Second Spring 

pain

I think this girl at work
doesn’t like me
because I’m not sure about my pain
I want other people to tell me
how much pain I’m in
I see how that could be annoying

I record myself talking to kids
to see if I sound nice
sometimes I can tell
that the kids want to
cause me a bit of pain
and sometimes they ask me
if Nordstrom is where you go
when you die
because they don’t really know
what happens with your body
if people keep using it
or not

Ellie taught me
how to draw a person
I need to focus on the light
and get an impression
of what’s going on
I guess you would do
the same for an object

the girl wants me to have a clear
problem but I can’t
experience pain in service
to a concept
It’s hard for me to tell
if or why I feel pain
because it doesn’t seem
contingent on anything

I was telling my uncle
about the acting training I did
how it was mostly just learning how
to get out of a chair
he asked if that seemed helpful
and I said I think it’s always useful
to know where your body is



Halloween

the helicopters woke me up
last night they were looking
for the gunmen who fled their crime
on razor scooters
in the morning the reporters waited
by the police tape
for something
in the evening I saw
what they were waiting for
on my phone
where I can also look to see
if my roommates paid me back
for electricity
the killing was only two blocks away
but everyone’s world is so different
people are so different from each other
we want different things
I almost don’t notice
the lights go out on the train
when I was at theatre camp
one kid told everyone his brother got shot
the night before to get attention
it didn’t happen and we all knew it
but every day is a threat the world might change
not into a different world but into the world
of someone else
it took me a while to see that
everyone else got off the train
except for me and a man
in all black
holding realistic angel wings



incident report

I spent a few hours helping my friend
cut down a tree in his front yard and drag
its branches to the back
it was supposed to be a peach tree
but the peaches never grew

the neighbors call the city on him
to report the empty and overgrown branches
one night we burned them
and a neighbor came up to the fence

she said it’s not okay what you are doing
those go in the green waste bin

it’s fine I tell her        I know how to use a tree