More Attempts at Creativity ...

unburdened (for my brother, Bob)

i hope my brother is in a place

where he can finally rest,

unburdened

by everything he carried here.

i hope he's got

dogs,

frisbees,

music loud and funky enough

to drown everything else out.

i hope he's telling

those same long stories,

not worrying

who's already heard them.

i hope nothing followed him there –

no sense he'd fallen short,

no voice telling him so,

no battles he had to fight alone.

i hope he remembers only the good,

the times the rest of us got it right.

i keep hoping he'll call.

but mostly i hope he's someplace

where nothing is heavy anymore,

and where i might see him again.

Alabama

Your brother left a message,

flat as the red clay in Mobile

after the rain.

“Daddy’s gone. Come out if you want.”

You go west with a bag.

Forty-one hours of bus windows,

nothing to look at.

Daly City fog comes in for the burial,

and hangs there, saying nothing.

Your brother flies back to Dallas.

You stay.

Not for any reason.

Just that the ticket was one-way

and there wasn’t much to go back to.

The bay moves back and forth,

back and forth.

The needle is there.

The bay is there.

The fog returns each morning.

It always does.

On the street

they call you Alabama.

You sleep where you can –

cardboard box, blue tarp,

angled for the morning sun.

You watch the tide come in.

Then you watch it roll away again.

Jesus Keeps His Head Down

He crossed near Nogales with a coyote who cost 80,000 pesos

and spent three days in a stash house

watching telenovelas with the sound off.

A friend of the family ferried him up to Fresno

where he sleeps behind the Circle K.

Every morning he stands in the parking lot

coffee cooling in a Styrofoam cup

that still smells of last night's Tecate.

The contractors know his name by now.

He can paint, patch, hang drywall, and landscape.

They pay in cash.

He folds it twice.

But for the most part, Jesus keeps his head down.

He sends money home every two weeks,

and flinches at the sirens that sweep the streets each day.

He used to dream of her in Spanish.

Anarchy at 54

The faded letter A

ringed by a circle and

tattooed on his forearm

no longer speaks to

or for him.

He would cover it with something else,

except no one sees it anyway.

He traces the ink with a calloused finger,

sighs,

laces up scuffed Doc Martens,

and steps into the morning chill.

For Mindy

We borrowed the magic of those nights.

The skyline – lit like a promise,

the windows dripping with sweat and condensation,

the bass mixed with the current of the river

moving the floor beneath our feet,

until the insistent dawn

spilled over the Ohio River.

I can still see you

counting out your bills at closing time.

Your smile warming through the bar haze.

The Waterfront was a temporary family –

fleeting and makeshift,

but it was enough.

Some things don't need to last forever

to mean everything.

Rest easy, sweet friend.

The Pin Trader at Disneyland

"Trading pins" she whispers,

not to anyone,

"is really just borrowing

other people's memories.”

She sips Jameson from a Minnie Mouse flask,

As she watches the families float past.

Their temporary joy is a permanent fixture

in a kingdom where no one notices

that she has nowhere else to be.

Bart

Each night,

Bart would duck behind the bar,

with a half-empty bottle of Tropicana,

and top it off with Stolichnaya.

I'd watch from the service well, pretending not to see.

He was a God behind that bar.

Six-foot-three, movie-star teeth.

Remembered every regular's name,

and what they needed to forget.

He eventually got fired

by a manager who did too much cocaine.

But then that manager got fired too.

So now Bart's back.

Working as my barback.

Stacking the glasses that once danced in his hands.

Sometimes he stares at the bottles,

fingers twitching,

like they remember the poetry of the pour.