Code Talkers

boxer shorted well into
a tuesday afternoon,
it is summer.
he's showing me

the dictionary left
for him
after the war -
our grandfathers'
sons
born in letters
the same year,
invisible from the Pacific -

how quiet I had to be,
pondering a list
of words
that had forgotten love
(or thought it
unnecessary)
and made fighter planes
of humming birds.

Languages II

My separateness becomes obvious, noisy

sends my face seeking

asylum in armpits or elbow crooks

eyelids pressed right up against that infinite

distance, fumbling the translation

of ever expanding languages

I’ve put my alphabet all over this new skin

but we’re illiterate in the dark, here

fingers blinking like cursors

between my shoulder blades

they speak in code to freckled galaxies

under the warm soup of night noises:

heat pipes, traffic two blocks down, a radio

turned really low

This stillness doesn’t calm me, I want

to claw through the roof just for

an examination of all those dots,

patternless harborers of endless wishing

Languages I

Way in the back

cigarette clouds

the after hours Portuguese

talk around pitchers of

dollar drafts stabbing

out smoke after

smoke

they call me

mama

mama, from under

baseball caps

from cities none

of us

have been to

Carlito he’s twelve

or maybe

fourteen

they are pretending

to shave

his chin, smooth

as glass

he says, in English,

I’m old enough for you

mama

the window’s gone white

from drifting

snow

nos somos furados aqui

I say back

A rare foray into the world of poetry...no title

She says, strength that can’t lift things is called grace
and knows that it takes balls to just admit
when even your taste buds are full of shit
for the price, dessert is bland in this place.

Tea lights in glass houses cheaply attempt
ambiance, flickering epileptically
while she’s snickering condescendingly
at some small grammatical misprint

in a letter I wrote. Eyes at half mast
she says, at last, it’s good, almost great
substantive pause, looks at her plate
while I provide lame conversational ballast.

In the manner brilliant Boston sunshine
guilt trips those indoors, her complimentary
commentary woos by sheer rarity,
things scarce become delicacies, in time

I do find her barricades disarming,
the old “because it’s there” mentality
moths me to the light of her brutality,
her soft, female cruelty, rather charming.

We find recourse - political discourse
obviates her admitting inability
to write loving letters for anybody
since impulse lost its original source,

now she only changes the addressee.
Despite her swift, careless unkindnesses
Her voice holds not a trace of mindlessness
and her hands, her hands know some secret me.

By midnight, our mouths are red with wine
cannibals both, we fuck with the rhyme,
throwing the form from before on the ground,
swearing like a sailor, lighting her incense
her ocean is cold, but I like to be drowned
we find rhythm in rhythm’s absence.