Your wings are not a problem.

The doors you must walk through
that shred your leading edge
are a problem.
The granite steps you must climb
that soil and tear your feathers
are a problem,

and you must love those problems
in order to solve them.
To simply fly over them
and spit upon them
is no act of love.  What will
your children do
if you do not take the time
to caress them into
a pleasing and comfortable
place to be? 

You will say: bah! Enough!
I will raise my children
far from the doors and stairs
that have bruised me.

But there will be new stairs
and new doors.  A right angle
is the builder’s best friend
and a sharp edge makes
for easy packaging of
right and wrong, approval
and denial.  Trip on a step,
bruise your wing on a frame, and
you are learning that they are there
to make pain obvious and avoidable
only by compressing and stunting
your passage.  Someone
vested in that will build again
wherever you choose to live;

perhaps you will become that architect yourself someday.

So love them, those shin-busting,
wing-breaking corners, too-little
headroom, too-steep stairways
that lead to the Heights for which you are longing.
Love them sternly, love them strongly,
do not submit to them without pushing through
and wearing them down with their unexpected joy
at the pleasure of your touch.

Before you fly,
flow through the gates
and make them smooth and soft
as if your flight was water coursing
over the ruins, as if the deformation
you suffer
is a token of respect
for the ones who will follow
more easily across the barriers
you’ve pushed so hard against
as you moved toward a land
full of promise fulfilled.

Never
in the story
I know best
and dread but believe in —
my own —
have I come back
from this far
along this trail
that’s run
through deep woods
full of storms and
filled with the running
leather lunged wolves
who harry me along
as if I were
their solitary prey,
but
I found myself lying on the floor tonight
and disbelieving, for once,
the most likely outcome
of that scenario;
instead
I heard the ocean
and saw the long horizon
and felt a hand reach for mine
and say
come, get up,
there are people here
who want to see you,
and the night was still
and though there was a moon
there was no howling to be heard,
only arms outstretched to me and
murmured, soft greetings.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Leave the shoe
where you found it,
on the sidewalk
in front of the house.

That broken sole, that torn toe,
may mean nothing to the owner;
maybe he’s fine with that shoe, maybe
it’s the only left shoe he owns.
Maybe he lost it running away
and now he’s safe and will return.

It’s not your place to decide
what is disgusting and useless.
The street
where the broken shoe
awaits its fate
is not your place to judge.

Today I want so badly to die

but October’s coming, sometime
soon, not tomorrow, not
the following day, but sometime
after August starts to bleed off summer
and the days begin to pale through September,
October will come. 

I hope I make it to October, to that month
when I’m glad to be cool, glad to be
needing a jacket, wondering how
I made it though the heat, happy to be watching
the trees turn and strip themselves
to nothing but bark and bone.

Ah, October, month of memory balanced upon
expectation, with its glimmers
of future want and last gasp days
of comfortable light and clarity — why does October
have to be so far away?  There’s too much fog
in the mornings now, and too much sweat

from late morning all the way to night.
What I wouldn’t give for October tomorrow.
I know it will come, not soon, not tomorrow,
not the following day;  but sitting here and burning up,
I can’t wait for October
when the earth will be naked,

when I may be alive.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

If you send me one more request
to become your fan,
knock on my door one more time
with God in your fist,
exhort me one more time
to accept Jesus as my personal savior,
whip a finger at me again
to tell me I owe you my attention and my fate;

if you touch me again
as if you’d earned that intimacy,
ask me over and over
for a number, a key, a sign;
beg me one more time
to take you back,
coat me with unrepentant irritations
so I need a shower ten times a day;

if you look me in the eye again
and steal my glance,
raise my hope again
and steal my thunder,
pat my back again
and steal my spine,
stick your hand out again
and slice my grip —

watch me turn, then,
into water;
watch me sluice
down this channel between us
and wash you back;
hear me whisper like silk on steel
to try and melt the block in your head;
see me take your hands in mine
still covered with my own blood
and gently, as if everything depended on such a thing
being gentle, turn you back onto yourself
and make you feel how ashamed you are
of your fanatic insecurity
that makes you seek me out
to join you in your lonely cell.

Walking by a pond,
I shiver briefly
near a mound of rocks
and rusted cans.

Because I prefer the visible world,
the blare of neon and loud comfort,
I ignore the possibility
that has just occurred to me,
that the mound covers
a maiden’s grave
and that she is calling to me
to open the pile and see her face,
open to the world, her jaw gaping,
teeth gray with soil, her hands gloved
in the rot of years —

how many years
has she lain here?  No telling, because
I will not stop to discover
if any of what I’m thinking
is true, and not a fantasy born
of my unfamiliarity
with the unseen.

I do not want to know if she’s in there,
or if the ground I cover
on my hurried way home
contains more like her — Nipmuc graves,
broken colonial skulls, the wrecks
of more recent people who remain nameless
though they shake me
as I pass. 
Every pond may be a grave site,
every heap of stones
a home for a plane
I will not acknowledge.
I do not want to know
where women
who never got a chance
to speak of rape
were raped.  I do not know
where children were killed. 
I do not know
how the poor suffered
on these same streets
back before affluence
covered their poverty.

In the suburbs, I never have to think
about why, in the middle of all this
light and sound, I sometimes shiver
as if the light
was full of ghosts.

I’m not going to stop talking
until the shadow of the wheel
stops turning after the wheel does
I’m not going to stop talking
until the last panda goes negative
and black and white themselves reverse
I’m not going to stop talking
until the judgment pops its cork
and the fields of the sky bleach out
I’m not going to stop talking
until the islands become mobile
and flight from the flood is impossible

You ought to listen

I’m not going to give up my breath
until it is all but spent on futile gestures
and the last rattle of change fills my pockets
I’m not going to give up my hands
until their grip is gone and the ease of tension
breaks them open and they rest at my sides
I’m not going to give up my eyes
until light becomes too expensive to collect
and the darkness all around is all that’s free
I’m not going to give up my blood
until it’s all that’s left to wash the floor
and I need to clean up after the warriors are gone

Are you listening

I’m going to stand here with my mouth open
until somebody comes and drags me down
and my eyes fall from my astonished head
I’m going to be the hub of that slowing wheel
until the tread crumbles and the turning stops
and the axle bows and splits and is dropped in the sand
I’m going to champion and protest and call you out
until you can’t sit still without bleeding into your chair
and you slide to the ground relaxed and ready to sleep
I’m going to make the answers as loud as I can
until the ceiling caves into a wash of flowers
and the earth drowns in a haphazard funeral of song

If you’re listening and listening right
you’ll join our band of angel apes
You’ll evolve as fast as your ears can carry you
You see me up here now but soon with luck I’ll disappear
into a wall of pink and white and voice and action
I mean nothing without the listening
I hope I become extinct as soon as I possibly can
for what I do will only be worth doing
until your listening takes hold and soaks this dirty world
in sweet and attentive rain

Big Homie, they called him,
and yeah, he was big.  Around for years,
he got rounder through all of them,
and spoke more slowly over time
since it took the words longer to get out.

Big Homie used to balance on knife blades when he talked
and they’d watch to see how he didn’t fall. 
Now he’s bloody all the time.
His feet look like a cheese grater, red prints
on the barroom floors tell them where he’s been.

Big Homie used to eat lightbulbs like candy
and when he opened his mouth shone
like the Yukon at midnight in summer.
Lately he’s taken to speaking in the dark.
Lately he’s taken by how he can only talk in the dark.

Big Homie, they call him. Big Homie, whose light
and shadow aren’t on speaking terms anymore.
Big Homie, who one night knows he’ll get home
and the lamps will not light, the shadows will sink
into pure black, he’ll be alone, and they won’t care.

Crawling through a long swamp after growing up among jackals,
I came upon a house bone, relic of a family that had thrived at some point
before it vanished into the muck.

I put the bone in my hip pocket (after tossing the flask aside)
and carried it back to where I could plant it in dry rich sand.
If a bone could be a seed, I reasoned, it might grow into a home.

But all the bone did was stick up where I could trip over it
and I fell often, and hard, and bruised myself yellow and brown
and ached every time for a long time, so that I cursed the very idea

of home.  I tried to fertilize it and it did nothing.  I tried
to redesign my own place around it, stared at the blueprints
till they bled, and still the home I desired would not rise.

So I go back into the swamp every day and slop around seeking
that flask I dropped a while back.  If I see another bone,
I leave it there.  Better it should rot unaided by my fumblings.