On a night like tonight
we hear church-bells ring
outsiders in shadows 
sneaks freaks rats thieves
Madhatters bastards addicts adders
mentally ill neurodivergent
tics and stutters and sideways glances 
hobos in train cars 
barrel-fire bearded bushmen
we call out like screeching bats 
like whales of the deep
Join us!
indigenous and indigent
natives and native sons 
seekers and founders enslaved and free
when you hear the frog croak 
the owl hoot in the night 
we speak to you: 
if you’re broken 
welcome home

When my brother got sick my father called me and I wasn’t too alarmed, but then my father called and said my brother was being life-flighted because his liver was shutting down, and I was alarmed… then my father called me and said, “You need to come now,” like in the movies. I lived in Los Angeles at the time so I got on a flight and I flew and flew but I wasn’t afraid, why should I be? My brother was 29 years old and had two young daughters. But when I arrived at the hospital, they said my brother was already in a coma, and they told me his liver and his kidneys had stopped functioning, and he would need more than one transplant, and he would probably have brain damage if he lived, which was unlikely. And I said there must be some misunderstanding, this is my little brother maybe you have the wrong family? But when I saw him his skin looked puffy and almost wet, like if you pressed-in his skin with your finger, there would be an indentation that would never reinflate. And after we decided to take him off life support, the nurses said we could gather around him one last time, my grandparents wouldn’t come in the room with us (they said they already had their memories), and my father asked that we sing Amazing Grace (I never much liked that song), and as we sang suddenly my father cried out, “My little boy! Who loved fire trucks!” and those words cut me so deep, I’ll remember those words, of my brother’s life and my father’s pain, until my bones are dust, it was like someone took a knife to my neck and cut me to my spine and my blood ran down through my shoes, and that song, that day, it destroyed my family from which we’ll never recover, my sister and I float like cursed ghosts pretending that we didn’t also die that day, that we aren’t already dead. And my mother fell on the floor, and the people from the church tried to talk to her then about Jesus, and she shouted at them, so I helped her up and walked her to the waiting room, even though she and I don’t really speak, and my father walked around outside in the mud in the cold rain, the rain falling in his eyes and in his heart and down his neck and down his throat, and he shouted at God, I imagine he said “How dare you take my son!,” see my father is a deeply religious man, even now he prays on his knees, and my brother was becoming a pastor and preached at a soup kitchen for homeless men, both of them, all of them, having poured out their hearts to God, and what good did it do them?And my son was there that day, he was just a baby, and strange thing is they’ve become merged in my mind, my son as my brother, my brother as my son, which doesn’t make sense, but in a way it does… see my brother, my little brother, my only brother, his name was Aaron (which means “mountain of strength”), and his middle name was Matthew (which means “gift from God”), and my son, my only son, his name is Noah (which means “to rest”), and his middle name is Matthew, named in honor of his uncle, my brother, who he never really met, so together their names mean something like, “go rest, on that mountain high.” But see Aaron was the brother of Moses, and his rod became a serpent to frighten the Pharoah, and Lamech was the father of Noah, like me, and the son of Methuselah, who lived 1000 years, and the grandson of Enoch, who walked with God and then was no more because God took him, like God took my brother, and my name is Nathan (which means “God has given,”) but has he, and I don’t believe in God anymore, so where’s that leave me? And sometimes I go to my brother’s grave at night, I sit on the cold ground and look up at the twinkling light of a thousand stars in the cold night sky, and I don’t really know what to think. I guess we all have to accept our mediocrity and our mortality and the millions of years it took for that starlight to reach me, and my brother beside me and we look at each other and we smile, what better way to let him go and hold him to my heart than staring up together at the light of an endless sky full of ancient dying stars.

Aaron Matthew Griffith 5/6/1981-5/22/2010

 Sometimes you don’t want 
 the sun (yet) to rise
 you pray it spares you
 the bright wince of eyes
 to keep the terror 
 in unseen skies see
 in the night you can 
 be quiet and hide
 dye in the night fog 
 darkened haze not (yet)
 responsible for 
 the Order of Days 

[Actors present: Scientist 1, Scientist 2, Soldier, Capitalist, Priest]

Scientist 1: (looking severe, and peeved) As to the data we are receiving from the alien civilization, it is apparently now being “coded” by NASA “for our safety,” before we even receive it to decode!

Priest: (reverently) [whispering]…for our safety, so The Voice wouldn’t be so brilliant in its raw form and glory that we would be destroyed instantly… [slowly closes his eyes]

Soldier: Pfft. (mentally rolling his eyes) Coded, to be decoded?

Scientist 1: But putting that aside [stroking his beard], how can we decode a signal that has traversed civilizations and light years, that is assumedly not only inter-species, but inter-galactic? It’s like like trying to communicate in Braille, through a telescope, with a spider, on Mars, after translations and back-translations through a thousand languages that aren’t spoken anymore. It is as if—if each person only understood ONE language—a woman, in English, tried to…

Capitalist: …communicate a verbal message to a man who only spoke Chinese, and so on and so on, to French, and then to Hindi, or in spoken Sanskrit, I suppose, and then… I don’t know (just spitballing now), fired as a virtual information laser…

Priest: [gasps] …thereby tattooing a desert goat! [everyone groans]…but then the goat falls down a well and perishes, and the Goat-spirit emerges like smoke, as it billowed from the fires of the destruction of the great Library of Alexandria! [quietly sobbing now] We are not sufficiently knowledgeable! We are lost! I am losing my religion… but perhaps (quizzically, as if considering a thought that had never before entered his mind) the aliens are Gods?

Scientist 2: {ignoring that bit about goats and gods} Yes, like smoke, [she looks up at the ceiling] like maybe we’re losing information as it decays over time and space, as if IN—and finally then OUT of—[swallows hard, with weighty realization] a black hole!

Capitalist: [rubbing his eyes] …but even then it could only work if, despite common sense and physics, the metaphorical radio signal that emerged, weakly emitted, was…

Soldier: (deadpan)…in English.

{Note: Which was an overstatement and not exactly true, but it had been a long, difficult week to say the least, and he was wearing uncomfortable boots}

[the Soldier sighs] (…he is exasperated, and thinks of the sacrifices he’s made to protect his countrymen, and countrywomen, from harm, alien-caused or not; and of his young daughter, far away—not being with her being one of those sacrifices—how he hates to not see her grow up, and hopes someday she will understand that he was a soldier, like his father before him, and that being away was his duty…. notwithstanding the sacred duty he also had, of course, to her)

Scientist 2: …But it wouldn’t be in English. Because by then [grimaces, then straightens her bow tie], it’s probably not a LANGUAGE anymore—it might be numbers, or music.

Priest: (looking haunted) …or just the sound of slow breathing on the other end of the phone…

Capitalist: (frustrated) [says under his breath] These aliens may as well be telepathic octopods! [saying this next part at typical volume] Didn’t Carl Sagan send some decorated disc into space, what ever happened with that? Can’t we just send them some inspirational quotes, or one of the Ali-Frazier fights…or that version of “Hamilton” that’s on Disney+?

Soldier: If any of the Navajo code talkers are still alive, can we ask them to save our ass again, but this time to do it in reverse, and in their old age?

(All seem puzzled…) [Scientist 1 looking at Scientist 2, Scientist 2 seeming to do calculations in her head, the Soldier staring dutifully and unblinking at the door (in case it were to be breached), the Priest holding a rosary and mumbling a prayer, the Capitalist checking emails on his phone.]

*A young girl with hearing aids, who plays in the trees, ENTERS*

Girl: (signs, in sign language) Use the sounds of the animals. The whales, the monkeys, the honeybees.

(For Hannah)

To fold wings around yourself in final proud repose, your Spirit a great greying moth still seeking light slowly fades, merging with bark and pith of a noble timeless Tree, feeding on your Spirit’s ghost nourishing your leaves, re-membering yourself until your new end’s Beginning

Orange sunrise on his woke
last-meal lobster-butter choke
cucumber-melon bathroom soap
life-last scent long-lost hope
recollection interlope
innocents he crushed and broke

Fingers slip on slope of throat
justice of the hangman’s rope
badman croaks a deathly note
righteous as a holy pope
sullen spirit fails to float
tossed-out corpse begins to bloat

Thank you for my weakness
thank you for my ugliness
my ignorance my arrogance
stupidity cowardice sloth
Worse t’were were I beautiful and kind
Least now I hope for a Devil moon

Sit with sadness, wrestle pain
face it, touch its face like a
blind man would, without fear
Accept your loneliness
like a brother in arms
cradled in arms like a child

Cover your eyes, cover you like molasses
wring the weakness from your
spirit like an old wet sock
Your honor your beauty your healing remains
only then can you be free

thank you doubt thank you fear thank you panic
thank you anger thank you hatred thank you pain
thank you dark nights alone just let me
breathe let me breathe help me breathe help me
breathe let me breathe I can’t breathe I’ve never felt
more life never been more scared to death

I wanna live like Roy Batty howled in that hollow building,
hunting his brother/killer in a drab World-to-come
stripped of his future his lover and having killed his Maker
the killer-Maker, for not giving more life

but he chose kindness even as he died a
fugitive’s death a slave’s death his last act, running out of
time was to lift up the man who sought to kill him
for being alive