreamed it this way,

The Age of the Machines—

five welded digits, tempered paws

wrenching back our roofs,

siderophilic tongues seeking blood,

licking the crumbs of us from our beds.

O, it won’t be pretty. Great nation,

why exhort you—fear-of-fear-only steeling your veins.

Would you trade land for lives? A game

you know—a treaty

inked in advance of metal’s footfall.

Give them Detroit. Give them Gary,

Pittsburgh, Braddock—those forgotten
nurseries of girders and axels. Tell them

we honor their dead, distant cousins.

Tell them we let the cities wither out of respect.

Tell them Carnegie and Ford were giant

men and war glazed their palms with gold.

Tell them we mourn them all the same.

 

 

 

 

 

Let me savor a gourmet meal

with the same tongue as this young vet

besides me, choking down that same shame

he feels as he raises his face from the plate

to survey the dining room and ensure

none of us see him thinking

—she being the lone thought to buoy

his spirit through conflict’s brine of survival.

Somehow he drowned but did not die.

He split into two betta fish, one swimming

within each of his eyes’ twin bowls—

angry pupils watching himself

watch the world he knew, a rage

that whittles, a glass dam erected

between his body’s senses and the reason

god gave him senses. That is enough

to forget delectability, enough to feel shock

when a taste as strong as motherlove

blindsides him at the table adjacent to me—

so far removed from his childhood kitchen

and its greasy, flower-printed walls.

His mind repatriated from a place

of sand and shorted synapses,

he stares around then lifts the fork—again

swallowing, again shivering like a ghost

slipping his shoulders into a cold coat of skin.

 

 

 

 

Were I Poet, I’d now be asleep

atop a paper mound—each page which,

five seconds prior to being palmed and crushed,

would have been the opening of the poem

that would bleed forever on the crucificial

lips of lovers, the poem that would suffer

so longing would never need to

fumble with words again. My words

for you so given to the pulp's white void.

I would be serving that master, art,

who says, mold your soul into a cistern

then smash it.

 

But what I am is Lumberjack. I kiss an oak tree

and backpedal twenty feet. I practice

tossing my axe end over end—

the butt, the handle whacking the bark—

until its blade edge finally pierces the sapwood.

I toss the axe until I’ve struck deep

enough to know the heartwood will scar.