Poems are bullshit if they are more math 

than song.  If they are to be solved instead of sang,

they don’t mean a thing, not a damn thang

if they don’t bang in the trunk.

A poem afraid to get off the page has shit

to say about the way a poem meant to be spat

sprays itself at audiences who honor it

with dollars in passed hats, hollering and hand claps. 

Poems that demand a line for CD sales

instead of a line on a CV fail

at measuring up because the measuring stick

is stuck in fucking Iowa at a writers workshop

where sound poetry has nothing to do with sound

and line breaks and break beats act like ex lovers

right after awkward sex in the coat closet

at their high school reunion.

Donald Hall might think your whole life led you

here but we both know you woke up surprised,

regretful and set to pull a Norton off the shelf

and make a wet spot with a dead sonnet. 

But we, we want poems to get butt naked and skinny

dip in cool whip. We want poems that don’t

and won’t apologize for how wild they are.  

I Don’t Know, The Title Could Use Some Work

Right when the poem starts, the language is very muscular,

very construction worker.  It makes me

want to wear a hard hat and spit and swing

a pick ax or grab my nuts and direct traffic. 

Right off the bat, it is clear there is

a journey in the heart of this poem

not only in the heart, but in the liver

and the pancreas too.  I have a strong feeling

the journey trickles into other body parts as well. 

The poem really loses me in the third stanza.

I don’t know, maybe I’m just being picky and anal

but the line, “gentrification is the new whitey diaspora”

really confuses me, although I like the way

it looks on the page.  The spacing    invokes   textures   of

colonizer flesh and overpriced apartments. 

The language is so fluid and flowing.

Maybe in revision you could cut out a picture

of a waterfall and glue it on top of this poem. 

I never knew Styrofoam could be spiritual until

that metaphor about how it never decomposes

gave me a new perspective on eternal life.

The thread feels the strongest for me

when the quilt is sewn.  I love quilts.  My grandma

had a tree farm in Southern Georgia.  She had many cats. 

Cats roamed her farm like teeth in a mouth.

For me, the previous stanza really broke

the dream.  I don’t see how it fit.  

Although, I like how the poem talks to itself

like it’s on a cell phone with an earpiece

or it’s answering a question only it can hear. 

Towards the end of the poem

the sensuality is so post-modernly pastoral.

I could smell the rotten milk

in the lopsided udders

of the plastic mad cow.

I could almost touch

the cactus in the clouds. 

And that word flippant, I love that word.

I imagine little red and black ants

doing back flips.

I think this poem could get published.

I really do. If you gave the editor

a hand job.  

You can’t teach an old god new tricks.

Who died and made you

the stronger the scary,

the meaner the rebuke?

The proof is in the couldn’t. 

Two birds in the hand is

too much too soon. 

What doesn’t kill you only waits to.

If at first you don’t believe,

speak now or forever hold

your breath and count to three.

Take two of these and call me

in the evening that wasn’t built

in a day but sure as hell

felt the way a belt is not supposed to.

This is going to hurt you

more than it turns me on

and off like a light switch

in a blighted house.

Absenteeism makes

the heart slow wander

A magic eight ball

is a hard thing to swallow.

Ashes to ashes, we all follow

the ring around the supposed-to

pocketful of I-told-you-so much

depends upon the red wheelbarrow.

Do not collet rainwater.

Do not collect two hundred dollars. 

Do not pass no means no

happiness is a warm gun

torn from a hand-me-down

game of red rover, red rover,

come on, get over it. The road

not taken is the road forgotten.

Duck, Duck, who’s

way leads on to way?

What breaks up must come down

and out of pocket. 

Poor as a church mouse.

Pour me another.

You can’t miss it.

It’s the first house on the left,

Always a bride, never a bridesmaid

left at the alter. 

Halter tops and hand grenades,

these are a few of my favorite things.  

Too Bad I Didn’t Buy A Stamp Seven Years Ago

On my ninth birthday I learned

to ride a white lie like a bike.

I’ve been coasting ever since.

By the time my mama bought the time

to drop a dime and call my father

I was already eleven years old. 

If the night is quiet enough

my heartbeat feels like footsteps.

I’m not sure where I’m walking to.

I just know it feels good to be outside.

I was born in the bed of a pickup truck

drunk driving up the buckle of the bible belt,

which is most likely why I feel so at home

while I’m spiraling wildly out of control.

Papa said he could tell the truth about whether or not

his heart could hold out another year   

by the way the moon fell across the sky

meaning I haven’t seen him in a while

and neither has my black eye.

My hopes for you are still as high

as we got that night

we jumped the chain link fence

and planted a granny smith apple tree

on our alma mater’s fifty yard line.

I will always remember the way we sat in the end zone

and we plucked up wet blades of grass.

We made bird calls with our palms held in prayer.

I guess I just wanted to remember us

before the world so reluctantly proved to us

that we were not invincible. 

There is a part of me that will always be

riding my bike down the dirt road

of my adolescence and smoking cigarettes

in the parking lot of a Methodist church

on a Friday night, waiting on the clouds

to get out of the way so I can see

the same full moon you see tonight.  

The morning you wrote me

a love letter from prison

was the same day I woke up

fresh from a dream where I swore 

we were ten years old again

soaked in sunlight,

skipping rocks across

the top of Lake Hartwell. 

Last I heard you were working as a maid

at a Holiday Inn somewhere between

Savannah and Jacksonville off Highway 95.

Sorry I never wrote you back.

Arse Poetica Written Right After I Got to Work and Discovered My School Is on Lockdown Because of a Fight Between Student and Teacher

Maybe the poem will sing like a snitch

in jail after assaulting a teacher at 7:49

in the morning because the paper or

the pen or the wind or the noise behind

his home life or his tired teacher

or the blaring sirens behind his parents

told him what to do or how fast to run.

Maybe the poem will cock a gun and drop it

just to see if the barrel smokes

as much as he does after he goes bang.

Maybe the poem will catch a beating when it gets home. 

That’ll teach it. Beat its ass.  If that doesn’t work, you must

have not whooped it hard enough. That’s the problem, poems

walking around here like they’ve never had a good ass whooping.

Put that poem in the air, behind a mic.

See if it still knows how to get smart.   

To Whom It May Concern:

Careful is not how we tell the truth.

Don’t get lost in process of losing faith 

in yourself, in your purpose, in your ability, in your work

in yourself, in your mind, in your love, in your thirst

for yourself, for the ocean, for the earth, for the help

of what tells you to keep pushing.  Be still

long enough to know what you know

and know you know it. 

When you’re so hungry, you feel like you could eat a gun. 

Be the one who doesn’t.  Don’t be the tragic artist.

We are what we make, Jake.  I’m not divorced.

I’m not married.  I couldn’t make either work. 

I am not a dry drunk.  Nor am I quiet

when I should be. I am not a handful of decades

shoved in a matchbox, in a box

spring, a bent key in a deadbolt.

I am not a promise ring. 

I am no mistake. I’m not

welcome at her table and I’m not

insulted.  Maybe I’m a sad woman

because I sure know how to make one.

When no one else will claim you,

when the shame you’ve brought your name

is the same as the day you disappeared,

when you can’t go back, when

your front doorstep ain’t yours. 

Jake, don’t slam doors that aren’t yours. 

Don’t walk out of that house of cards

you both built.  Not unless

you’re bluffing.  The long way home

is a lot longer than you know

but if you need to go, go and enjoy the walk.

After you’ve run your family off,

you’ll have to be your own.

We all become dust but some

of us enjoy being swept away. 

You’ve come this far, you better

get what you came for.

You better settle up

before you fall towards the light

before you call it a night.