THE RETURN
There was comfort
In the dense fog
The ocean waves
The return
Was I any different?
Another ghost
I walked past
These figures
Passing through
Deep nights
Of oceans
Separated
And now I was one of them
Whose hands
Reached out to no one. . .
I AM THE POET LAUREATE OF NOTHINGNESS
I am the poet laureate of nothingness
I am proud of that disputed fact
It is disputed because there is no proof
That nothingness exists
And I am no argument
For or against nothingness
I was telling my dead mother
Just last night
When we paused
Halfway up McKinnon St
That the house is still there
But I don’t think the people
Will let us live with them
She was standing out of breath
And I felt guilty for asking her
To climb up this hill
That is certainly an example of nothingness
I can’t tell her that there is a view
What would you see if you saw nothingness?
But I am proud anyway
To have this title
A title I gave myself
Why wait for someone
To give you a meaningless title
When you can create your own
I was jealous for many years
When all of my favorite dead poets
Got streets and alleys named after them
Usually those streets were dead end streets
One was in back of a restaurant
Where the dishwasher would dump the garbage
Another one was in an alleyway
Where drunks would piss
And trucks would pull up
To deliver hysterical chickens
But anyway
Being the poet of nothingness
I should make a little speech
Just to kind of inaugurate myself
But my mother
Wants to turn back
And since I have left the womb
I have also had the desire recently
To want to turn back
But how can you turn back
To the nothingness
Of the womb of your dead mother
But I don’t want to end my poem
On such a lonely statement
As though I were speaking
To strangers who had
No love of nothingness
I know you are out there somewhere
And it is to you
That I dedicate this poem
And impose a brief silence
In honor of my mother
Waiting for her son to come home.
SMALL TOWN AMERICA
You can live in a place all your life
Know where the cemetery is
Know what happened to your husband
Know what happened at the town hall meeting
When nothing new happened at the town hall meeting
Know when water rights or your own rights were taken away from you
You can know the Star Spangled Banner by heart
You can know what happened to your kids
What happened to your town after the flood, after the tornado,
after the life was kicked out of you
You can know a little or a lot about American history
Or why that new prison was put up
Or why somebody poisoned your dog
Or why you can’t hold your food down anymore
And you can go for a walk down along where the trains used to come in
And you can stare off into the distance and still hear that rumble
you heard as a kid when you placed copper Lincoln pennies on the tracks
And ran for your life through that tunnel to prove you were a small town hero
And you can stand at the bus station watching your brother in his uniform
leave town for the first time in his life
And imagine that everybody leaves town in a uniform
Or you can throw flowers into that grave where you lost your little sister
Because she didn’t have eyes in the back of her head
And that low number of rapes does not mention her name
And you can pick up the local paper
Which will provide you with information about a highway that threatens
To wipe your town off the face of the earth
And you can stare at the winds as they pick up and pray that your town
is not blown away first
And you can hold hands at the church and bond with your neighbors
And you can sit on the front porch late into the night
And be just one more human being under the stars
With a book in their hand, with a bottle in their hands with a gun in their hands with a cry in their throat with a man or woman in your arms and a dream in your heart
And you can bless or curse the day you were born in small town America.
