Looking for Your Brother Again

the kitchen door open someone recognized it as a room
brief there     reptilian big show     heartbeat
his ribcage which had been interrupted
he was whittling a place down the hill
shaping it in his shoulders
forcing a smile
which he left dry every time he worried

	this was remorse
	this is how the novel
	was supposed to begin

but he has a brother left in his head
jugs empty at the fountain of nostalgia
talking a whole era as prescription
he opened the door     and his own light met him
he barked     at last recognizing napoleon’s ghost
a stranger turning out to be a cliché in eagle feathers

	a quiver of arrows brought him a rope
	out of the quicksand the rank reek of heroism
	hell     at least you found the sight of light
	that shadow was your brother

hope standing prostitute against a blank wall
the heaving death of boarded-up buildings
from now on     he decided     dead horses
invite them in     turn a statue into a doctor
so you could see him do it     ha
so he could send you smiling
and this     is how the novel ends

from Yew Nork (2014)

Union Square

as he got older as his years
got larger     a city larger within him

got fewer it got then a larger
city     then with skyscrapers
a basement     he got tall and fat
a basement     that reached to his voice

who is that old man
with a spine like a skyscraper
who complains about a gutache
or ulcers     or a spastic colon?
who is he?     why don’t i
want to look at him
when i look     in the mirror?

i need to go to new york city
where the pulse runs like
it did when i was young

i need to see     and how i haven’t
where there are so many
that are surprise     with their noise
that are both familiar and unfamiliar to me
the voice     of the city     i hear     at night
when all else is quiet     a sort of
unified hum     welcome me back
who i once was     to the air

from Yew Nork (2014)

Deserts Under Water

the full filed teeth of your little rubber sailors
skateboarding
across floors scarred by centuries of memory

	the apartments inside your eye
	flooded in the sheer hilarity
	of the laughter shared between their walls

you have taken a long and beautiful look
across a deep desert of oceans
elizabethan high beds surfing across a living bumpy floor
the soulful lassitude and drama
of underwater lights of broadway

	the irregular heave against glass and steel
	by the random currents of extrapolated vision

	medical plantlife on the top floor of the clouds
	magnetizing the force of their seeds at ground level

	the swaying grasses of the grace of vacant lots
	that grow as eyebrows of earth below skyline

	your memory of these places
	both small and large as the footsteps of childhood

no matter
children still play here
sing
	we live here
	we live here
	our songs and our games
	are alive here

from Yew Nork (2014)