Mob Mentality

One foot on her stoop,
One key in the door,
Kitty poured fire engine red,
No-Parking paint, out from her insides,
She emptied herself onto the street
In front of thirty eight too-busy-bystanders,
And disturbed no one.

Her neighbors gossiped on the phone,
Cursed at black and white broadcasts,
Tucked children into sheets,
Kissed wives, washed their faces,
Flossed, and prayed to God,
While a twenty nine year girl was raped as she bled
From the cuts carved deep into her palms.

With the TV turned loud, with responsibility thin,
The neighborhood watch never gets rewound,
And the sugar cups left unshared sour and stagnate,
Neighbors, in-proximity strangers, can’t hear you scream.

Jane Doe: Revision

Into the cavernous confines of your hollow mind,
Into the echoing insides of your empty wallet,
The therapist, the reporter,
The watcher and I
Dig deep,

Trying to decipher
Any promising relation, potential association,
Any, if at all,
Possible connection
Between the eighteen years of breadcrumbs
Scattered and now, somehow,
And for some reason, forgotten.

On the TV, they rumor.
They speculate.
They think
You seem like that kinda girl,
The type they’ve seen before,
The type left
Alone
At night.

The Latch-Key-Kid-Special, they say.

Deserted too often,
Ignored too early.

If your father
Had been my father,
I can’t help but think
How mad he’d be
To see your hand-cut filthy bangs
Brush against my face.
He would agonize over
How and what I’d been eating,
How and where I’d been sleeping.

So I need to know.
You need to tell me.

What happened to your mother, Jane?
Your father too? Did they get a chance
To tell you what could happen
To a girl like you, to any Once-Upon-A-Time-Girl
Who, by chance, took an off-the-trail hike?
Did they take the time to warn you?
Take the time to tell you
About cross dressing wolves and poison apple romance?
Did she ever, even just once,
Tell you a story
About a girl
Named Gretel
Who found a nightmare waiting in the woods?

The networks
They think they know your name now,
Your first and your middle
And although both fall on ears equally unrecognized,
They repeat them just the same,
Overlapping and rushed,
One directly after another.

Hearing your name
That way
Makes me angry.
Makes it sound like
You’re in trouble,
And it’s all your fault.
Makes me worry that
Regardless of what you remember,
And what you don’t,
You will never be able to explain how one night you fell asleep on the street,
In the middle of Midtown, with no shoes and a dirty face, outside and cold,
Stretched out on pieces of cardboard, dreaming.

Conversation with a Stone

As he flags under the weight
Of the passing green bean casserole,
He twists his stroke-stricken tongue

He struggles to speak sentences,
To enunciate niceties, to stumble
Over syllables that refuse to sound.

Besieged by all the many things
He cannot do, he sputters, he spits.
He makes me wonder why he bothers.

Confessions of an MA Graduate Student

Shaven Santa Clauses seem to shamelessly hide themselves
In the liner notes of my late night lectures.

They've come to mock me and my Langston-like impressions of literature,
Come to pose my pencil polemically, aiming it for the whites of book jacket eyes.

Targeting my kind of Mickey Mantles, my personal Jesuses of print,
My role models of rhetoric, the legacies of my library.

Turns out, the university saves the worst for last,
Shakespeare's faker than Alice Liddell’s ID.
Wordsworth, a thief, and a bad brother too. Remember,
Will, if you don’t ask, it’s not borrowing, it’s stealing,

And the same goes for hymens, dear Mr. Golding,
Who liked to touch girls who hadn’t bled yet, in his backseat,
Among piles of led stained mole skins. But what can one expect
In a world able to kill off my favorite Beatle, the tooth fairy, and Mickey Mouse.
Who, as of late, I hear hated Mamet, Roth and Ginsberg, among other Jews.
FYI, Allen fucked Dean Moriarty, but the real one,
And each time, was left all the colder and more lacking,
Left with nothing but a poorly written “Dear John” and a shadily rolled joint.

At the very least, I like to think, (It is pretty to do so)
That I would have loved Allen better,
Although we both know he wouldn't have wanted me to,
A starving artist wannabe, who, against her better judgment,
Refuses to further populate Barnes and Noble book shelves
With Anne Rice regurgitated vampire teen fiction.

But each day I hold out and withstand,
I bounce more and more under-the-pillow-checks.
Proving that perhaps the life of the poet, translator, and reader
Was a poor choice. I am just about
To exhaust my stockpile of Edgar Allen dreams within dreams,
About to choke to death on my day job.
Because all I want for Christmas, Hannukah, Kwanzaa and Easter
Is to dedicate leather bound pages to the man I love,
To embrace Ernie and T.S. on the mountaintop,
To read Moby Dick and write pretty prose. To sip lattes
And romanticize William Carlos Williams, Ezra, and Gertrude too.

So, yes,
I guess,
In that regard,
It’s not too bad to be a student
Of words, a student of greatness,
Of text and wonder.

Jane Doe

The therapists, the reporters,
The watchers, and me
Dig deep into the confines
Of your hollow mind and your empty wallet,
Trying desperately to find connections
Between the breadcrumbs left behind
From 18 years you have somehow,
And for some reason, forgotten—

On the news, they say your pretty mother died
Young, and your father, so very typical,
Bathed himself in the waters of whiskey.

But, if your father were my father,
All I can think is how mad he’d be
At seeing your hand cut, filthy bangs
Brush against my face. He would agonize
Over how I’d been eating, how and where
I’d been sleeping.

So I need to know. You need to tell me.
Before bed, did he ever bend down low and check
For monsters? What of your mother—
Did she ever sit up with you after bad dreams?
Or were yours the type too busy to discuss
Wockets, pockets, green eggs and ham?

The networks now they’ve found your name,
Your first and your middle, both equally
Unrecognized. They repeat them squished
And ran together, overlapping and rushed.

It makes me angry to hear it that way.
Makes it sound like you’re in trouble,
And it’s all your fault.

I worry that no matter
What you remember, you will never
Be able to explain how one night
You fell asleep on the street,
In the middle of Midtown, with no shoes
And a dirty face, cold, outside, and unfolded
Stretched out on pieces of cardboard dreaming.

Roswell Boys

Gone were the first borns, the kiss ups.
The short and tall alike. The pretty boy poets
And the silver screen stars.

Our prom dates, our neighbors, our paperboys too.
Our firsts and our last loves, each squeezed in between
Now nakedly missing off our paper milk boxes.

"Every man I've loved is lost.
Deserted Providence for good.
No map left to follow. No man left to curse.""

So said the radio last night. Pregnant
With the seedling of too many questions
Unable to be answered, barely able to be asked.

"What of the dead letter lost boys?
What will become of them now? What of their offices?
And their car lots? What of Romeo, oh Romeo--

Methinks, I see a man?" Any man, by any name,
Who could play your role as sweet. Does no such man exist?
Only we, the hollow, the lacking. The now mundane in our abundance.

Who will start up their stalled engines?
Take out their wedded wives? Who will bend on one knee
Bruised? Patch the roof? And hang the lights?

"Am I the unexpected Heathcliff? The sorry dear Viola
I never asked to be? Am I both sister and my brother?"
Am I the woman, who only in man's absence, shows her true horns

Her pointed tail too? Like a junebug in dry heat,
or an instinct drunk lemming. All it took was
A change in weather, whether I like it or not.

Mixed & Misused Margarita Messages

There's a nothingness that comes with twenty somethingness,
A blackness or a blankness to match with the last King drawn,
A solemness, a complete nakedness to walk beside my stacked up red cups,
A finality that rhymes beautifully with a table wiped clean, and a phone call disconnected,
A book end, a chapter end, a slammed door closed,
An empty bottle, or kicked tin can dry from its holes across the bottom,
From the netted screen door that's jingling and jangling on our hinges,
Of broken promises,
Missed messages,
Mixed signals,
And expensive excommunications,
Walky Talky Fuzziness that reminds me of you and reminds me of me,
Reminds me of a tunnel full of clocks and sitting room furniture,
That smells of Hedda Gabler's powdered hands, or Plath's misused oven,
That looks just like a doorway leading from the white to red queen,
Just as long as the street that leads to a job I can't believe is mine,
Like the commute I can't believe I bear, like my blazer with tweed patches I can't believe I wear,
Like the parade of exes I can't believe I dared, or all the reasons I don't have to care,
With a lined smile, stressed eyes, a dull tiredness I'm too young for,
I'll take my rock, paper, scissor hands and snip away at our shared, ribbon telephone wire,
Slap myself brutally and soberly aware,
Cancel my miles and forget about that which connects me to twentytwo,
Connects me to you.