Easy Target

1. Words that arrest the pulmonary valve

I am a sucker, always

ready to be crushed.

Pull the cord 

of this robe at any 
time and I’ll be exposed,

the whole length of my

soulish ribbon so easily

unraveled with your

single reveal,

lie or not.

And it is okay.

The ones who love

just to love, they’re the 

ones put away in asylums 

to dream on the fumes, the 

entrails of these heart explosions

and their atomic wake; they’re the
ones drugged for the sake of 

generative factories that fuel

the world’s healing machine;

they’re kept in padded 
rooms that pretend to 
keep them from 
falling on their 
own swords.

But we, the unraveled,

the easily exposed, the

naked and around the world

in 80 days breakers of records—

we know the shimmer of hope

when we see it. Even when

nothing but a lightsail a

lifetime of stars away.

2.  What is real is what is unseen

Inside 
this desert is a carved acacia organ unplayed, 
cloaked by a red curtain in a theater of damp walls and

echoes.

Outside

an old white man still escaping jungle

theaters plays Blind Willie Johnson songs

off-beat, his thin voice naïve and

beautiful.

Underneath

is a grid of tunnels that makes the whole

city sing unawares, notes like drops that make caves

one decade at a time, notes like bullets that ricochet from

angled wall to ceiling to wall, aiming with

intrigue.

And above,

a whole world of drying blankets and

kite magicians, ravens that map out in their ink eyes

every inch of the rooftops, the earth, and relay it in sung loops

of history, revelatory clouds rolling black coverings

off hills that were always there, growing in

secret.

3. Even when hunger drives you

You resist with your downshift,

you reverse right off the reservation.

You chase the fast without vengeance,

only learning to eat air, to drink wavering

molten light right as it passes through you, over

the curve of the world. Velocity saps your blood.

You throw your roots farther out, before

the gold in the frying pan can say when.