Under all the noise she made. But sometimes I hear it wrong.

It’s not James Brown making trouble, it’s trouble he’s drawn to:

Baby, you done me wrong. Took my love, and now you’re gone.

It’s trouble he’s asking to stay. My father might have said Please

When my mother was beating the door and then calling to me

From the window. I might have heard her say Please just before

Or just after the glass and then the skin along her wrist broke.

Pleasepleasepleasepleaseplease, that’s how James Brown says it.

Please, please, please, please, please, Honey, please don’t go.

NEW YORK POEM

In New York from a rooftop in Chinatown

one can see the sci-fi bridges and aisles

of buildings where there are more miles

of shortcuts and alternative takes than

there are Miles Davis alternative takes.

There is a white girl who looks hijacked

with feeling in her glittering jacket

and her boots that look made of dinosaur

skin and R is saying to her I love you

again and again. On a Chinatown rooftop

in New York anything can happen.

Someone says “abattoir” is such a pretty word

for slaughterhouse. Someone says

mermaids are just fish ladies. I am so

fucking vain I cannot believe anyone

is threatened by me. In New York

not everyone is forgiven. Dear New York,

dear girl with a bar code tattooed

on the side of your face, and everyone

writing poems about and inside and outside

the subways, dear people underground

in New York, on the sci-fi bridges and aisles

of New York, on the rooftops of Chinatown

where Miles Davis is pumping in,

and someone is telling me about contranyms,

how “cleave” and “cleave” are the same word

looking in opposite directions, I now know

“bolt” is to lock and “bolt” is to run away.

That’s how I think of New York. Someone

jonesing for Grace Jones at the party,

and someone jonesing for grace.

AS TRAFFIC

Sounds like the hook in a chart topper

A rapper mouths squatting like a gilded animal

In the middle of a bustling boulevard

Of bumpers and bumping bikini rumps,

Chains, chains, chains, but it is meant to conjure

My half brother, and the girls the news says

He’d kidnapped or persuaded with knuckles

Before the police rushed in knocking him

Like a lover no longer loved to the motel floor

His long arm was chained to a cell phone

The one time I met him he called me brother

And said our father had more children like us

All over town while UGK’s “Int’l Players Anthem”

(“My bitch a choosy lover, never fuck

Without a rubber”) bumped in the background

Foolishly, I did not think the worst of the music

I adore had anything to do with having power

Over anyone else, the naked women as bountiful

As traffic, the half-naked men who cannot grow

Stiff without looking at reflections of themselves

While the camera glares an inch from their genitals

Might have wanted before porn simply to play