Here's to Killing

Here’s to killing. Here’s to screeching

rubber-burned through happy standers-by,

to the bomb like a small sun

born above the city. Here’s to murder,

manslaughter, the lexicon of –cides: where Cain

slinks back from the lamb-specked pasture,

a prince goes epileptic over bitter wine, or a boy

drops the gun by his wound-bleached mother.

Here’s to the noose, to the mortar, to the spear

so patient in its palm-draped pit,

to the death ray arriving from a distant planet

to melt the trees into brownish scum. Friends,

here’s to killing—not because it’s fun,

but because the days fill up with static,

because the limbs go numb from sitting,

because anyway we can’t run

from the inside-out gas creeping through the city

or the tumors that swallow our bowels as we sleep—

because, at last, we must succumb. And so

we have a duty: To break. To bleed. To go

quietly dumb in our book-lined studies

or cough ’til our lungs give up their longing.

Which is to say, we must receive.

So here’s to giving.

Psalm of the Apple, Psalm of Mud

After the city of ash and sulfur; After the fall

to the dark of the lake; After all

the wrong angels had baked into age,

the good Lord, they say, got lonely, lonely…

Dead-dog and sweet-Lucy-done-left-me lonely.

Rogue-cosmonaut-lost-in-the-vacuum lonely. And so

he built a beast of earth that wouldn’t bark

or bite, that fawned, that had no spite

boiling in it like bile, a thing

that he could tickle on its little head at night

before bedding down in his hammock of stars—

Sweet Lucy,

he wanted to make it right.

He wanted to make another you. He wanted to do

it all over but you,

you skulked through the night

to tongue your double’s ear;

you taught it to fight, to flirt, to steal cars.

What is it we fear

the dead might do, tiptoeing

like thieves through the brain’s backyard?

What is it we want

when we make of the living the ones we’ve lost?

God missed the dead. He brought

them back. And there’s the cost:

To let them die again.