We Learned it Early
altruism is not spelled with pocket change:
airport,
bus station, beggar,
bail and the
baby won’t stop
crying again, no medicine but
could we sell my ring, you think?
could we sell
could we?
cold, so cold.
car won’t start
city lights,
city nights,
catcalls from mouths without faces and a
coat over your head like a shroud.
creaking chairs,
crumpled papers in one hand,
christmas stockings and bills due yesterday
dial the numbers on the sign,
dot your t’s and cross your i’s,
everybody knows that.
empty bank accounts, empty pill bottles,
food poisoning and no more
funds available; hey, you
(fuckin)
freeloader, why don’t you just
(god, i’m freezing)
get a job?
gas station sandwiches
guillotine fantasies,
get your life together.
how? you ask,
howling.
huddled under canvas,
“hey, isn’t it that girl who’s always”
hush little baby,
hiding.
hoping.
hopeless.
“Have you considered
helping yourself?” we can only
help you
if you prostrate yourself
if your papers are in order.
if you juggle these rings of fire,
if you stand there while they laugh,
if you beg.
(it’s so cold here, in the winter)
“I remember you,
I gave you money one time.”
I never asked to get sick.
Jail shoes, unpaid fines,
judgement,
just one more thing,
kids asleep on a subway train,
kiss them as they’re dreaming,
landlord screaming,
lover leaving,
leaky roof and the
limp that lets you starve.
money doesn’t grow on trees, son.
medicine doesn’t, either.
mommy will keep you warm.
maybe they won’t bother us here,
maybe we can sleep.
no coats,
no supper,
no lights, no heat;
no, we can’t help you,
not people like you: you are the
Noises in our symphony.
neighbors watching,
one missed paycheck,
open the door to an
officer with a fistful of despair
officials who have never slept
outside
one breath turns heart and glass
opaque with silver frost.
Out, he says, get
out. Get out, get out, get
off the
property.
Police cars gathered at the scene of your crime:
packing, frantic,
plastic bags,
phone calls,
pleading,
panic,
pieces of your life strewn underfoot.
please, she cries,
please.
Pardon me, sir, do you have a
quarter, do you have a dollar,
really, all I need is a dime: to
ride on a steaming bus and stay out of the
rain one more night, one more time
reading posters in primary colors and you
realize that you are not the
right kind of poor.
remembering real life
reports to red-faced cops that
rout you out, you run
smell of fast food on the corner, a
slick and solemn knife in your
stomach,
starving, starving.
salvation army says
“we don’t think that you are
(straight)
saved enough to
survive.
shine your hair, comb your
shoes,
scrape off your
sexuality;
surrender your firstborn dreams and let us
see what you are willing to
sacrifice.”
shopping cart,
spare change,
spats of snow on my
shoulders;
soaked through,
scrutiny,
sleeping in the back seat,
sleeping in a waiting room
sleeping in an alley next door.
sleeping in shifts:
shelter is a sin
they won’t help you commit.
Tent in the woods,
threadbare jeans and
thrift-store jacket,
“they’ll just buy drugs with it,”
they say
they’re only carrying plastic; but
they’ll pray for you,
they promise. and
trans men in homeless shelters might “confuse
the poor sweet children,”
this is not the place for you.
there’s help out there, after all,
that is not us,
that’s what everybody says.
try looking harder;
try again.
Under the limit,
unused cans of sticky peaches
(“ungrateful”)
Unavailable,
Vouchers
(we don’t have any left)
walking a dozen miles
washing machines sit silent
war memories and
wallet empty except for an old receipt
(Why can’t you get a job?)
work let you go because too many
(e)xaminations,
X-rays at 3 AM;
your eyes are burning and
You need your birth certificate,
You need a photo ID
You need an award letter
You need a pay stub
You need a co-signer
You need better credit
You need first last and security
You need a reference
You need a reason to live.
…you don’t have those things?
You must be stupid.
You must be lazy.
You must be on drugs.
Your value to us is null.
You’ll have to come back some other time
You’ll have to help yourself.
Nic Fit (Mike #1)
The blue lights spawn
greasy guilt-sweat
In an instant:
Like the terror of cavemen I imagine
Fleeing from that shriek.
The voice that thunders over us
Is the voice of God,
My childhood god of vengeance,
Of constant
Constant
Constant watching
And judgement:
A god five hundred feet tall,
Knocking on skyscrapers
With knuckles of paint
Big as houses.
He was a troublemaker
(Mike, not God)
And I should have asked why
Why the car was so shiny
Why he had come to me
Why he was so proud.
But spackle and dust like a second skin
Made me thirsty and tired
And I wanted a cigarette like poison
Seeks itself out,
The driverless train of self-destruction.
So I got
in
the
car.
Backseat nest of black snakes gone rigid,
bad decisions with triggers.
Making me feel oddly violated,
like a stranger exposing himself to me
in that back alley:
Seeing them put the taste of garbage
On my tongue.
But I pretended not to notice
The stink of them
the oily stench of steel
like steam from stigmata gone rotten.
That place had made us all monsters,
anyway,
hungry and angry
for the same reasons.
And anyway,
what’s a little murder
between rats?
as long as he took me
to get a cigarette.
God’s voice said
“Driver, open the door”
and
“Keep your hands where we can see them”
and Mike’s eyes had swallowed the world
Its refuse rising
in his face.
He was starving, still, I realized
(Mike, not God)
even as he opened the door
with his hands full of backseat death
his last meal
a stomach full of rage
and lead.
he wanted me to see,
i understood too late,
to anoint him:
this is my blood
frying on crusty headlights.
he wanted a witness,
forgiveness,
but all
I
wanted
was a cigarette.
On the Occasion of My Death
On the occasion of my death
please do not be afraid of my edges
so easily covered in gray.
don’t let them tell you
their “thoughts are with my family”,
(we are strangers)
that I “lit up a room”
(I didn’t):
or
a thousand other words that have never climbed off a groaning bus
and shivered with me.
Do not let them press me deep
between the pages
of the reality upon which they insist,
my impressions are not soft.
There aren’t that many of us in here anyway,
but we have all suffered too separately
and spectacularly
for a soundbite.
instead I’d have you
gather, like jacks,
the scattered jetsam of a life
lived behind glass
in full color
real the way a tale is real
as long as you tell it.
I’ve rubbed shoulders with gods
and grieved lost wars.
I’ve walked city streets after midnight
and seen behind the worlds
on the tip of my tongue.
I’ve seen good and evil
in hotel mirrors
and learned which eyes don’t lie
when forgiveness seems to weep
my dead friends carried with me,
in the hollows of my worn brown coat
that reeks of fire and leather
and red smoke.
Tell them that I remembered
How the sun is hotter on your elbows
in new mexico
but the dust makes it softer on your boots
in boulder
I’ve always had the words
(just never in the right order)
in the back of bus stations
fistfuls of coffee in the neon night
Learning that grief has pitches and timbre
as panic dwindles in the rearview
A little quieter, even with that terror
between my teeth.
You’d understand me
if you understood yourselves.
Instead you drive away your sorcerers
and break your children early.
Reality is, you say.
You are not.
Tell them to scrawl my verse
on a bedroom wall
and watch it in the uncertain light:
tell them that all I wanted
was to be seen.
Do not let them press me deep
between the pages
of the reality they have chosen
in fear of the ones that were mine.
there are still worlds
on the tip of my tongue
We
The camera isn’t easily fooled:
it sees the planes of existence shift
i must be careful.
Oh, you would
like to know how i
feel?
I’d give you a hand
but when a million voices
are making just a little bit of
noise,
it’s not exactly easy to find
the “I”.
I am, multitudes.
The first person plural.
Like the ship that drifts
across the mind wastes,
kept alive by the movements
inside her.
here, i,
(the hull,)
neck bent like a penitent,
the ghost of gun oil and someone else’s blood
dissolving on my tongue of memory,
i pull on our costume by the door
and we smile
(with one mouth)
for the camera.
I Would Reap
These blue teeth wake
an underwater longing:
slow fathoms
that flood my heart with tears.
in all these dreams
I excavate my own bones
sowing the earth with the salt
of my grief.
how my hands yearn
to be the roots of small trees
with iron toes–
autumn-voiced fae who sing my name
with silver tongues
from fear of steel.
their mother, who,
recognizing her prodigal son,
would take me to her bosom
calling me home:
“I’ve left a light on
for you.”
i can see that light from here,
my lungs full of poverty,
like the glint from a gold tooth
behind the asphalt lips of the captain
of the boat that passed me by
Merrily honking its horn
so that even my drowning
could not be silent
Biographical Note: Malcolm Draven Reynolds is a poet and author whose favorite way to describe his life is “I wouldn’t believe it either if I hadn’t been there.” He has spent a good portion of his life dealing with the struggles of marginalization, mental illness, poverty, disability, chronic health conditions, and loss— groups, he says, whose voices are not nearly represented enough, especially in the places where they intersect. He currently lives in Maine with his partner and their excruciatingly spoiled dog, pursuing a Creative Writing degree in order to have the opportunity to teach in the future.