Poetry

Little wiener dog doing his best show horse, 
jumping one, two, three stumps in a row;
his boy is too busy scrolling to notice, but I smile 
all the way up the hill. Bitter cold

What are words when they meet the action 
of what they attempt to modify?

I wonder. Yes, I’m looking up as I say this,
I wonder if I do have a superpower. Maybe
I have more than one aspect of attraction,
this knack for drawing others in close, almost
touching me.

why she had six children,
your mother’s mother
who liked math and science,

When he was small,
I rented a little studio 
in a building on Ninety-Fifth Street so I could have a room 
of my own to write. The studio was the size of a bathroom.

Now that I’m dead too, just like the living dead on TV, 
fat chance that the merely living will be saved 
by doing what they did when I was merely living— 
nailing their doors shut against me, 
hurricane-proofing the windows, 
positioning...

like a game show or some other excuse
for selling toothpaste. Wish I could remember who said that, 

If someone was kind enough to take us driving out to the long roads
that veered away from cornfields to the farms, pig roasts & parties 

I look at you with my vexed eye.
I look at you with my hostile eye.
I look at you with my hostile and vexed eye.
My hostile, vexed eye is a wrench.

There’s a brother who sits over on North University. 
Looks like James Baldwin in a do-rag. Sings.
Is he homeless? People give him money