This Dangerous Place

 This poem is me

as if it was requests hour at the radio station

even if you are young

and don't know about request hours

or listen to the radio.

What if I dedicated my dial

(what even was a dial) to you--

you people in dangerous places,

you people with loved ones in dangerous places. 

Me and poetry are not a safe space

because I come to lyric

when time and space

don't rhyme and rifts and shifting

action spill out of tune and I

am bereft of prose because I am deep in the

"Who knows?"

And that's why I want to hold you here

where I find it dangerous to be--

you in all you are and I where I am trying to be

feeling the part where art bridges 

tragedy and fugues itself into

multipart harmony and 

something something directs a prism 

to where others try to see and witness the full spectrum

as if that was an epiphany

that could be cantilevered by poetry

as never was in prose. 

This dangerous space is for who knows

what, but I put my pen in it and like a grenade 

pull the pin out

hoping understanding 

explodes. 

Charged

 You are your brother's keeper

after all, though you don't know him,

or even trust him any further than

you honestly would throw him.

He doesn't look like you, or

not enough, but if you and

he were standing together

faces in a mirror,

you'd be stupid not to see the 

relationship between you and he. 

His family died in a tragic thing

we aren't going to talk about today

it doesn't help us in any way,

except that they were your family, too.

and if you knew that--

what would you do? 

Maybe feel like you should feel badder or madder

or that their deaths mattered.

He doesn't feel like you do

or not enough,

and wants to fuck up you and your stuff

and though your faces aren't

mirror perfect your twin

wants to start ancient angry bullshit again,

And your "stop" isn't enough for him,

And his reasons aren't

enough for you--stretching morality too.

I don't know what you are supposed to do

but you are entwined 

and some fucked ups will dine

on the horrible opportunity the 

family feud has afforded.

And serve both of you 

like a dessert

and call it "peace". 

I don't know

 I don't know if you know

that "from the river to the sea"

means not liberation

but depopulation of people

who came here to be free.

I don't know if you know

that saying something a million times

doesn't make it entirely so,

even if a little bit is. 

I don't know how people live in a prison

without knowing

who the criminals are,

and despising them first

and foremost,

for the sacrifice of the innocent,

for the demand of the humane urge

to call it liberation--even when it is just death. 

We like purpose, after all. 

the sight of a tree where no tree might be, but also could. 

The signal of hope

in a dark place. 

Sometimes I sympathize with hopeless causes, 

but I don't know

how hopelessness becomes so intrinsic

that beheaded babies feel like

something you have to argue

about instead of just not--thinking about how it isn't so

or was maybe not so bad? 

I don't know if the people

who want a solution have a solution,

holding it so close to their chest we see no outline

of anything but their disdain for the status quo. 

You know: people existing. Here and now. Rejecting

the Eternal "No."

And the people who sacrifice you

to sacrifice them? 

How they stay? I do not know. 

I only understand why they need to go. 

And why anyone would stand in that way:

I do not know. 

Returning

 I dreamed I came to

my parents' house

after they and I had been away

and I went inside and they

stayed outside two gray shades

by the door.

Nothing looked as it did before,

there was light coming in

where no light

needed to be,

and dirt like a landfill

all across the floor.

For a moment I pawed

at the dirt with my hand

looking for what was theirs and

what was mine,

but as the light came down and 

illuminated the grass

growing up from the dirt on the floor,

I knew I didn't want to be there

anymore,

and I followed the 

gray shades out the door.

You Don't Know

 You don't know the wonderful people

you are wanting to kill. 

The sweets and tea they would give you

if you stopped by their place

and the names of their children

and the names of their dead. 

You don't know how they pray

or the secret thoughts they have

that prayer is not enough,

and the times it feels like so much. 

How can I tell you they don't know you

but they would understand your rage

if it came to them from just you:

one person, telling them the horror 

from your soul, and you would know them by the 

horror they can also tell. 

We are born to feel pain

but to bear it together

lightens it. 

And if we could bear with one another better

we might survive anything.

You don't know:

we might!