to be an american, edited.

I always give advice on things
that I don’t know anything about.
I only know things that will make a person miserable
and actually don’t know much about what makes things glow.
(I don’t know why I do that;
I really don’t know anything about poetry
or anthing about ethics
the outdoors,
or healthy diets.)



I don’t leave the house anymore,
because my house has become the only real company
I love.




I feel the soft walls curling their Michelangelo
stone palms with the fat square tips
they are gently scooping up the bed, which is empty raft of lights
and the Christmas lights that are not evenly
hung around the door, and hang like fats in some places
each have an egg raising
a story of an innocent bird inside.
the smell of spices and hot food just cooked
and plates that sit under suds and tomato water
making purple coal rings that stay forever
in the porcelain sink
and the heavenly lights under their paper lampshades
the burnt guitar always ready
round faced
gold thin teeth
to play its brawny bourbon sound with tin cans kicked




she made me feel so alone,
even though she was my teacher.
she made me feel small and hard
& cold, a sad line in a barcode
or something even more obscene
like ignorance and boring ideas
she made me feel embarrassed
& confused, like I had used a word wrong
at the table, and everyone knew that I had been
faking that I know things.
but she had thin arms like my mother,
kind of flaky like hers,
and she had on this watch
of my mother when I was still in my odepus phase
(when told her I was in love with her and stroked her triangle face.)
those thin arms, with the anorexic wrist
with the deerskin pearl that sticks out,
and she was rubbing her own arm the way my mother did
rolling up the same silver band with
the dime glass face
up to her drying clay elbow.
I adored her then
and I felt like she could love me.
because she has the same arms as my mother
with the same sliding watch


to be American is to be lonely
so I make these dream stories of village people
who don’t know what lonely is.
(and its another thing i know nothing about,
and i only want them to exist,
to balance out the american in me)

So I’ve given them faces
with homes and sons and
gossip.
I’ve given them warm nights with stars
and heat beside chill

their communal duties
with the disappearing space of joy
I imagine
this woman
with bundled pounds of hair
and marine eyes
these big new york cheese cakes
I imagine
her sitting on her stoop
in the dirt
watching children in baggy clothes
kick a muddy ball around
ricocheting precariously upon potholes
occupied with tan soup water
sometimes almost hitting the baby
in the face.
there is a real sense of commotion here
with bodies and movement
and wind.
but she is quiet and still
she knows why things are &
who she belongs;
everything is remembered in
the lines in between the skin of the village
written with blood
and heard in the wilderness
which still exists there
and she doesn’t have to figure out anything.
figuring things out, isn’t what life is about.



to be American is to be a stranger
but you can still remember a time when the check-out-lady
would tell your about her nights with boxed wine and tv shows
or when they didn’t need to check your ID
when people waited for you to cross the street
and when it was easy to have people over in your home
to play music and share a meal that looked like
it was cooked in sections.
when art didn’t mean anything
and your talk didn’t mean anything.
Being an American means you can remember this
when you were a part of something
but now no one remembers you.