Celebrity Stalking


The celebrities are at it again. They keep 
stalking me for poetry. Just the other day
George Clooney tried to deliver my pizza
so I could sign his broadside, Meryl Streep 
crouched in my back yard with a first edition
in hand, Julia Roberts broke into my bathroom
to ask about pentameter, and Charlie Sheen left 
twenty-six voicemails asking for sexstinas [sic]
written in the colloquial language of porn, 
but these movie stars think they know the real me 
behind the poetry because they read tabloids
in line at the super market that detail
the lurid private lives of poets who take lovers, 
get caught without make-up, carry small dogs, 
enjoy gay trysts, drink absinthe, and own 
many-chambered homes with deep-pile 
cream carpets, secret rooms, and libraries 
the size of Luxembourg. They couldn’t know
that I’m allergic to even numbers and no longer 
fluent in filthy words. I’m feeling inflamed
on this spring nocturnal in the City of Angels, 
a hundred watt moon on the rise and the song birds 
playing their music well past prime time 
like neighbors with no children. No moment,
no poet ever safe from the paparazzi
so we duck into seedy bars while tourists 
mug with our tread-upon stars inlaid 
along Hollywood Boulevard.





Ode on a Floppy Disk


That poem doesn’t 
exist. The poem that saved 
the economy, the one
that proved God, the one about
all the swimming ponies. 
That clever sonnet 
to the unborn. The poem,
maybe the loveliest written, 
too arresting to speak. Too 
beautiful to finish. The hot 
little number from honeysuckle 
to hummingbird. The villanelle 
that ended the wars. Drug
war, gang war, the war 
on women. The poem about 
the old couple who died 
in the quake. The one
that solved the pop star’s 
problems. That controlled 
guns. The odes to turn-tables, 
beta-max, and polar bears. 
That poem about the house 
fire, cracking its hot whip 
against the hard-drive, 
literally taking it all.   





Kicked Around


The ball was too chubby and pink to think “kick it!” 
so I was last in kickball and first in oddball. Now I’m 
a full-grown waitress expecting more than these grease stains 
crisscrossing my mother’s day t-shirt at mother’s day brunch 
as I balance the plates up my arms like a circus act, 
a failed kickballer who thought tenderness should count 
for something. So what if this poem were a rubber school ball 
aimed at the head of the woman who gave me the stink-eye 
and no tip? What if I carried hash like purple mountains majesty 
topped with a little fluff of poached egg? She said her food was cold 
so I blamed it on the toast. The kitchen tried I tried to tell her, 
but it didn’t matter. She would have kicked me if she could. 
Fuck that bitch. She’s no better than me: a waitress 
who spins hash and eggs into poetry.





I Shouldn’t Even Write This


When the Iranian man told you
in broken English 
how he lived each day
through his cancer to see
the dark eyes of his daughter
I knew those lines wouldn’t be mine 
but when we slept off the tears
in your bed 
with the street humming
through an open window
I thought those lines could be mine 
and when you gave your body away
for a geometric fix
and when you nearly died 
for your next line 
like a poem
aches toward the white
at the end of a page
those metaphors are not mine 
but when I trace the webbed scars
that lace your body 
and when I
see life lived twice 
in the clear green of your eyes 
those written lines are almost mine 
because when I read anything 
that puts a boy near a man
like a boy on tiptoe 
at the edge of a deep well
I want to tear the page in two
that put him there 
and my love
my love that rage 
those words are mine.