I’m the matron-king of hell
In yoga pants and a disused bra for a laurel
& shatter the scene inside your simmering year
 
Like a ransom scene filmed through shattered transom
I smear in my glamour
I make as if
to justify the ways of God to man
That’s my ticket in
That’s why God lets me speak here
Crystostoma’d
on his couch
Even though I’m derived from Hell
Hellish Helenish Hellenic
 
I’m the hanged man
in this version
pegged up
in mine pegged jeans
by mine ancles, an inversion
mine manacles are monocoles
I spit out the key
and squinny through the keyhole
back at the unquittable world
 
In my rainment
of gummy sunglasses
and crows wings for epaulets
I delicately squawk from the edges of things
balance unsteadily on the bust of the goddess
 
squawk:
Aeschelus Euphorion Aeschelus Euphorion
 
&:
I’m going to tell you something so bad that when you hear it you’re gonna know it’s true.
 
Like all the worst stories
It comes from the heart
& it goes there too.
 
Back here in St. Joseph County
a struck duck flies crown first into the asphalt and is stuck there
with its brains for adhesive
like someone licked the pavement and sealed it
a postalette
with its cartoon feet in the air and its Jeff Koon wings
that’s roadkill for you: realer than real
and the cars mill by with their wheels in reverse
heavy as chariots
in a dealership commercial
and I am walking my dog by the river
a matron from hell
 
look on me and despise
I am like the river:
thick as beer and with a sudsy crown
there polyethylene bags drape the banks like herons
and a plastic jug rides a current with something like the determination
that creases mine own brow
as I attempt to burn my lunch off
the determination of garbage
riding for its drain
hey-nonny it’s spring
and everything wears a crown
as it rides its thick doom to its noplace
 
gently brushed
by pollen
by the wings of hymenoptera
like a helicoptera
performing its opera
all above Indiana
bearing the babes away
from their births to their berths
in the NICU in Indie-un-apple-us
Unapple us, moron God,
You’ve turned me Deophobic
the greasy tracks you leave all over the internet
the slicey DNA
in the scramblechondria
the torn jeans
panicked like space invaders
in an arcane video game
oh spittle-pink blossom
the tree don’t need nomore
shook down to slick the pavement like a payslip
you disused killer app
 
each thought strikes my brain
like the spirals in a ham
pink pink for easter
sliced by something machinic
each thought zeros in
flies hapless and demented
festooned like a lawn dart
finds its bit of eye
spills its champagne
split of pain
 
then we come to our senses
suddenly alone
in the endzone

anyone lived in a pretty how town
(with up so floating many bells down)
spring summer autumn winter
he sang his didn’t he danced his did.

Women and men(both little and small)
cared for anyone not at all
they sowed their isn’t they reaped their same
sun moon stars rain

children guessed(but only a few
and down they forgot as up they grew
autumn winter spring summer)
that noone loved him more by more

when by now and tree by leaf
she laughed his joy she cried his grief
bird by snow and stir by still
anyone’s any was all to her

someones married their everyones
laughed their cryings and did their dance
(sleep wake hope and then)they
said their nevers they slept their dream

stars rain sun moon
(and only the snow can begin to explain
how children are apt to forget to remember
with up so floating many bells down)

one day anyone died i guess
(and noone stooped to kiss his face)
busy folk buried them side by side
little by little and was by was

all by all and deep by deep
and more by more they dream their sleep
noone and anyone earth by april
wish by spirit and if by yes.

Women and men(both dong and ding)
summer autumn winter spring
reaped their sowing and went their came
sun moon stars rain

Tamir Rice, 2002–2014

                          the boy’s face 
climbed back down the twelve-year tunnel  

of its becoming,  a charcoal sunflower 
swallowing itself. Who has eyes to see,  

or ears to hear? If you could see 
what happens fastest, unmaking 

the human irreplaceable, a star 
falling into complete gravitational  

darkness from all points of itself, all this: 

the held loved body into which entered 
milk and music,  honeying the cells of him: 

who sang to him, stroked the nap 
of the scalp, kissed the flesh-knot 

after the cord completed its work 
of fueling into him the long history  

of those whose suffering
was made more bearable  

by the as-yet-unknown of him,

playing alone in some unthinkable 
future city, a Cleveland,  

whatever that might be. 
Two seconds. To elapse: 

the arc of joy in the conception bed,
the labor of hands repeated until  

the hands no longer required attention,
so that as the woman folded  

her hopes for him sank into the fabric 
of his shirts and underpants. Down 

they go, swirling down into the maw 
of a greater dark. Treasure box, 

comic books, pocket knife, bell from a lost cat’s collar,
why even begin to enumerate them

when behind every tributary 
poured into him comes rushing backward 

all he hasn’t been yet. Everything 
that boy could have thought or made,  

sung or theorized, built on the quavering 
but continuous structure 

that had preceded him sank into 
an absence in the shape of a boy 

playing with a plastic gun in a city park 
in Ohio, in the middle of the afternoon. 

 When I say two seconds, I don’t mean the time 
it took him to die. I mean the lapse between

the instant the cruiser braked to a halt 
on the grass, between that moment 

and the one in which the officer fired his weapon.
The two seconds taken to assess the situation.  

I believe it is part of the work 
of poetry to try on at least
the moment and skin of another,  

for this hour I respectfully decline. 

I refuse it. May that officer 
be visited every night of his life
by an enormity collapsing in front of him 

into an incomprehensible bloom,
and the voice that howls out of it.

 If this is no poem then… 

But that voice—erased boy, 
beloved of time, who did nothing 
to no one and became  

nothing because of it—I know that voice 
is one of the things we call poetry.
It isn’t to his killer he’s speaking.