On my street we all avoid
getting pulled into a conversation
with the guy
who lives on the second floor
of the pale yellow triple-decker.

If there is an iris
in the front yard, he’ll mention it
and will have taken the time to look up
which variety it belongs to.  You will know
if it is bearded or Siberian
almost as soon as he does.  He’ll follow that
with a report on all the tangents he took
on the way to that information.

You will soon be as bored as he apparently is.

I suspect that he talks so much
because not to speak
would leave him alone with his thoughts
and if you’ve listened to him at all,
you can understand how scared he should be
for having them.

He says he would like to have an invisible hand
in one of history’s defining moments
and be the only one who knows of it.

He would like to go to China
and buy a farm child to water his garden
so that he could watch her
and then tearfully describe to her
how carefully she moves among the plants
and then he would take her home
and not ask for his money back.
He believes it would be worth it to see
how baffled they all would be.

He would consider it
an improbable adventure which evolved
strictly for his own pleasure.

Someday she’d come back to him as a famous journalist
and tell him her eye for detail
and her robust self-esteem
were all due to him
and then she would sit with him for days
and capture his story
for her book on great men she had known.

But instead he looks out the open window
down at the ragged yard
and waits for the neighbors to come by
so he can speculate out loud about the hens and chickens
growing in the wall, how they got there, he never planted them,
must have been the previous tenant, did you know them,
what were they like,

his voice rising in volume and pitch
as we back away claiming
we are late for an errand, late for work,
anything we can think of
to get away from him,

the one we call the garden guy,
whose name we do not care to know.

In love this morning

with the sounds
of a child crying,
adults good-naturedly
trying to calm it down,
and all this set amid
the steady gutter drips and asphalt hiss
of a daybreak summer rain…

a melody and a poem
to start my day,
and I’m not even out of bed.

Sunshine on
mental illness
is a good thing mostly.

But it’s just like rain.
Too much
can stimulate a train of mood

that runs off the track
and kills what’s in the way.
Too little and it withers.

How much good
is enough?  You can’t
know.  That is the problem

with being this kind of sick.
There’s no clear path from diagnosis
to cure.  It’s not like tending a garden.

No instructions for this much shade,
this much sun, this much water,
what food and how much to feed.

What triggers blight
is unpredictable except in broad terms.
Don’t push it, whatever it is,

is all you can tell yourself.  And
how far is too far?  Only way to know
is to watch for failure.  Success

isn’t measured
in bloom or fruit
but by dying in a reasonable season

for dying.
A sigh of grieved relief
is the only validation that matters

and seeing yourself mulched
when all is done is all you can hope for.
It’s enough to know you’ve not poisoned the ground.

A giant heart, perhaps a cow’s,
soaking in brine
on the window sill.
(It’s always better not to ask.)

Immense cat
apparently sleeping on the counter
with a cutting board and cleaver
next to him.  (It probably means nothing,
but why chance it?)

His sudden move to block
access to the fridge when you ask
if there’s anything cold to drink.
(Oh, he’s just very private, or perhaps
he rarely cleans it?)

His hands twisting in his lap
the whole time you’re speaking with him,
his knee a piledriver ramming the desk.
(Not used to people staying more than a minute,
maybe?  Too self conscious about that smell?)

That smell…
(but who doesn’t have something they are
embarrassed about?)

Such a quiet man usually, nice to all,
keeps to himself.  (His voice, so eager
one moment, so guarded the next,
and always the shaking leg…)

You say goodbye — neighbor talking
to neighbor.  But you’re filing away details
you’ll never mention until
the news trucks park in front of the house.
(If they ever do…which, of course, you highly doubt
will happen. Why would it?)

To build a case
against insomnia
so as to enjoin it from
canceling you out
you may purchase drugs or
forget how it feels to be
awake long enough that
you trick yourself into
sleeping and thus render it
harmless.  You will have to do this
often.  Relentless and vigorous
defense is required.

To choose a tattoo
that will not be an
embarrassment shortly after
its application you may need
to look at how it feels to lack
a thing you’ve never had.  It is
often difficult to imagine
how a patch of your hide could be
improved so deftly that such a lack
could be erased.  Impulsive tattoos
may be representative of illusory
absence felt strongly but only for the time
it takes to nod your head at a stencil.
Their disappearance would reinforce
other moments of loss you’ve suffered
and it is therefore usually advisable to keep them.

To reject a parent
is to demonstrate a certain respect
for their historic presence or absence.
It is usually easier to maintain some contact
even if only on high holidays
so restraining yourself
from all touch
and declaring any bridging
of the distance between you unsafe
is a way to honor the place they have made in your
experience even when that place is a hole or a wound.

To own a life you have been given
is a rigorous responsibility
that demands a certain acceptance of folly
and exceptional flexibility in the areas
of communication and self-care.  What may seem
on the surface to be various forms of harm
may in fact be completely logical
if not always comfortable adaptations
to facts and environmental factors.
You will choose often.
You may never choose wisely or consciously

but you will choose.

I saw it on the street tonight
glowing like a Ronette’s dress.

It smelled of gunpowder and genius,
even from a distance of some yards.

A domestic rabbit picked it up
and carried it back to its hutch

to nurse it to adulthood, mistaking it
for a baby.  When the rabbit’s back was turned

the wig rolled itself into a tube and slipped away
through the mesh, humming madly to itself.

Where’s my head,
it kept singing,

a lying tune as large as that myth from the 1960s
that everything was poised on the brink of utopia

until Sirhan and Ray and Oswald
and those guys in the Audubon Ballroom had to bring guns

into the picture.  Where’s my head, where’s my gun,
where is my warm gray cloud of sound? Phil’s wig

packed heat undercover long before all that happened
and now we know that there was always a touch of the bad crazy

looming behind the innocent songs.  Be my baby, dammit.
Be my baby, be my baby.

I watched the wig
scuttle away.

I’m no longer some wascally wabbit,
it sang,

at last I’m the streetwalking cheetah
I always knew I could be,

and I like it.

Orange is to pheasant
as tangerine is to quail.

How easily lives may be peeled and consumed.

Bridge is to raft
as train is to car.

How tightly the ends of a trail are tethered.

How perfect the art of comparison
that sling can be to singing
as Goliath is to shuddering earth,
that arrow can be to correlation
as bow is to itinerary.

How obvious are source and destination,
how chilled the observer standing between them.

Blanket is to genocide
as lovemaking is to terror.

How easy it is to draw forth the latter
by infecting the former with a deadly pox.

Pebble is to bullet
as tomcat is to wildfire,
as stinger is to charring,
as bootblack is to shouted orders.

How we know these things without ever having learned them.

As fern is to memory,
so clay is to despair.
As leaf mold is to an enduring fear,
so a bone on a littered beach
is
to a whisper of crumbled lullaby.

How easy to remain ignorant
of how all things are speaking to one another.

I’m as irrelevant here
as country blues
in a metal club

even though I’ve met
the devil
too

and made my deal with him
long before
half these imps were even born

I love you, dead actors,
rock stars lost in plane crashes
and drug hazes, writers full of bullets
and unseen masterpieces. 

I love you, Otis Redding, Buddy Holly,
Eddie Cochran, Kurt and Jimi and Janis.
(I don’t love you, Jim Morrison, but that is because
you were a dick, not because you were unfulfilled.)

I love you, Ernest Hemingway, George Sanders,
David Carradine, David Foster Wallace, Anne Sexton,
Sylvia Plath: all you did and said was genius
lit by the fire that took you from craft to ash.

Something there is that doesn’t love an old artist
who does a life’s work in a complete lifetime. 
Something that sees that
as invalidating the notion that is is dangerous to be an artist.

If we don’t celebrate the pain,
creation looks too pleasurable, and then
everyone would be doing it.  Who knows how many people
would turn to art if there were not such cautionary tales?

So love to you from me, all you tragic figures,
you lovely bones, models of what I’m supposed to do
if i want to reach a personal best:
I have to get rid of the personal part.

I see myself, dying to be on top of my game.
I can die myself, going out on top, thinking that
the going out is all it will take
to get there. 

You were doomed
to do this before
you ever picked up a pen.

Your first word wasn’t “Mama” but “apple,”
although by that you meant “Mama.”
No one could see that even then,
you thought in metaphors.

You read from cereal boxes
before you learned to eat from them.

You cut yourself wide open whittling an arrow
with a Bowie knife at six, and still remember
the sight of the bone
in the center of the cleft in your thumb,
and thinking of that now,
it should have been clear

that you would be hurt
every time you tried to create something,

that you’d open yourself up
on impulse, just because you could,

and that you’d always reach for the biggest tool
to do the smallest work.

Fat pen in the hand tonight
and all that blood still inside.

What a gift, they tell you.
What an inspiration.
How you have moved them all.

That scar
still hounds you
every morning at breakfast,
a note in plain sight telling you
to stop wasting time eating
when words are still everywhere,
and you still haven’t explained
why “apple”
is another word for
“mama.”