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Kill Starlings

by Christian Drake

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1.
The sign at the strip mall nail parlor & botánica said, Free cup of coffee with every palm reading, so the day laborer dismounting the truck bed across the street, wearing the cologne of grease and vaporized grass the way the devil wears sulfur, decided to find out his fortune. The palm reader wore pink sweatpants beneath her gypsy skirts. There were pictures of two children tacked on the corkboard next to some tarot cards. She turned up his right hand in hers and frowned. The whorls were gone, fingerprints burned off and anonymous. The topography of a life, all sanded down by an ocean of work. All that remained in the callused hoof of his palm was a life line that frayed like weak lightning and then disappeared. She squinted like an astronomer into a cloudy sky, and said, I'm sorry, I have to give you a refund. You have no future. He said, Puede todavía tengo la taza de café? She said, Yes, you can still have the cup of coffee. Sipping his coffee from a styrofoam cup, he said, Maybe you can read the future. But I can do something more useful: I can read the past. Look again. See this range of calluses below my fingers? This is my shovel line. This scar on the heel, I got pushing an old car out of a ditch. My fingerprints were scalded off by the poison they spray to make tomatoes perfect. On the index, the mark of rope-burn. The middle, from guitar strings. The ring finger, caught in a belt sander. The pinky is somewhere in Guatemala - I'd rather not tell the story. These are the stars I have placed in the sky of my own fortune, one by one, as if putting oranges back on the trees. Maybe I have erased my destiny, but if you can read my scars scattered like tea leaves in the cup of my open palms, you can tell what sort of man I am, and can become. That night, as he was unwrapping her quilted gypsy skirts, her K-mart bra, precisely undoing the tiny gold clasp of her necklace with his glove-like hands, she would show him the twilight of her body: the scar under her lip where the toy fire truck was thrown. The black vein like a tattooed river on her thigh. The ironing burn, the cigarette burn on her wrist like a kissing mouth, the c-section. Her body was like the sky, and her marks a Cassiopeia in the shape of her hard life, and all the dog bites and bruises laughed with her as they were revealed, as she matched the map of her scars to his, scars that for working people are always birthmarks, and they made love until they both knew each other in a past life, their bodies together a busy storyteller, they made love until they became an augury in the mirror and a prediction that has already come true: his body, an open hand on the bed. Her lips, an oracle talking in her sleep.
2.
The night I was struck by lightning, I awoke with ordinary powers the likes of which the world had seen before. I could manipulate sound waves to make other people hear my thoughts. I could generate heat, even on the coldest days. When I turned 13, I discovered I could extinguish at least 13 flames with a single breath, and with another breath, make campfires burn hotter. With practice, I even learned how to transfer my breath to a drowning man, and start a heart beating with my bare hands. The day of the science field trip, I was bitten by a spider, and my latent human abilities manifested in ways I'd never dreamed. As a child, I stepped on a caterpillar and discovered I had power over insects. In high school, I turned invisible. My first kiss turned me tangible. My first break-up, I learned my heart can heal from wounds as open as outer space. My cells fully regenerate every seven years. I am in my fifth body. As far as I know, I am bulletproof. I was born on a dying world, packed into a lonely cradle, and crash-landed on my home planet, full of fantastic creatures and hostile natives. I learned I could make my mother materialize by calling out her name. When she died, I learned I could achieve mortality. People of Earth, I have time-travelled here from the year 1982 to tell you I have not come alone; that we walk among us, we freaks, born to a world that hates and fears us, constantly bombarded with cosmic radiation, we shape-shifting apes, grandchildren of the amoeba, ancestors of a future race of spacemen. By night, we travel to a bizarre alternate universe unbound by physical laws, to do battle with monsters wearing our friends' faces. And by day, we put on our normal suits and pretend we are normal, that we cannot hear the distant cries for help, or the heartbeats racing in the liars' chests. We keep our true identities a secret in our citizen costumes, knowing we have the power to save the world or destroy the planet, that we can rescue others by making hands appear in our fists and eventually we must because within each of us is a force too great to be contained in mere skin, that wants to push and build and comfort and pilot the good that is the atom of the Earthling soul. We must realize we possess incredible powers that only seem ordinary because they are common to us all, because with ordinary powers comes an ordinary responsibility so heavy on our giant shoulders: to be beyond what we believe we were born to be, more human than humanly possible.
3.
Dear Jane 03:50
Dear Jane, By time you read, I will be barefoot, I. You will find shoes you bought me polished by front door, but I have left by bedroom window to go back to Africa by only trees. I will find my elephant, my chimpanzee. I will never touch ground again. Please understand, Jane, I was never sad to learn for you how to use spoon. I will miss bed, how we made linens smell like moss. I chose to live on ground for you, Jane: Look how I cut hair. How I do not eat your goldfish when I am hungry. Look how I speak man now. How I learned to whip your horses like you told. I am not going back to jungle because I do not love you, pale deer. I return shoes to you forever because a house cannot contain my love. Do you remember fruit bats drumming moon? How I laid you bleeding out on medicine leaves, your body white as fast river, and we fell asleep to mating song of frogs? This is how I love you. How can I explain this, sitting in chair? How do I say this, but in kill-cry from roof? For year, we swept floor, we made church. I did not bark when dog barked. I made me human for you, I. But you never Africa for me. I made myself fireplace for you, Jane.. But you never burned like dry season for me. When neighbors called me black thing because I eat for hunger, because will not whip butler, you laughed like butterfly fallen in soup. Kissed me like buttoning top button. I brought jungle in hands to you, I. You folded it into napkin. I learned to apologize, I. You never screamed like leopard in heat or even let bad magic word bloom from lips like exquisite corpse-flower. Even your horses know to be wild if leave gate open. If you could learn to bite through skin, or walk naked in house with windows open, or let breath stink with too much sleep and meat, I would know you understand love. Lover should not need to learn how to use fork. Lover should learn to eat raw flesh of just-killed lion with fingers. That is love. It is savage thing. It eats snails off ground to survive. Love kills only what it needs. I have taken knife, only thing you did not teach me to use. I was human, for a year. Now I am all animals again, together. Cannot stay where I frighten canary with laughter. Cannot be full man if you keep you woman locked in corset. Still, I will miss you from treetops when moon rises like fever on our wedding night, last time you spoke jungle to me. It is a strange place, this house of human heart. I am glad we are both left it now to live where we always belonged: howling into night that always hunts us, suffering exquisite wilderness.
4.
If you know why the pigs on barbeque joint signs are always smiling, you know what it truly means to be in love. Because love is like barbeque. You get your hands in the sauce down to your elbows and smeared all over your mouth ‘til you’re grinning like a carnivorous clown. Love takes a lot of paper towels. Love is best slow-roasted over low coals with smoke in its eyes until a kiss might shake the meat from its bones And the Saint of Love, right there above your own name spelled crooked on the menu marquis is Bubba the Pig, wearing Chicago bluesman shades and a chef’s toque, as if to say, I am both the cook and the supper. I have fattened myself to fatten your belly. I have danced to the scrape of the knife on the strap and I have entered the knife, and prepared myself for you with black pepper and a long, pleasant bath above the flames of hell. Now complete me. I exist to be delicious, and it is a joy to be pulverized between the teeth of something incomprehensible, a piece of my heart bulging in your cheeks as you lick you lips, you smile, you swallow, you loosen your belt.
5.
A Petition to Sarah Palin, from the Polar Bears The starving miles grow longer for us now, Sarah. The ice floes drift apart like prodigal planets, making us surrender to the water and drown. The cold sea is a taxidermist. It keeps us too perfectly in its refrigerator as the crabs pick our bones. You don't yet know what it feels like to be a deposed god in your own church. You will. We have a saying in our language: "Beneath the surface, everything white is red." The ice is a living creature; scratch its skin and you'll find seal blood bubbling up under its white fur. Its heartbeat is our North Star, our Ursa Minor, our cub. But we can't feel it under our paws anymore, and we grow lost. We stand before you to represent the wolves, the Kodiaks and the caribou. We are the nightmares of the Arctic, but we are the only dreams it has. But now they fence us in with pipelines, starve us with laws, and when we are weak, they come for us in airplanes when we have no cover, no wings. Shoot us from above, so far outside the reach of our claws. You call this "hunting," but you don't call it "hunting" when you stand a prisoner against a white wall as pockmarked as the moon. And you, Sarah, sent out this air force of executioners with the click of a pen. We imagine you with your legs tightly crossed, saying grace over a plate of wolf meat in a dining room wallpapered with grizzly pelts. You must think you're a real predator, Sarah Barricuda, pit bull suckling the microphone, chanting "Drill Baby Drill" until all the humans howl for blood. You think beneath the surface, everything white is black. You think you can kill your native monsters with a wink. And the worst part is, you know you can. Step out on the ice with us. This is your subpoena. We'll show you what it means to be a real predator. We'll let you have your rifle, your Bible, and the famous moose-dressing knife. Step out on the ice in the boots you bought in New York. Try to become us. Wear the bearskin rug you used to make love on, the beast on which you conceived your brood. Try to find us in the white. We can smell your perfume from further than you can see. We will be watching you with lifeless eyes as the crabs devour us, as you cannot find us on the ice because we are under your feet now, as the bear mask falls further over your face, as the plane begins to circle, as the ice applies its red lipstick.
6.
Delilah 03:30
After a hard day of killing, his skin flayed with sunburn, Samson would fall asleep in Delilah's lap while she brushed the blood from his miles of hair. She was beautiful as a lost kite. Kept her own hair short, cut it every time she lost a lover, wrung the smell of him out with bleach and changed its color more often than a spy so she could keep her grace, float from room to room unburdened as light, and she made the moon jealous of the back of her neck. But in the intimacy of their cups, bathing themselves in the river of his locks, she rolled a grape along his sternum, and asked Samson, What makes you so strong? And he whispered, The days fly away behind us, dead yet alive, like hair. Every day we grow a new cell, and we put our memories there, a slow film reel of our lives blowing in the wind. I earned my strength carrying the crushing length of my whole history on my head. The weight is almost unbearable, but now I can dent the executioner's axe with my neck. If you can hoist the planet of your past above your shoulders, you can brush away a thousand soldiers like gnats in the wind with any bone you find on the ground. You read my autobiography every time you run your fingers through my hair, Beloved. Look: Here, at the tips, I was born. Here, my childhood fever. Here, I killed my first snake. Here, the car crash. The knot where my mother died. Here I killed my first man, a Philistine. And see this place, near my ears? This is where I met you, Beloved. When I unwrap it after battle, I can remember everything: every bee sting and stolen kiss, every day I fought and lost, or prayed to false gods, took kindness on the enemy's child, bowed down to the wicked, and yes, every single day I have loved you. Remembering your love is what makes me so strong. And Samson fell asleep under her fingertips, as her peculiar kisses landed around his temples, with a sound like, Snip, snip. This is why I cut my hair short the day I left you. This is why I turned the scissors on myself. Why I came home looking like a stranger and looked at you like a stranger, too weak to fight anymore. This is why I call myself Delilah now. Why I begged the barber to be my surgeon, to cut away this agonizing weight, to preserve my heart in his jar of blue alcohol, to burn the clippings, as you and I fell away onto the checkered floor.
7.
Good morning, suicides. Good morning, unloved lovers. Mothers who never wanted children. The factory workers with hands mangled by the machine, who still work the machine. The prison guards with murderers inside. Rise and shine. You are listening to Radio Free Hell, bringing you the sounds from the underground. I can't answer your prayers, but I play requests. I'm alone and listening for you, too. This song goes out to the girls in their bathrooms letting their blood with x-actos to make sure they are deeper than the mirror, and to the machete-scarred girls in coffee country who cannot possibly imagine them. This song is dedicated to the innocent prisoners, the starving children whose parents steal food from them, the first-time heartbroken. Twist the speaker dial like a knife in your ribs, listen closely. We are Radio Free Hell. We are the resistance. We send blues from the tenement trash fires to the heights of the Golden Gate. This place does have borders, though you may never reach them, and we bring you lullabies from the other side. I am not preaching the gospel; I am here in the crowded fire with you, broadcasting at whisper range. I am not here to tell you the cavalry is coming. The cavalry is not coming. I'm here to bring you music on the killing fields. For the woman who daily binds her breasts so they never again invite a rapist's stare, here's Rhapsody in Blue. Here's a dance beat for you slaves in the diamond mines x-rayed daily so you cannot eat even the stones. For the suicidal astronaut considering cutting your umbilicus when you see the true nature of the stars: here's your mother's piano. Come home. Last night, your tears sparkled like an ambulance. Last night, you felt the phone go limp in your hand like a wounded bird. You had the dream again, you pissed the sheets in fear. But today you will put your hands under cold water on purpose. Today you will divine our signal, a lonely tapping in the pipes trying to reach you after so long. When you are lost in the desert of salt, turn your radio on. When the ceiling at night is busy with the traffic of headlight ghosts, when the sun will not help push your broken-down heart, turn your radio on. Wave your antenna from the top of the roof like a man in a flooded house and listen through the static. There is good news coming, maybe. I don't know how to save you yet. I'm burning, too. But turn your radio on. Because if the day ever comes to escape this place, we will be broadcasting instructions. We will read the list of the names of found souls over the new national anthem, with its guitar sobbing triumphantly, and you will finally realize that this voice has always been your own, and then you will hear yourself read your name.
8.
Southern Gothic On Crack After Daddy done got done with Bethsheba-Rose,
 Jesus wept and flooded the hog barn
 and we found grampa rowing to shore in the wheelbarra
 singin' Confederate songs, even though 
 he was three years dead. 

 The day Mama got out of the state pen
 covered with tattoos of lilies-of-the-valley
 and the names of dead soldiers,
 the 'lectric company miraculously decided to turn
 the lights back on.

 This was the summer that corn turned
 to whiskey on the stalk, due to the frost,
 and the possums played dead between
 slices of Sunshine white bread at our feet.

 This was the July of my first woman blood,
 before we weaned Daddy Jr. from the hound dog's tits
 but after the circus elephants trampled
 the rye field and knocked up the tractor.

 The vampires came then, and took to eating the fireflies.
 The district court judge sucked a twelve-gauge
 on account of his youngest runnin' off with the boy
 who sold sunflowers, and everybody cheered.

 Mama hung my stained drawers from the pickup antenna
 and the vampires ran after the truck like pups.
 The gators yawned like welcome mats on the chapel porch
 and the con man's tabernacle collapsed, killing us all.

 We're a proud people. We bury our cannonballs with crosses. 
 The chickens scratching at the red dirt will find our bones
 just under the surface, cakewalking with the Devil
 the mayor cast out years ago by law, before he did the thing
 we don't talk about anymore.
9.
10.
Birdwatching in the city is not a sport for the weak. I’ve dodged junkyard dogs to get a better look at a dove, and the other day in the Bosque I scared off a great blue heron when I stepped on an empty vial of crack. Listen, I’d love to be out in the virgin wilderness communing with the Great Turtle Spirit or whatever, but I’m what happens when Mark Trail spends his gas money on beer and doesn’t get weekends off from the coffeeshop, so I’m getting down with Mother Earth out behind the WalMart. At the cusp of every city, the forest knocks on the backdoor of the Barrio, and you can find me there, where No Hunting signs are motheaten with bullet holes, where teenagers come to smoke pot and their little brothers come to build kick-ass bike jumps, where generations of hardworking lowlifes come to smash beer bottles, so the clearing becomes a meadow of glass with a million sharp blossoms of sunlight. I’m birdwatching from the hobo camps of the world, where the trees are spiderwebbed with plastic bags and the car drunk-driven into the ravine twelve years ago has been repo’d by wildflowers. While we fight to keep the Earth free for the wolves and the whooping cranes, let’s never forget to save enough wilderness for the outlaws. We need a wildlife refuge for the fugitives, the drunkards, and the trespassers, because the best way to protect good land is to put bad men in it. Viva this outlaw Earth. Viva the hideouts of panthers and thieves. Viva Pancho Villa’s rattlesnake paradise and Robin Hood’s forest of laughter. Viva the broad red borderlands that conceal immigrants zigzagging under stars and Joshua Trees, hands hungry for work. Viva the bootlegger’s swamps, and the city slickers lost in them, fumbling for moonshine on a moonless night. Viva the guerrilla terrorists of the American revolution hunting redcoats in the jungles of Massachusetts. Viva the midnight skinnydippers at the reservoir. Viva rednecks, y’all, because they know more about Nature than you do, because they siphon it through the barrel of a double-gauge. Viva the illegal campfires warming illegal hands by the riverbanks, and the endangered snow leopard pausing to sniff the moon among the caves of Al Qaeda. When the cops and the taxman want to find you, they will bring you back to the city, give you an address in the projects and tell you to show up for jury duty. They will boil down the forest with Agent Orange so they can find you by airplane, kill the buffalo to starve you out, and if you run for the hills, they will stripmine the hills, because they know the last refuge of the free will always be the outskirts, the badlands, the sweet lawless scorpion planet where the golf course ends, and I will be there, birdwatching from the edge of the junkyard, grateful there are is enough wilderness in the world for us to still be wild.
11.
Pinocchio As An Old Man If I could make my wish again, I would have liked to have been a tree instead. When the fairy asked me, half boy and half pine, to choose between blood and wood, no one knows I hesitated, and chose mostly for the old man's sake. He had worked so hard to carve me out of the gnarled heartwood into a doll in the shape of a son, and I wanted so badly to please him. Love was an irresistible unknown then. My true mother cast me down a hill as a seed cone, and I was not born until after the forest fire. So when the fairy asked me to choose, I told her I wanted to be a real boy, and my nose did not grow one inch, though a termite chomped at my heart. It has been a good life, by anyone's measure. The old man taught me carpentry, how to shear wood into a violin, or a toy ballerina, or a crucifix, but I never showed a talent for it. My hands were unsteady. After he died, I joined the navy to be as far as possible from forests and the incessant crickets that kept me up nights. But the ship's timbers told me war stories at sea in a haunted baritone, and the mast waved slowly and steadily as a pine in the strong wind. The other sailors laughed at my stammering horror whenever we passed a pod of whales. After that, I became a lawyer, and was very good at it. I took a wife, and had children we named after saints. I know pain, and the pleasure of soft flesh. Grandchildren try to climb me, play hide-and-seek around my legs, and this makes me happy. But the termite is still in my heart, fat and relentless, its jaws sticky with blood and resin. It is still my habit to sit in my rocking chair in the sun, letting the wind pass through my splayed fingers, and listening to the soft rattle of maple leaves, the pines rubbing their trunks together like cello necks. Rheumatism creaks in my axe-handle bones now, and I still dream about my ship's bare-breasted masthead, and my wife complains about my dirt-caked toenails after I've taken my coffee in the garden and dug my knotty toes into the topsoil, tightly as a fist's grip. I wonder if I was ever made for adventuring, rather than staying in one place and simply praising the sun. Blue star, grant me one more wish. When they bury me, don't let them put me in a wooden coffin. Plant a sapling as my headstone where its roots can reach my blood. A pear, perhaps. Something I can offer my great-grandchildren who steal them from my branches and fall asleep in my shade as I whisper, Hush, Husssssshhhhhhhhhhhhh.
12.
My grandfather died not knowing I existed. His mind, a world atlas folded in half and half and half again until it could fit under his tongue. It was not so much that he slowly disappeared as we did, the grown grandchildren at the dinner table mistaken for strangers. Fantasy grew on his memory like patches on an old coat, the holes in every story repaired with fictions until my grandpa's coat was every color, unraveling. Forgetfulness runs in my family. Already I've forgotten so much of my childhood it's like I've lost a twin brother: I can't name my kindergarten friends, my sweetest nights, the shape of my grandfather's hands. So now I live my life the way I'll misremember it when all sense has left me. We are young now, but when we are old we will lie to our grandchildren. These are the days we can still make tomorrow's lies true. These are the days you will remember: Your summer dress swings like a screen door in the wind. These days, a bubble of blood rises in your throat and burps with laughter, and your skeleton costume tumbles in the dryer like a child down a grassy hill. You will remember this wild pair of green shoes, how you were brave with your hair. The one semester of metal shop, when you performed surgery on your bicycle with a plasma torch. The heat, the orange life. These days, you experiment with love like a little boy with mercury. Once, you cupped your hands to the rain until you became a birdbath reflecting the storm. You leave blue footprints on the bathroom linoleum from your girlfriend's hair dye. You drink beer in the morning and watch the rocket ships leaving in great plumes from your fire escape. These are the days when you stop at rattlesnake farms and wade in, and this is how you will remember them: walking drunk in the middle of the road like a king, uvula moon vibrating in the night's mouth. Hummingbirds swoop in to admire your earrings. This is how you will remember these days: the good autumn. This is how: the trek across Australia. The flat tire, where the marriage really began. The Southern cross. These days: the fancy scarves. The gypsy diseases. You gargle night like baby oil. The alligators roll over to show their bellies to your kissing lips. You lose your virginity again in a trapeze net. And some of these things will even be true. But this is how you will remember these days when you call your granddaughter by your first wife's name. When the man with the tape recorder comes for your story, this is your alibi. Cherish these days. Muddy your face with these dreams before you break into the hospital like a bandit. These are the days you will remember when they force you onto the last rocket ship, when the Earth dwindles in the black. When you wake up before the sunrise because there is no sun anymore, and the nurse is still asleep. My God, the kites I flew! The kites I never forgot to fly! The stars revolve like a mobile, and you write your life the way you recall it, an autobiography like a suicide note so delicious you could never put down the pencil.

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The second album by rockabilly poet and rogue naturalist Christian Drake, including poignant, loud, humorous and captivating work from 2008 to 2011. The album, recorded by the author in his rich and distinctive baritone, is included with accompanying poetry text. Listen and hear why Christian is known by the spoken word and slam poetry community as simply "one of the best."

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released January 26, 2012

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Christian Drake Dhaka Division, Bangladesh

Christian Drake is a six-time National Poetry Slam team member and has performed on three National Poetry Slam Finals stages. Originally from New England, he bas been a host of popular slams, poetry shows and burlesques in San Francisco, CA and Albuquerque, NM. He's best known for his often loud, erotic, and political nature poetry. He currently a science teacher in the New England wilderness. ... more

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