A man over

A man over-serious,
Then a boy over-serious,
Turns the wooden block over and over,
The surface seeming just as implacable
As its pounded, packed, interiors

A boy over-serious
Strains looking between the lines
The tiny dots on a page of his Green Lantern comic
Forces anxieties out of small confrontations
On the tops of buildings

Dressed-up threats exchanged between enemies
Who have only been so for two such panels
But nonetheless are enemies forever
In the free space between two buildings
In the free space they shout across
In swaths of stylish lettering

You will turn that wooden block over and over
You will wear it to a nub
Whittle it in your dotage to a fine sharp point
And bob it threateningly as best you can in your shriveled hand at those
Who’d laugh at you still
Who wouldn’t understand

The Diner, Onondaga County

The Diner, Onondaga County
Four of us bustle in laughing
Dirty comfortably unwashed from days of travel
Days of pillows in the backseat
The jukebox slurs to a halt
Heads turn incredulous stares
Either this or they don't care
Do we try or do we die
We try we order food and dine
Giggle over cd sized pancakes
Half raw like wet chalk dust
Finish off pay up piss walk out
A photo was taken outside
From the back window of the car
A man with a boiled hotdog
In one hand a coffee in the other
In the doorway leaving
Looking after us
Before he went to work and did his thing

O Friends

O friends, we go on singing, but
what do we know?
There are many impenetrable barriers.
O stinking Sarah, what do you mean now,
Heralding for us a new age,
All of us?
O questions, you will answer all of us,
And this we know so we go on loving

your exteriors travel

It was literally a bold action
of terrorist envy when I threw
my eyes toward your sterile form
You were caught in that bright
square, that great equalizer,
That flashed you toward your
judgement in the hopeful dawns
of all mornings
Trying so hard not to be
human out there but at your
point of origin you had
to be burning.
None of us regret the way
the world works because we
can't. There is no such thing
as a devil until imagined by
millions with the mind of a movie
You're no victim, you flash out
there alive, your exteriors travel,
you crash a wave across
every conversation going and you
sink into the sand made of people
Now mud and how can it be but that
every mind must think toward you
when bonded by your evaporating water