the rising of the dark lord like promise, like death without meaning, like he came with frank and always sullen precision. everything’s a fragment and everything’s not a fragment like a night wind in pines or like the sea in the dark. who would have said that the earth with its ancient skin would have changed so much? in the republic of poetry you may write me down in history: I sit in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street uncertain and afraid as the clever hopes expire. some say the world will end in fire. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, rolling and rolling there where God seems not to care. I, too, sing America. I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond the ominous shriek in the belly. now I am nothing and running toward nothing. and you are free with a ghastly freedom. you are the beautiful half of a golden hurt. come on all you ghosts, try to make me repeat the most terrible thing I said to someone and I will. this is the moment I’ll need you to sing with me. o, let my land be a land where Liberty stops running. when the baker arrives and unlocks where no space has ever been. I watch from my burning stake the broken necks. bombs igniting a line against our dreaming. & all the mothers in dc maryland virginia crossed an ocean & I suppose you must live as if you had been given better to live with. but if I turn too quick on Line with the worst billboards glowing proposing It’s better whatever dark, like a door, hangs on this hinge. this time bomb of youth which explodes in an alley behind a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame will stare out the window forever. I am listening in on the last century, with my ear to the door. Go little president! You just don’t know yet which parts of yourself to value. Instead, the year begins with my knees scraping hardwood, another man leaving. what we call life presents itself as a kind of task. I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul. sometimes I still put my hand tenderly on my heart and now: it is easy to forget what I came for. maybe there is more of the magical in the idea of a door than in the door itself. maybe the mother is still proud but really, if I’m being honest, I like the riddance of the ritual. again I have too many words for sadness and I gather in their shapes until the streetlamps blink awake. I feel satisfied that my apologies have run themselves out. something opening. there is fever, rage that you’ve been closed. then the shell dream broke and I woke again. the rising of the dark lord. I must activate my role thinking about the evil in the world and say I’m sorry I love you so much please stay alive. we are not good at pretending, but it’s all we’ve got this morning.

Sources: Dan Chelotti, Peter Richards, Al Zolynas, W.S. Merwin, Pablo Neruda, Martín Espada, Maya Angelou, W.H. Auden, Robert Frost, Alan Ginsberg, Wilfred Owen, Langston Hughes, Marianne Moore, Gennady Gor, Gwendolyn Brooks, Matthew Zapruder, Peter Gizzi, Langston Hughes, Eve L. Ewing, Dara Wier, Nicole Sealey, C.A. Conrad, Safia Elhillo, Brenda Shaughnessy, Jericho Brown, Sarah Trudgeon, francine j. harris, Hanif Willis-Abduraqib, Emma Lazarus, Naomi Shihab Nye, Aracelis Girmay, Matthew Zapruder, Kaveh Akbar, Ocean Vuong, Timothy Donnelly, William Ernest Henly, Alicia Orstriker, Adrienne Rich, Marge Piercy, Tracy K. Smith, Olivia Gatwood, Danez Smith, Camille Rankine, Arda Collins, Arise White, Max Ritvo, Dan Chelotti, Seth Landman, Steve Healey, Jim Daniels. Note: this poem first appeared in my school’s literary magazine, Elms College’s BLOOM.

Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
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