we move among the cities

there are highways to lead us
cars to sleep in
couches and hostels and coffee shops
and there’s
gotta be some internet around here
somewhere

one of them has to be
a place that isn’t
like any other

ghosting our way
from north to south
east to west and back
spirits walking alone
in dirty backpacks

we used to be
other people
we will be
other people
again

if we can be
elsewhere
soon enough

…starring, stage left,
a bass — telling its stories
through a couple of fingers.
Someone laying pipe
for the flow to follow.
The same someone popping the welds on it
when the flow’s gotta get free.

When Shuggie Otis comes on
with an invite to Sparkle City,
that bass shakes me deep and simple:
a friendly hand opening a door,
shuffling me along to comfort,
giving a shout to someone unseen
to break out sweet tea and a good meal,
makes me agree that
"there is no offer
I would refuse…"

It’s not much —
it’s everything.

So give me
that rock steady bottom
any Sunday, because that’s church
softer than any pew,
keeping me warm on an ember
made of Bible pages.

This morning in particular,
it’s a big pillow
for a sad head
and the groove it cuts
holds me like a mother
I never had.

When they scream,
"Kill him!  Off with his head!"

I am appalled.
I would never scream such things.

I only whisper them to my pillow
(or at most, to trusted friends),

and only about people
who actually deserve it.

Take a moment,
he said, and drink from
this spring —

first you have to pump
the handle a few times
and then it’s going to come out fast

so be ready to put your hand
under the spout and catch a handful
of the water, then

hold it to your mouth
and drink — be careful, it’s going
to be cold, colder than what we get

from the tap, cold as snow almost,
just drink it and it will hurt your teeth
a bit but it’ll be worth it.

It was.  It was, and although
the sweat had run down
from under my headband

since we’d started, I forgot about that
and all the hard, sulky work of mowing
and raking four and one half acres

in no time as I pumped and drank
handful after handful until he stopped me
and said, it’ll be here when you need it,

there’s no reason to overdo it,
it was here before we were, it’ll be here
after us, you can always come back.

I do not know it the pump’s still there
but the spring is still, I trust, because
when he spoke of things like that,

he usually told the truth, I could trust him
when it came to things that weren’t
about what was between us, especially when I was thirsty

or hot or lazy; anytime, really,
I wasn’t able to take care of myself.
It’s good that I have outgrown that.

I say "cathedral"
when I want to speak of
a holy place that is dark
when seen from outside
through a door and instead
turns out to be
full of light.  That’s
what a Catholic boy does
when he looks past his lapse,
back at what he once felt.

If I had been born
elsewhere, as another man,
I might instead speak of
the synagogue of Worms, Germany, called
the Rashi Shul, razed twice
and built back to God each time;
might mention
the Blue Mosque of Istanbul,
repurposed long ago
into mosque from cathedral,
and which still can sharpen
any viewer’s inhale. 

I am not any of the men
who still look to brick and mortar,
stone and glass, as a house of God.
I know there are evils buried in their foundations,
I know how the good words spoken inside them
have some times set in motion the chains, whips,
biases, murders, wars…

I am far down a highway
now, one where asphalt and desert
have opened me to spirit and light
I never dreamed of.  I am no Catholic boy,
no chosen man, no hajji any other hajjii
would recognize…

I know enough, though, to understand
that every highway starts somewhere,
and God at the beginning is God at the end,
and where there is God, even a hidden one,
even one masked by profanity,

there is always a story
worth hearing
of a journey
from someplace to
this place.

I was born
open at the joints, soft all over,
more ready to fold
than to break.

When my bones knit
at last, I was left
with lines
on the inside. 

I try to cross them
as often
as possible,
but sometimes

it’s all I can do
even to see them.
Instead, I feel my way along
the fissures in the dark.

The other day,
I came to one I’d thought
had long ago ossified
but which still gave a little

when poked, gently at first,
then more firmly, with
the now rigid length
of my outstretched index.

I forced it then, a little
at a time, until I could step
over the edges and enter
what lay beneath it.

I am still here.  I am
unable to find a light
anywhere, and I’ve stopped
seeking one. 

Instead, I sit on the floor
of a long hall.  There is an altar
at one end, smoking incense,
the sound of voices I can’t name

yet, though I am struggling
to hear them: hawk cry of a celebrant,
sobs of goosedown, breathy chanting
of others who came here before me.

Is it my imagination
or is there now some shine above me
that makes me think I can see reeds
along a riverbank

outside the margins of the hall?
I promise myself
that later,
when I’ve grown to love the dark,

I will step to that water
and float away, navigating
the hushed canyons of my bones
toward places that were peopled

before they fused, before
I stopped folding and bouncing back
whenever I happened to fall — back before
I was taught

that to be solid and brittle
was my lot, was everyone’s lot;
before I forgot
that there is a kind of starlight

that can guide a person
to cities and rivers
if one is willing to push open
what has not, in fact, hardened.

Winter is coming and I’m not ready to go.
Something that should have lasted longer
has faded, spring isn’t anywhere close at hand,
and I’m in the way of the seasonal need.

Leaves that don’t come loose from the tree
are not natural.  They are supposed to die.
When they drift to the ground, they let themselves feed
the next generation.  If they hang on too long
they block the way for the young.

I’ve fed too long on sun
meant for others. I am cracked, mottled,
and impatient for the end, but somehow,
I’m not capable of letting go even as I pray for the fall
to bring me to some rest, to some usefulness
for the ones who come next.  It’s all
I can hope for, and I can’t even let myself
do that when the light up here is so bright,
so lovely, so warm.

There’s no point to doing this. No point
in cobbling breath, interest, and passion
until they congeal. I scrape stuff off plates
that matters more than this. Words

stopped having meaning years ago,
shortly before the advent of television,
shortly before the atom bomb made speech
irrelevant. Now that the planet itself

is boiling before our eyes, why bother with a poem
when a bullet between your brows will move you more?
There’s nothing a poem can do for you
a gun can’t do better.

Your love, your pain, your empathy and rage
make no difference to a tree that’s going to die.
Your heartbreak’s boring, your social conscience
means nothing — the world’s a dead issue, and the faster

humanity and all its conceits disappear, the better off
the world will be. You’d be better served making that happen
if you want a better planet, and forget immortality:
it’s pointless to write a poem when no one will be here to ignore it.

You’ll do it anyway, of course. You’ll do it anyway
because the clinical definition of insanity
is to do the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results.
Poets are humans, humans are insane. Welcome to the asylum:

enjoy it while you can.

The correct thing to say right now is
"swirling."  Swirling. My head’s swirling,
or something in my head’s swirling, or
there’s something that seems the same
as swirling about the way my head feels.
In truth, nothing’s swirling at all up there,
unless you count the blood making a round
through the cortex as "swirling,"
or perhaps the single cells swirl
as they move through the veins and arteries.
I can imagine that they swirl in the tight space
of a capillary while making the exchange of oxygen
and nutrients through the walls. Perhaps
they swirl with joy, and the joy slips into the brain
and covers its membranes, and that fuels my feeling
that my head itself is swirling, or perhaps this is how
the word "swirling" came to be invented — it invented itself
as it pulled letters off of the blood and created the sound
of itself, letting itself echo in me as it shifts among the other words,
words like "responsibility" and "sleep," or whole sentences made of letters
brought to me by the blood, scratched into the folds
by rival neurotransmitters, serotonin waving its glinting switchblade
at the joy that creates the swirling before it disappears too fast into
the walls of the crevices to wait for another chance, and meanwhile
the swirling continues, dervish headspace, holy spring dance, name it
as you will, a pleasure I will pay for in dizziness as I imagine
how to say the things that will make the good part of the spin last
while letting the darkness that always follows it swirl off into
a place where it will lie, still and stolid, for as long as I can keep it there.