Before Heaven

by Michael Dwayne Smith

animal skins beneath
lightening contusions
were bruised by cloud shadow,
sweet with the dust of red dirt and yellow teeth,
mesh of bones long since gone to sea
with shards of rain,
run down mountains, funneled down mud hills,
crashing against glassy weed of ocean,
and in that marinade of salt, sperm, and egg,
that prescient cold soup
rich with zygotes of dumb government,
thick headed chains of DNA,
planet conquering, self-raping, underfed, overestimated
one way monkeys, stupid with milky eyes,
supposing stars dabbed horrific black sky for reasons
only upright thumbsters could understand,
only heaven’s invention could remand,
water was singing music of our own demise.

Not to Nourish the Delusion

by Michael Dwayne Smith

A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe” 
  --Albert Einstein

Downstairs, shrieks, too much Tequila and beer,

everything bumps and laughter. The night is icing over,

the talking’s just begun.

Whoever knows a book best leads the discussion.

I listen to the radiator tick in my room, exhale its

breath of fire.  Someone chatters about acorns to

squirrels, someone else about Thoreau to rapturous,

half-drunk grad school girls.

All of us small in our rooms, but think we’ll add up

to something, later. An outpouring of stars seems certain.

Against sand, and black density.

Out the apartment window, it’s a blue night dome.

Dogs skirt around a throw of pure halogen light.

The writer worries about freedom.  Squirrels avoid

counting the calories in their nuts. I think about

my brother, sleeping it off in a Salvation Army shelter.

Our havens recede the faster we drink and sleep,

the faster the weather gets cold, and slow.

I’m shaking as hard as I can without being noticed.

I’m dancing like the other shoe is dropping, to save us all.

Nothingness feels clean. Stars, like the monolith of home.

These books make discussion.  The Mothers of Invention

made records. My words make a ceiling I keep revising,

and raising, or I’ll never get closer. Close enough for

a sleeping star to drink me, drunk enough to be frozen,

screaming laughter through to its stellar core.

A Myth of Evolution of Creation

by Michael Dwayne Smith

The steamy, naked bun jungle is my home.
I run rain forest with the monkey. Nights we swat
fat moths away with his tail, by day compose

stories in clay at the slow-drying mud hole
down in Twin Bush gulch. I’ve become a cowboy.
The monkey won’t touch my spurs. We woke

in this desert all head-achey, staring at cactus spiders.
The sky dry heaved what was left of heaven
into the monkey’s lap. It’s a wicked hallucinogen.

Not much of it left after all these Indian chants we’ve
sung to tarantulas, but death is valiant enough for
monkey and me. We take the heat, and we pack it, too.

Sleep with Amazonian stars in our stomachs. And it’s
Good Night, Suckers, when monkey rolls his bare ass up
in a grimy poncho, and cuts the jalapeño cheese.

Footwork

by Michael Dwayne Smith

My father leaned on bars like

            Nureyev tipped on floors.

                        It was a certain grace: a red

            rag body

slipped and poured into

            furniture—

fixed or laughing, pissed or dancing,

            the little shit could flick a jab with his left

            quicker’n you could think.

It was goddam

ballet: spin around the stools and

            work the crowd,

jokes and hands and pinch an ass

            and here the drinks’d come. Flatter

the fat woman, flirt with

            the fag in the overdone eyes,

                        Dad was

King For A Day, scotch and blowjobs for life,

            bobbing and weaving,

                        flipping the pages

of his encyclopedic brain, where he’d recorded

            every racist joke

                        he’d ever heard.

But trading one drink for three

            was his specialty. “Always buy

                        first,”

he’d tell me, “serve with bullshit buddy-speak

            and machismo drool.”

                        And just to keep the

            timing right, he’d kick

the occasional fight. “Keeps gas in the tank,

            n’ smoke in the eye,” he’d say.

The burning day I

            busted his face, reeling around

            from behind the rust-red pump

                        at a Vegas filling station,

he dropped to the pavement and smiled like

I'd arrived.  He lept to his feet,

paid cash for the fuel,

and in the viscous heat,

for the first time in years, he called me

Son.  The toothless

attendant laughed

in the swirling sand, waved the ragged bills

as we sped away.

And in the red of the blood of my father's eye,

I saw the sad choreography of it all:

one movement

making necessary the next,

the hard logic

of ignorant pain,

the strained chorus of loss, the tragic

gravity of

cuts and glass and falling down drunk

and stinking sex—

we drove for hours without a word.

We met again in Barstow, several months later,

in a gritty lounge from a noir film,

his face a relief in shadow and stone.

He had the cancer then, but didn’t know.

Mother

            traveled with him,

drinking gin, alone, again—

a trembling rabbit, in a black corner booth.

She watched, shitfaced, seated in yet another

smoke and dim theater,

a stage where nightly he’d performed, forever.

                        The old man

was artful. Knew his audience well. He’d learned

            to lean his bones in a

carcinogen wind

                        and dance,

and dance, until he fell.