Lofting the Molotov cocktail into the church’s
empty lot was, in retrospect, a political act. 
Back then it was only three guys I didn’t like
unhanding the girly mags, fevered to spectacular action.  
Friday night and no driver’s license gave us this license.

In the graveyard we slunk behind granite markers,
thumbing cloth down the Coke bottle’s high octane throat.
Strange, how doing something marks your life,
hard and permanent as stone, as years later,
driving home from the hospital after something

they called our baby had died, I thought I’d turned
the corner when no I’d not.  It had turned on me.
Wittgenstein says you can’t see the periphery
of your world because you’re in it.  He penciled
a sketch in his Tractatus  just to prove it, buddy,

which is what, in a way, the cops said to me.
Molotov, what’s it like to have a weapon named after you?
You’re the world’s word for insurrection.  Emerson says
words themselves are actions, though bless him,
in his dotage he forgot even how to ask for a glass of ____.

Some words you can’t say without invoking action.
Against them, there’s cultural or moral injunction,
but “dead baby” you say only in the bathroom
with the water running.  It’s what’s not said each time
you blow out the candle.  It’s what nothing’s named after.

Some things you do you wish you hadn’t. 
Some you don’t you wish you had. 
It’s years before you know the difference,
so what good’s remorse?  At the hospital
with my wife, what prayer could I have spoken

to what forgetful god?  In time, we break things,
stupid and unreflective.  In time, we’re broken
by things, stupid and unreflective.  After I’d tossed
the Molotov, I ran like water through dark alleys.
I never looked back for flames I didn’t believe in either.

First appeared in Poetry, September 2005.