Bonfire of the Ancestors
Preliminary Instructions

Take a bag of whitest ashes
To the woods of family trees
Sprinkle ‘round the edges
Do it on your knees 

Return again at night
A candle in your hand
Let the forest whimper
Stories of the land

Come back in the morning
Swing your sharpest axe
Cut down all the trees
Pile them up in stacks 

Drag off all the stumps so
The understory’s clear
The space is now ready
Your fire goes here

Tenderloin

Wolf woman howling on the corner
Ragged, her mouth a dark wound
Every day this week at the bus stop
none of us can make
Out words
Is it even English?
Then the old punk rocker says speed it way up man!

My baby my baby they took my baby away.

In Bed Last Night

bleak, bare-breasted moment
in bed last night
tortured by candlelight
I felt my breasts soft, full, overripe—
no Lover to caress them
pleasures unfelt, ungiven—
Incredible— years have gone by—

This detachment is scary...
am beyond touch deprivation now...
Space traveler gone
too far, too long

Here come tears
like vomit.

Thanksgiving

All that food on the table
They used two tables for all that food.
All those views out picture windows—so perfect
Hills, meadow, there’s water in the pond
I saw it from the kitchen window
All those windows, their eyes, the smilings
I wonder what they are saying when I leave the room

Peaceful bathroom with plenty of toilet paper this time
It’s Thanksgiving with all the food
I didn’t know I had to shepherd my vegetables
I didn’t want to talk about my mother.

Heavy

I remember him asking
if he could carry my books home from school
2 nerds meandering down a street

I remember asking him
40 years later, sitting on his lumpy dark couch
“What made you do that?”

I remember his scent
musky, floral, buttery…
But I can’t describe it

I remember him sighing
in hospital hallways
in rooms of emergency, intensive, critical
in beds I’d raise and lower

I remember holding his
eyelids down
until they stayed shut
He was cooling off,
hadn’t been gone more
than 20 minutes,
at home, yeah, in his own bed

I remember a floating feeling
after he answered me,
back on the lumpy dark couch
“Because your books looked heavy.”

Small white clouds
Slowly blow across my sky
“Forget…forgetting…”

 30 Years Old In Amsterdam
(For Bob)

Our
mornings
broke like soft gold
running bright over the plates
rolling ‘round town, creaking
in funny axles, and when we
turned sideways at night
we were in-
visible.

Change

I’m putting my finger
up the ass of America
This is not a sexual procedure.
I wear gloves
I get a whole hand in
I go farther up, up and away,
and now I have my whole head
way up inside the ass of America

Here there is no color,
but the darkness is so blinding bright
it might as well be white
And where is the proof through the night
that we can change?