Trash, and: Dad Poem, and: The Hurricane Doesn't Roar in Pentameter

TRASH

The Knicks were trash. Head coldsat the outset of a South Bronx summer:

trash. The second hour after she is gone,the moment the song you both used to slow

dance through the kitchenetteto comes on, moving on: all trash.

Death is trash. Love is a robust engagementwith the trash of another.

Monthly bills of any kind are trash,although access to gas & electricity

are not, so there is that to consider.Blackouts are incontrovertibly

trash. Much like student loans, or the factthat we live in a culture of debt such that one

must always be behind to make some semblanceof what our elders might have called living.

My friends often state in the midst of otherwiseloving group chat missives that life is trash, though

we all keep trying to make one for some reasonor another, and the Internet says my friends are trash,

that black men and boys are trash, & it makes me thinkof the high Germanic roots of garbage—which

is perhaps the first cousin of trash—that part of the animalone does not eat, and we are sort of like that, no?

Modernity's refuse, disposable fleshand spectacular failure, fuel and fodder,

corpses abundant as the trashon the floor of the world.

Aging is trash. I am years past 30 nowand so any further time qualifies

as statistical anomaly,you can't expect good

results with bad data, trashin trash out, as they say,

and I'm really just searchingfor better, more redemptive

language is the thing,some version of the story

where all the charactersinside look like me and every

single one of us escapeswith our heads.

DAD POEM

We play Dip Set at eleven & the boy takes flight,drums against his mother's form in lock-step with the electric bass emanating

from my modest plastic speakers, a kind of minor thunder-storm, enclosed in evening's temperate embrace.We got this house to raise him in & pack the walls with lyrics

born of financial markets all but decimated, racial capitalism, warpoetry of an era we barely remember now, mainstream radio accountsof actual fugitives set free only in the air

between platinum chains muted by engineers& microphones built from stolen metals,the blood binding them & the men in the mines

blurred by American avarice, the romanceof narratives ending in home. We're all here.My son, my wife, and I, the three of us alive

inside a Massachusetts town I discovered reading linesfrom David Berman. I was 26, seated in classroomsfull of strangers who looked the way I imagine

the boy dancing as I write this does, our blacknessa bridge across every militarized zone, the musicin him so mighty it shifts the weather.

THE HURRICANE DOESN'T ROAR IN PENTAMETER

with thanks to Kamau Brathwaite

& neither does the ar-15 at 3 a.m.baptizing a city block in metal,the chestnut-colored boy behind

the weapon's heft no largerthan my father was in the junglesof Saigon, ducking buckshotin the understory. Spooked

witless he was, he says, long since broken in his ownway, far beyond the small redemptions our hollow,dead-end culture offers a man like that anyhow.I am not unlike him: almost as muchas forgiveness, I wanted a theory of violence,

a philosophy of life at the edge of the civil, somelovelier song for the unplanned,the children of accidental birth & systemicannihilation. When the smaller girlson the block drew knives, or greasedthe sides of cheeks so punches

would slip right off, you knew there was loveinvolved. Love discolored or forgotten,pummeled in the gut, thrown to the streetlike a black bag, or anything else black for thatmatter (universal glyph of loss & excessthat it is). I too was bornto leather belt & brandished fist,

learned language, first, as a trapdoor through trouble. A story or joketo lessen the blow...