Children, I’ll downright lie and snap, “Shadow, why do you follow me

so? Ain’t you a long way from home too?” You don’t need me to know

what it means to be lonely. I won’t look back. I won’t look back at you.

A CONCEPT OF SURVIVAL

after Jenny Holzer

It was a good enough request at first

written on prophylactic packages PROTECT ME

FROM WHAT I WANT the shy genes exploding

just outside the late streetlights and later

in other quarters it was found stamped

inside all the Midwestern Bibles PROTECT ME

FROM WHAT I WANT not just in hotels where

sometimes the condoms were sheathed

and unsheathed but in the pews and desks

of churches and churchgoers in nursing homes

where the aged lived long enough to find pain

shameless my grandmother’s uncle jumped

naked on his bed the last time we visited him

our mood was baffled and ugly PROTECT ME

FROM WHAT I WANT appeared on neon signs

and banners it was typed on the ticker tape strips

buried in fortune cookies so that opening one

after my meal I looked over my shoulder

to a vanishing waitress I was told her shift

was done I’d fallen in love with her as I always fall

for anyone taking my order sometimes fortune

explodes quietly PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT

to be thoroughly drunk and immune to hunger

to dream a means of survival a bubble of luck

milk pours from the pastoral holes in the body

or blood when you are beaten tender in the woods

I want to feel the trees around me I want you

to smell the leaves on my breath PROTECT ME

FROM WHAT I WANT paranoia is a form of intuition

it carries a flashlight and never sits with its back

to an exit the water always threatens to come indoors

I want to enter someone else’s hide and hide

I want to sleep enough to never need sleep again

too many years have passed since I went dancing

since I cried publicly or was so small my mother

could lift me with her one free arm from the floor

WHO ARE THE TRIBES

Visit http://bit.ly/1vY1ga2 for a larger version of this table.

1. BEEFS

2. HOW TO FORGET

in a city that was a village that was a tribe and is a tribe again

we named ourselves the disciples of the darkness

because we looked at so little of ourselves from day to day

a birthmark could be mistaken for a strange new rash