cold yellow light on a sunday afternoon and i apologize for nothing i have no use for burroughs or bukowski edie is dead and andrea and all of your patron saints are nowhere to be found none of your cities were ever meant to last forever and i am tired of being hungry and i am tired of being lost but all of these houses look the same all of these roads end without warning at cemeteries or abandoned factories or rivers with indian names in this land where there are no indians and the girl didn't jump she fell four stories and drunk and left her three year old daughter with nothing but a missing father the pacific was only a dream 3000 light years away and when i stand in the shadow of this bridge i have nothing of my own when i pick up my son he cries we are always on the verge of being lost
this little girl with wings or this middle-aged man with the bones of his wife locked in the trunk of a shiny new car these myths that are actually truths the way pollock died so desperately the way lee fell to the floor screamed and what is history but a list of names written backwards in the book of wasted days? what are words but a more hopeless form of violence? listen i was never this frightened before my children were born was never filled with so much useless anger and i keep coming back to this eleven year-old girl who disappears from her home thirty miles east of here i keep coming back to her killer how he never told where her body was how he laughed on the day he was executed not like anything was funny but like he'd won like it had cost him nothing
find the man who murdered geronimo's wife and children think of what it is you'd say to him consider how good the last two hundred and fifty years of slaughter have been to you
you alone in the house of truths the news of twelve soldiers ambushed and slaughtered the news of bodies being set on fire and dragged through city streets and not the sun but almost not warmth but the memory of it the snow melted and the streets grey and the screams of animals caught in traps the blurred reflections of strangers in the windshields of empty cars all of these words and all of these images that refuse to add up to anything more than themselves but you still have to stop and consider each one you still have to dig until the bodies are found it shouldn't take much longer than the rest of your life
and i'm sorry that i have never bled pure sunlight over the people i love and i'm sorry that my hands are tied and i am not blind but standing here in my back yard i'm beginning to think that i may be lost i'm beginning to see how i will fail my children how the promise of cancer will be my gift to them or the threat of aids or a world filled with zealots who want only to kill who believe that the slaughter of innocents will be rewarded and what happens is that i find myself wasting too much time talking about things that i'll never be able to change i wake up in the first grey light of morning in a stranger's bed and feel nothing but afraid i am only the empty grasping hand that my father always told me i would be
the cold blue ghost of christ caught in the wires such a simple thing to imagine such a small gift for all of these beaten children not anger but vengeance not prison but crucifixion a poem that sounds like a young boy with his hand held to a lit burner a beats that runs on blood america with nowhere left to go this back yard littered with dirty needles these empty vials that crackle like breaking shells beneath our feet as we cross the aquarium parking lot september and then october and the sky like a shroud grey and threatening rain and the condensation that forms on the upstairs windows the sound of my heart beating in a pale blue room distance which is a lie and time which is a spike a baby found floating in the pacific in a bathtub while the mother fucks her lover twenty feet away while the father says he has bigger problems this man beaten then tied to a fence who says nothing is dying and then is dead and the fact that it was supposed to be a joke the fact that i love you or that you love me the bills that don't get paid the hours that are wasted in prayer or in anger a woman raped then stabbed eighty times with a screwdriver [i]a woman raped then stabbed eighty times with a screwdriver[/i] everything that remains unsaid
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