Dark Matter

Down with this easy world
we live in now

where thought becomes word becomes deed
at the blink of a trigger 

one hard thought
breaks a heart

and hard thoughts fly like missiles
in the night 

one hard word
breaks a spirit 

and hard words fly like bullets
through the halls

one hard deed
might break a world

and hard deeds wait in shadows
for their time to come

Here’s to a harder world
than the one we have now

where thought and word and deed
work together to keep things right

one soft thought
keeps someone alive

when it leads to one caring word
against the darkness

and one simple deed changes
a hard moment into something shining

Here’s to the end
of playing it easy

Here’s to the start of doing the harder thing
until it becomes easy

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
said Robert Frost that one time.

He was making
a point about how weird it is to think
walls help anything, that the earth itself hates them
and tears them to little wall bits;
you had to keep at them to keep them whole;

something there is that knocks them down
then knocks them down again.

What he didn’t say: something there is in us
that doesn’t love another. Something in us 
that doesn’t love, that pays love lip service 
even as it short sells love against some imagined
future gain, and that’s the force that builds the wall.

Perhaps he did say it when he said so little
about the neighbor who comes to set the wall 
back in place, who only knows how to repeat
what his father told him even as he casts aside
the poet’s note about the folly of pines and apples
devouring each other?

Perhaps when the speaker named the neighbor
as some risen caveman wielding stone
he was trying to tell us something — 
Frost by all accounts was himself
a bastard and a half
and he might have had
a moment of clarity there
when he put the speaker
right there beside the savage
as the two of them mended wall;

think on that —

even though he knew
every wall will someday fall,
that in the long run
that wall would do nothing,
a man stood beside another man
and together they built
a useless wall.

I don’t do nostalgia.
It wasn’t better then.

I hated life a while ago.
It improved, failed, improved again.

That was a bad body I had.
I was a bad, bold mistake.

My mother was a bad cook.
My father wasn’t wise. Or maybe

I’m the dumb one and my taste buds
got too numb to feel comfort.

The music was the music.
Full of promise, most unfulfilled.

Some came true then other songs
came along and made those wrong.

The movies were rude and crude
and shifted little, if you look around.

My old books smell as musty
as the ideas therein.

Even the sun was dim back then
in exactly the way it’s dim now.

The only thing then had over now
was the feeling that hope had a point.

I can’t live on that full memory
when I bite down on tinfoil today and every day.

It hurts exactly the way it always has.
I remember that and only that from my youth.

Hope was a luxury then,
a luxury now. 

Go on living. Bite down. It’ll hurt. It always does.
That’s the lesson of the past:

you will only remember how the world can glow
once the agony ends.

Observing sparrows,
drab and puffed, pecking
at my homemade cakes of
suet and seed.

A squirrel climbs the feeder post
but will not touch the food itself
thanks to red pepper flakes
in the seed mix.

Squirrel skips about 
below the feeders, nipping up
bits of neutral, unseasoned
feed fallen from above.

The sparrows 
seem unbothered. Maybe
they even like the small fires
in their food. 

I should be
putting my talent into
saving the world,
unless this

does save the world;
perhaps I fret needlessly
that there is so much more
to be done. This is such 

a small thing, this feeding
and saving and replenishing
while not harming as I go.
I do not like thinking

it’s all I can do, but it might be.
I do not like thinking I am reduced
to rendering fat and making poetry;
would rather imagine myself gunning

and shouting, slicing and 
leading a charge. Instead
I wince at my pains, stay off my feet,
nurse my confusion and memorialize

all I once was
while the sparrows
eat, the squirrels eat, the cold
settles in

and the world 
goes on without me 
to stand and bar
its crushing way.

They asked me
to be more
impish and sweet.

They looked me
in the eye
and asked this.

I could not,
did not understand,
couldn’t. I’m just

too serious, too
stolidly sour, too
resistant to change

but also: they
knew me, why
ask me this?

They said nothing.
A head shake,
then turning away.

Impish and sweet
seemed easy, I
guess. They seemed

disappointed in my
unwillingness to shift
all I was

into that mode 
for them. Could
not accept it,

so I was
rejected, dismissed, and
forgotten at once.

And yes, it
stung. Of course.
It always does.

Yet, in being
stubbornly myself I
cooled that pain

eventually. They did
what they did, 
I moved on,

and those words
slipped off me
like beads of

sweat, like mistakes
left unfixed, like
rain on glass.

Impish, sweet: I
may have missed
out, I guess,

could have sunken
into their perceptions
and drowned there

happy enough. But
today, though I
may never be 

be sweet, impish,
or connected to
them again, somehow

this is fine,
this is better
than dying there

in the arms
of one who
asked for falsehood

to become my
costume, my daily
garb, my mask

worn all day
and night and
never to be

taken off again.
They asked me
to slay myself

for favor of
their dimpled smile.
I said no

and though I
spoke it to
the air alone,

spoke it loud
with stony tongue
I owned, with

salt I’d ground
to flavor all,
I did endure.

You don’t want to admit it
but lately you have been thinking
that your big moments 
have all passed. 

You abhor the sentiment 
but truth is, you do sit around
thinking that you’re in stasis
and therefore decline.

Man, it’s like
you’re a damn walnut — hard-shelled,
long-fallen, full of potential,
sunken into the ground.

Maybe you’ll get out 
and grow.  Maybe you’ll rot.
Maybe you’ll be uncovered
by a squirrel and be consumed

by a being with a more urgent need
than any of your own and that will be
your biggest moment, your greatest
contribution. It ain’t over yet,

is what I’m trying to say.