You ask me where I stand.
What you mean (as I understand) is:
where do you base your conclusions,
where do you base this self from which these conclusions come?
I stand on shifting sands.
Let me clarify: the movement isn’t earthquaking or tectonic
nor even jarring-shaking or chronically unsettling;
rather it is and has always been
a constant flow of seething grains that gather momentum
and then come in hordes towards a single destination
and then en masse flee from where they just arrived
and then find a new space to occupy.
So I dance, and try to have my stance flow
with these infinite strands of pulverized land.

Rough hands lay every brick in Chicago
Now, mountains of mortar surround
South Side grandmas’ eyes
that have never seen hill,
canyon, starry sky splendor or sea.
They grimace
at the grit that man’s expansion paid for
as hands laid more and more
blocks for work-eager newcomers…
but man, just sit still a moment,
take stock of the current situation:
grandfather, unemployed for generations,
toyed with by ghetto-raping politicians,
alienation scraping at your crumbling door…
imagine the torture to step outside
to see slum-trashed abandoned lots…
please let my lines be a slight-binding suture
in our ruptured social fabric,
let me give you a lyrical lift,
a ride on my rhyme
so you may live what’s been denied…
but man, form flounders
in intellectual abyss, beyond the reach
of any but dreary divers...
but perhaps they will pass the pearls along…

Flying far from factory funeral desolation,
meet the ancient face of this artificial nation:
scarred, scored, worn by centuries’ wild West wind,
flameful breath sparking stone with sand
until the visage stands stark and stolid,
creases sweeping like highways through solid folds
that sigh skywards; behold it and marvel,
know that we travel somewhere in the midst
of the mountain’s streaking skids of colors,
that our matter’s somewhere in the center
with the natural fountain’s soaring chatters.
There our ancestors’ bones mix
with the peat-stone-silt to be ground
by gravity into lesser moans that regret not,
lament not and sit not still though they never will
move visibly – they seethe in the grooves
left by the swords that fell from the hordes
that cleft their words from the land,
and thus we’re not bereft of the fruit
of the work of their hands for still we see
their presence in the sand they tilled that sifts
and shifts through generations of formations
that have gently set upon the qualms of this nation
(our bloody history and shoddy society)
the calm building blocks for a new creation.

If you’re going to break down, break down in bed. Not here, not in the bathroom, where you know you’ll never reach that eyes-gazing-into-themselves-in-mirror clarity of vision. No, don’t break down here, where you’ll end up with head in hands, thoughts swimming between deafly ringing ears. Not here. Break down in bed, where you’ll quiver without jarring bones or scraping skin. In bed, where you know you’ll slide sobbing to sleep, where oblivion will engulf raw and bleeding emotion or where dreams will embrace raucous feeling into their ever mutating, transforming and potentially emancipating arms. No mirror clarity tonight. Break down in bed, where you’ll truly disintegrate, where you won’t simply chip a tooth or break a nail, where you’ll nerves will fizzle out of your pores, where you’ll be shot into the air on a gasp of despair, into the air where you’ll look down in panic and supernova, becoming a outward-hurtling junkheap of pathologies that will descend back down to Earth, where their radioactive remains will blanket the contours of the surface, creating a glowing silhouette: that’s the most clarity that you will get tonight. So now raise your face from your hands. Don’t glance in the mirror as you pass. Calmly open the door and walk down the hall. Enter your citylight-reflecting-off-of-smog -lit bedroom. Lay down. Break down.