beginning of a longer poem

What are you a veteran

            of which war resides in

the faint rise of your mind

            and which preposition

positions the gunshot the wakes you

            up in the midnights?

kiddie rhyme

I can use language
any way I please:

grind down sidewalks
and string angels from trees

I can putty placenames
into ravines and avenues:

every place is my place
that I walk myself through

For every movement in a song
I write my own to pair:

what better way to spend my time
than grow and praise and share?

project house

each room

           is a closet

storage for human heat;

Places where shade

            collects like mixing paint.

The materials of house structure-

            Wood, glass, brick, and metal pieces-

make for scattered, new sculptures.

            The body re-works every space it enters,

re-modeling, re-doing, re-working, realizing each room

for the first and hundredth time.

Vital records

Birth certificates

Death certificates

Marriage license

            Each of these cost $18 on the first floor of the Bayside Expo Center

            red, white, and blue paper bit-gripped by a toothed eagle stamp.

            My vital record is one Maia Nicole McPherson, birthed in winter.

            one paper and I realize that the vitality of records is false

            A living record is more complete What did I have for breakfast today?

            than certified words.

I keep thinking about the sun in the winter time

A grassy shindig,

laying haphazard

and bleeding youth

the day is both wasted

and won.  The spring sun

is still winding itself

like a clock and the long

winter sleeps beneath

new life.  How many

more days can I ask

questions of the

kid and kidding

monuments?

the hate

is an animal

red and writhing.

when

a body

becomes a capsule

of hate

nothing contains

it except the

soft permanence

of arms

wrapped round.

What compound

Is hate, it burns bones

And wears

down the liver.

It kills

like cancer

and pulls

weighty

and thick

at the face.

Toxic,

hateful is

healthy

in the function

of alone.

But in the

kitchen

of family

of community

hate smokes out

paper moths

of hope

and suspicion

is the sound

of dark snakes

on dry leaves.

(untitled)

Memory is a canon

Of rhetoric

Because the ex-perience and ex-pression

Of time differ:

What of what we know is good

And what of what we know is bad?

What makes us beautifully flawed

And which flaws make us ruined?

And who creates a flaw anyways-

We are not objects, our selves transcend

This place.  Humans do not follow the

rules we have fabricated to evaluate worth. 

But just the same memory gets explained

To death. 

It becomes an art form to match prevalent points

From childhood to adulthood

Both hooded in the presentable self

While the true sensory ensemble of a moment

Remains embedded in our own skin

Untouched.