“Draw near, Reviver and Consoler!
What is it you wish to tell me
By means of these people,
By means of these circumstances,
By this span of time?”
—prayer of Lithuanian prisoners

My brother had an inturned eye.
You saw more white than color.

Then my father hit him hard enough
To turn that side of his face the

Blue color of a black overcast at sunset.

And then the white of his eye pulled
In the explosions of his vessels

So that his tears turned to the Ganges,
His lazy eye a crystal in a cave,

A light magnet in a black vacuum.
But because I didn´t see it then,

Only after I had spent myself as a
Passed match among smoking homeless,

Then I couldn´t tell him of his beauty,
And so he believed it was the fist of God.

To My Children

There are two of each of you for me,
And the first you must shoot in the face

With a double-barreled shot-gun when
You see me coming with it.

I want with this to turn you into me,
Anointing you like some do the sun

As it sits while we round it,
A sunset or sunrise the calming names.

Know that this is a crime—
Reducing that which gives you

The heat, the breath, the flow of waves
Of air over the throat cave, where the

Painting can´t be seen, but is there,
If only the eyes would turn in, the voice

Soft, subtle, hearing in its howling instead
Of hiding the blood and mud drawings—pulling

This all into your palms and believing it is setting
Or rising on your rhythm is like believing the

Buffalo are just for you.

When you feel from me the need for you
To rise or set, to warm my empty morning,

To romanticize my coming evening,
Then blind me with your brightness like Oedipus,

And I will look inward for my light in my cave
And sit in awe of yours as you add to our family painting.

Throw Away

I´m remembering lately those first minutes reaching for
You in my half-life, in the grey of new.

It was the hair I missed then most,
Unseen hair inside wet with my world

Which is why we men worship hair,
Threads leading us to a million gates,

Hoping we´ll find you again
To relieve us of our thinking.

Cream is like hair and wine,
Music close, but beyond or before.

Music is more the roots of hair and it is
Even you—pure music with no intentions,

Like water running thin barely over
Small unseen rocks just under a glacier,

The flow still new to itself, just born to
Movement but the same as it always was,

Able to share itself once warmed by your
Smile, the one I have not been able to find

Since I left my mother and found myself
in the time without new water, where

Every heart has been pierced by a no-king lance
And there is no consolation just below the glacier

On the eternal hills, where every intention is camped
Out on top, all eyes drawn to the sun and not the water,

Its sweet cold unknown, ignored, forgotten,
Like an abandoned fetus in a dumpster.

To All Throw Aways

We together are straw dropped limp and wet from a giant horse,
Half-chewed, half-used, half-wanted, half-us.
We must stop believing that someone will come to spin us into gold,
That there was some meaning to our not mixing with the
vapor of a stallion´s breath.

We are ugly, my love, like a roach sneaking through heavens gate, only
one knowing the secret invasion, quivering in laughter as we crawl up
Her thigh. And that is what makes you my savior and me yours—together
we need no key to Him.

Our mistress Suffering carries us through
under Her dress,
slipping us into
her Father´s feast.

But only if we tickle her just right,
together in our dance
each virgin milk silver moon satin
Line up from the insole to the sun,
there from where we came,
that which we miss the most,
Which is why we know what she wants.

When you are hit again, concentrate on the burn
Inside instead—its opposite is the fire you will hunger for,
the unbearable tenderness

There at the top of our journey,
where life began the same,
before we were split,
before giant men
with self-made hats
and thinning beards
could pull us
from our Father´s mouth

before he was done feeding.