Downtown

Taxicabs carrying the coat hangers idle,
waiting outside while the men in houses
of congress map ways for women to seek
the back seats. To double back at this point

into the journey endangers schoolchildren
learning respect for whom they are not.
While legislating a boulevard to the birth
of a city, the heartland stands between

the two legs of a story with mask on
and palms open at the threshold of freedom
and justice, the twins crying for their day.
The placards read, "Pay the fare and send

the hackney home," a compass for frightened
men in the wilderness of conscious love.
Citizens traveling together, avoiding alleys
of a mob's mind, each wear shoes

that are right for each of them. Tipping
the balance of momentum from yesterday,
shoulders bent on power can't come
to terms: maimed with twenty years to life.

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Philomela's Reading

Nightingales form flocks for comfort
whenever they are more than one.
When alone, they perch themselves
at the ends of telephone wire.

Men cannot understand the behavior
or speech of the thrice caged creatures.
But the daily coronations of broad
shoulders and narrow hips that gave

birth to the story of the hunt put
the world to sleep and escaped blame.
Stripped of power, species, and song,
the flesh in feathers, tell their tales

in poems as opaque as tar, only now
being unlocked by mutants
with combination numbers. The convict
without bars doesn't understand

until her body sings through his.

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My poems have been published widely in such journals as Rolling Stone (yes, once they published poetry), Poetry Magazine (where I was featured poet), Grand Street (where I was featured poet), New Letters, Negative Capability, Confrontation Magazine, Barrelhouse Review, West 47 (Ireland), Aesthetica Review (England), New Delta Review, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review. You may also read, or listen to me read, poems in the current issue of Inertia Magazine (www.inertiamagazine.com). My essay "Vanishing Artist: American Poet and Differend" was published in Fulcrum: An Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics and again in The International Journal of the Humanities.