Decrease in Production

I need to trick myself into thinking I have an 'assignment' due every Monday, so that I keep writing regularly. This was a revision for my final portfolio for last semester's class, but it underwent a lot of much needed revision since then. So, basically, I haven't written a new thing since mid-December.


Candy Cigarettes

Since second grade
I believed my black-sheep blends
bound me for a land
not of the American Midwest Population 319
Village of Nowhere of my birth.
Six years old
strutting Boxcar kids' logic
down Oak Avenue, I was going places, ready
to locate the poetic kin
of my broody little brain.
I was going places:
black stirrup leggings
scuffless black and white saddle shoes
an oversized black sweater stolen
from an oversized tow-headed brother
one candy cigarette snug in the crease of my mouth
another candy cigarette warming between an index
and a middle finger
the rest of the carton swaying
in a faux-leather fanny pack beside
a Walkman rotating Emotions, Side A
getting me to the edge of town.

My bluff
was always called
in the time it took
to flip that tape to Side B.
If only If It's Over
could still make the compass of my feet
reorient the rest of my body to a direction
of where I always seem to find home.

But these twenty years have replaced Long Island
songstresses with Duluth poets, Buffalo babes,
Los Angeles machines, Kingsland currency,
London handguns; these twenty years
have left that tape deck turning only dust,
holding up only a corner of a bookshelf
broken during the move, the exile
of us outcasts to an American Metropolis
of Where Everybody Who Wants to Be Thought
a Somebody Has Got to Be.
And now I swagger
green philosophy:
my blacks all-natural, organic:
cotton grown in a field leeched
of a history of soil fertilized
by slaves, indentured servants,
illegal immigrants;
cotton grown in a field watered
by a river diverted from,
created from
the dirty Mississippi
and run through
solar-sustained filtrations
to rest me assured
my delicately freckled skin won't get rashed
from any mutant roe
when I slip into this style certified cool or
hot or
hip or
raw or
rad or
bad or
bitchin' or
boss or
whatever term in whatever tongue
such decrees are passed down by the kids
calling fashion
the gateway to heightened environmental awareness.

I request permission
to approach,
to enter their sanctuary,
and find myself seated at the foot of a banquet table
covered in produce -
carrots
celery
spinach
cherries
strawberries
pears
apples
grapes -
fruits and vegetables saturated not
with pesticides, not
with algicides
bactericides
fungicides
herbicides
insecticides
miticides
molluscicides
nematicides
rodenticides
virucides
but with the care and concern we
black-clad ex-pats left behind
when we fled countrysides
for cities filled with
windowless rooms, concrete gardens,
steel clouds.
But in this hall of good cheer and satisfied
smiles from our successful bid at an alternative,
an enlightened lifestyle, we
ching ching!
Toast
santé!
Á votre
santé! until
someone spills pinot on someone else's suit.

Grapes' blood shed: all bets off.

It doesn't matter
that red blends into black,
and we could just suck the juices
from the cotton because we read
its certification, know its genealogy
from seedling to shirtfront.

We don't quite know what to do with ourselves,
don't know how to manage this disruption,
this revolution,
now that somebody's been hurt.