You have a long life line,
said the palmist.  I know,
I replied.  I’m already old. 

You have a symbol of great power
there too, she said. I know that
too, I said.  Tell me something
I don’t know.

Your hands
are empty, she said.  They were full
and now they are open
and waiting for the next gift
to fall into them.

That was news to me
who had never felt anything,
ever, of any weight or substance
in there.

Did you not feel my hands in yours,
warm, soft, and ready, she asked?
And I had not.

Ach, she said,
What is one
to do with someone like you
who asks for his fortune
to be revealed
when he cannot feel the one
that is already there?

An ancient gentleman
in a cap
sat outside the cafe
and said to me, out of the blue,
in what I suspect
was an Albanian accent:

“Best friend. Fifty years,”

and held up a burning handrolled cigarette.

“I no speak English much.
I no speak without at all,
best friend, tobacco,
fifty years…”

And he laughed through brown peg teeth.

I could see what he meant.
Hell, we were talking, weren’t we?
And we hadn’t been.  Not till then,
and here he was being perfectly clear —
two friends laughing, perfectly clear, two of us
smoking together, holding our cigarettes
like talking sticks, taking turns
agreeing on friendship and sociability,
bridging gaps and silence
within a cloud of friendly, acrid smoke.

I delight
in the way my town shines
in moonlight.

It seems
that the buildings and yards
are freely enjoying themselves,

which is why all my money
has crawled under a rock
and my gasoline has disappeared

back into the soil
to cry as it longs for cars
and travel

and a return to the days
when I only got by
by thinking about leaving and not coming back.

I delight now
in the moon shining
on the empty road outside,

on my closed garage
and depleted wallet, useless anyway
now that all the stores are closed.

For once, I don’t want for anything
and it’s enough to pretend
that this feeling will last.

Tags: poetry, poems, meditations

Fast
as a car on a banked oval
going over and over the same ground;

fast as the slide
at the amusement park
that drops you into water
so quickly you at once want
to do it again;

fast as the fatal words
falling from your stunned lips
into the face of your traitor boss;

that is how fast it will happen
when you reach the point
of breaking again
in the same place you broke last time
this happened.

Slowly,
in the afterglow of the failure,
you come to see how awe-inspiring it is
to fail so well.  You are an expert, after all,
at the craft.  An inspiration
to future failures
who will look to you
and say

that’s how it is done.

And that makes you a success at something,
you fast speaker, fast in the grip
of blurt and impulse.
Did you know there are people
who would kill to be like that?
They imagine, of course,
that it will work out well for them —

which it might.
And you ponder that for a long time,
racing through the possibilities.

It is possible
that you are no failure,
but a genius of the moment.

It is possible that speed
is your violin
and you are Paganinni,
it is your guitar and you are
the Vai of the retort and the Hendrix
of the sudden move.

It is possible
that every move you’ve made
that dumped you, every spin
on the track after a hard charge,
every splashdown into bitter chlorine
was a masterpiece of the art
of playing a bad hand.

That it hasn’t always worked out
may be as much an illusion
as what would come from reasoned thought
and measured speech,
but that is something
you’d like to know for sure,
as fast as you can.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Odin
sits on a stone
with one eye on the Tree
and the other rolling on the ocean’s floor.
The meanest of the gods
is half blind but
nothing escapes him.
Warrior days are coming.
The same old Trickster
is still pulling the strings;
he can tell by the ache
in his half empty face.

He adjusts his robe
and pokes at the empty socket,
inside which he swears he can feel
the messages sent here by the roots
piercing the sea bed
and plunging all the way
to the core of the earth
without burning.

What they carry to the limbs of Yggdrasil
is the taste of the smoke of the axis
as it grinds down.
He can do nothing about that —

if the Tree is poisoned,
if Asgard falls,
he’ll sit here
and think about war
and pestilence
as any old man would,
as they all do
in the twilight of their years.

There’s a reason he holds
his robe so close
against the eventual cold
that will follow the Burning
that will surely come.

no more water
the fire next time

in the wake of every flame
every raid
every war
there is water

the reason for weeping
is that it recalls how evil
was once cleansed
from our world

so Mary
weep

as you lie burned
in the dust behind
the latest army to pass

thinking of the blackened children you’ve lost
whose bodies lie smoking in the wake of the machine
the Kings have driven for thousands of years

hear us, Mary
we are your tears

we will bring back the Flood
to soothe you
abrade your slipping skin
cool your blistered arms and reddened legs
wash your face free of the smoky taste of grief

you will rise
upon the face of the waters
a token of hope
that someday
the world won’t need to burn

so Mary
weep

bring us forth

we will remind God
of His broken promise

that the children
in whose laughter you hear a covenant
and in whose faces you see redemption
would not again become
ashes in your mouth

let us fall from you
strike these scorched stones
to open the springs
in a song of rushing water
and set a rainbow in its mist

no more fire
the water next time
Pharaoh’s gonna get drownded
and no more Marys gonna weep

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Off to visit you, Florida,
Sunshine State:
you’ve always been dark to me.
I see outlaws
in your smile, every time
I land there.

Then onto Georgia.
For me you’re just Atlanta
caught behind an endless ring of highway.
I know there’s more to discover
but those concrete barriers
always feel like barbed wire.

I’ve been again and again to places
that I do not really know,
spent time in enclaves
that looked like other enclaves
and ate food that only differed
in a trace of spice or a clever name.

A lot of suburbs and made-up places
built fresh upon what used to be
prairie or desert, swamp or forest,
full of boxes and chain amenities.
A lot of conference rooms
that looked out over other conference rooms.

Those edge cities
with their landscaped camouflage,
all those bright hotels
and their regionally friendly art;
I feel sometimes that when I step
from the airport into them,

I haven’t gone anywhere at all.
The miles add up in my accounts
and tell me I can go anywhere I want
with enough advance notice.
I end up at home on every vacation,
the only place strange enough to charm me.

When we were in the cult
we didn’t get a lot of sleep.
But they said we didn’t need it,
so we didn’t need it.

When we were in the cult
we talked funny; words had meanings there
that seemed a little off,
but we understood each other well enough.

When we were in the cult
we slept with others in the cult
and made a lot of noise about how
everyone ought to be with us.

When we were in the cult
everything that went wrong
was caused by something we’d done.
There were no accidents or errors.

When we were in the cult
we didn’t call it cult.  We just called it
“being there.”  We slept when we could,
fucked each other now and then,

tried not to mess it up
by thinking or saying or doing
things we shouldn’t.  When we were
in the cult, it wasn’t hard

to be in the cult
as long as we didn’t think
we were in one at all.
As long as we told each other that,

it wasn’t bad at all.

I slip and lose myself
in the dim light
of the tale you’re telling,
struggling under its red surface.

There’s warm blood
and cold blood.
I can tell the difference,
and this is warm
almost to boiling.
I like how it feels,
and it doesn’t matter to me
if the blood you’re crying for here
is yours or another’s,
if the story is fiction or not.

All of us have bathed
in the stuff at some point
and understand how it clings
and tastes of iron, no matter
the source.  When it’s stage blood,
it stinks of sugar and sham;
there is steel here.

My tongue sliced open,
my ears full.
I break into air as you finish,
crawling onto the shore
you’ve provided for me.

A ride worth taking,
butcher boy.  May you never
have to tell it again.