"field trip" and "send someone close second to none"

field trip

mama come ons her kids
straggle off their red letter slides
no    leave everything
you found jettisoned & thrown
rusty boat debris clang down the levee
pull out your pockets
avoid the contraband
of the transient man
collecting diddly
more than dollars or thoughts
on cameras or miles davis
walked everywhere
wanna follow me around for awhile?
the recognition of role reversals
somewhere in the limp intermittent sense
supported by parish-issued sandals
and sample rent collected for a few
days before casting inept american gents back
to trudge town   an observatory on hallucinogens
muddied help do you have more
gunshots usa heretostay
panic trips to the cement exit
and emergency hos-pits
doling fatalities
freight afraid of the halt of gait
mideast eat your apocalypse out
hazel iris of ideology
changes with whatever you wearing
or daring enough to consume
whether it’s the dove’s arm or moldy legume
maybe not the samsie feuds of news
maybe not the phubbing battle fugues
no breast upon egress
a discarded birthday gal
sequin flickers in the crevice
and someone’s been painting
a pale old leg bruised
even the levee’s black & blue
the river whittles every stick
collapses lax   relents
its trip out to sea
until our globe’s entirely tent cities
(pretending can be so pretty)
mine’s pitched on the back of a dragonfly
headed back to the nile

​

send someone close   second to none

right back to the mugging hum drum
of living life silent as an order for one
instead of a loud hand molding fantasies
into being maybe that was god’s error
the audience of his mission
couldn’t forgive him for setting the garden
with a naked awakening
craving for like company
children now too doped up to redeem
humanity may be the most fragile medium
this planet sympathy symphony
in a minor key that the poets sing
been battling the abyss since the beginning
been tattling on our brethren for a pittance
I can’t scrape my soul off the bleached coral
I can’t escape the mortal
mortar I’m afraid binds nothing
oversaturate the roots and see what grows
compost the roses like brown banana peels
I meant it when I ripped open my shirt
you watched the fault line form
down the middle of my graveyard heart
inked with the tears I held in
over the plucked feathers of my family
I still talk to every day
yesterday my father promised me
he would be there to talk until his death
and while I plan to take him up
on such a gracious guarantee
I reminded him that even when he’s dead
I will be speaking to him
I’m not sure how he took that
because that’s when we both hung up
but that’s how I live fully in this world
and fully in the next
until the whole fucking geode crumbles
to gleaming debris
and my graveyard gets folded
into a greater graveyard lapping behind