The Good We Can Sense (Slam Revision)

Middle school hung a steel box from the bottom of my sister's chin,
so that she'd feel rejection twist and drift from her bones
every time that motherfucker swings.

The door to the box is itself littered
with the postmark of passing rejections
the graffitii of young gangs that roam these hallways
and tag what they can with the swift tongue scribble whips
of the hate they learned from their elders

Exit the Swamp

at the city center in your brain
is a hole,
a myring, swampy stillness knotting tepid life to reason for it,
next to the headwaters of a stagnant river called Easy Commiseration,
fed by a drift of ditch streams, callow mistaken for simple

that black vacuum there brings the world in to sit down
to placate and forget but mostly to stay seated, dusting over
quieter all the time.

Don't Stray So Far

you interpreters of bar tops
and asian plateau trains
all you who come from music and its makers,
the hands who've carried the intentions of
foreign sunsets and plastic starlight
the awkward waking of
homecoming
you've run, well out ahead of me
don't stray so far,
that i can't find you