Reasoning

I will not kill myself.
not kill myself.
kill myself.

I shall not kill myself.
not kill myself.
kill myself.
I should not kill myself.
not kill myself.
kill myself.

It is a bad idea to kill myself.
not kill myself.
kill myself.

It is an absurd thought
to even think,
think,
about killing myself,
killing myself.

The shadow of a possibility,
the shadow of a possibility,
that there is a god,
there is a God,
and suicide is a mortal sin,
a sin. Prevents me from believing that

I might kill myself.

A Fence in Wyoming (for Matthew Shepherd)

Two men found you sitting
at a bar in Laramie. Those

two men only know what
happened afterward. But

That night they became
predators, and you, prey

only because you happened
to be homosexual. Later

two men found you draped
on a fence in Wyoming.

And now you must taste
the earth of this State, because

they happened to murderously
hate.

My Jesus is Porcelain

Riding the bus the other day,
while my eyes were scanning unfamiliar
houses and oxidized mailboxes,
a stranger wearing a moth-eaten
smile and a devious brown sweater
erupted alcohol in my nose as
he told me what the world looks like
behind those deep brown eyes of his.
I cannot recall all the details of his
worldview, but he asserted strongly,
“Jesus Christ, Our Savior, is a black man.”

I made the decision not to argue with
this declaration, or his conjugation
of the verb “to be,” whose present
tense leads to quite slippery questions.
Instead, I simply nodded my head
as if listening to music I enjoyed.
The nodding was just to appease
the too-close alcoholic, but when I
think of Jesus, I think of grandma’s

house, the musty scent of decay in the
air and the west-facing window over
the sink where her hands pruned up even more
as she cleaned the dishes from her night’s cooking
and a porcelain Jesus stood, his arms
outstretched,
illuminated by a setting sun.