of hair running the length of my calves

Supple meat gone sour in the freezer

Infertile country     Lousy with stray mutts

My fugitive reflection dirtying the anthem

You look just like him        so clean     so smart

It’s Midnight in ___________     In this light

he could be your father      Where your peoples

from    Yall might have split a ghost way back

Just the spitting image       like that poor boy

The Night makes cousins of us all

INSOMNIAC SOLILOQUY

A Double Golden Shovel

Death might as well be my father’s pen name     indecent hours ragged on his breath    and    I of course am his for knowing the night is no place for the softness even of an eye     I’m never cousin to the dull hex of my need to guzzle a poor light    by midnight I’m the need itself    Sleep the property of disembodied birds cooing as if dawn isn’t a mocking excuse for free     Because is this not always the year of two boys fumbling at the other’s mortality?   My father says sleep sleep and coins spill onto my eyes My palms wreak of copper    The reason that I don’t sleep is because he is still so alive   I don’t want to miss a single bloodshot eye before I can’t forget the sleep that lasts all my life    I’m asking the night for a drought the diameter of an iris    For cousin never to mean dead     O sleep     O father   Are we the children of what we deny ourselves of? I slept well on his chest and all night his same drab arithmetic: Exhale    Count the gaps in death

MY FATHER WATCHES FERGUSON VOL. 1

I tried to give you religion

on the South Side

but you never been

into glass houses

Honestly  I wasn’t fussed

God is something

St. Louis never gave me

All I know is winter

and construction and retreat

a relentless swallow

we call a city

This shit?

this ain’t nothing new to me

You’ve met my friends

shaken their scorched fingers

Shoot    once a cop

rolled up  next to us

pulled the trigger

on an empty gun

his laugh was a fog

You see how thick they went and made the sky?

that’s the religion I know

a heaven low enough to choke on

a god that bring tears to your eyes

just to take back his salt

I don’t do much praying

outside counting

how much you don’t look like me

I don’t ask much of you

but for your mother’s sake

don’t fuck around

and end up a fable

PORTRAIT OF MY FATHER AS SISYPHUS

Sisyphus always sees the boulder

coming towards him

so each day is like its predecessor

My grandmother lives in Saint Louis          she has never known anywhere else

I know this

of the many people

my father                   has threatened to kill

been forced to grieve

She is never among the dead