Poetry

Everywhere I look I see him,
I have a right to fear for him, 

though I have no right to claim his color.
His blackness is his to own and what will

my mouth say of that sweetness.

1. Dad, Don’t Be That Guy

2. Dad, Quoting the Wikipedia Isn’t Gospel

3. Dad, I’m Going to Take Those Away

4. Dad, I Warned You

Who’d have thought this wine made from the flowers of wild gorse
would turn out so well? How were the flowers ever convinced to give up so much

If time is money then how much might the bookie’s runner’s leather shoes have cost? To start: Tommy takes a watering can and tends the window boxes on his window sill.

               I wanted to make a gothic of it all:
the trees on the slope where the island dipped
               into the sea, their weird kinks & angles;

She has drawn them disembarking a sky-blue bus,
fresh from the bombing of Al Hajar. Some stumble
in the red-blobbed orchard, their hair shedding dust.

I’m thinking of how mushrooms will haunt a wet log like bulbous ghosts; 
of how a mushroom may be considered a travesty of a flower

It wasn’t so much that we burnt tires, releasing a toxic stew of nasties,
or that each Eleventh Night, as a spat crescendoed, some fella got battered 

Our love it lives at 6.3 degrees.
I stooped to measure it inside a dream.
A meager distance. Not the moon in apogee.