The simplest approach
to the remaking of the world is to
let go of the tug of war

between past and future
and let Now happen: unavoidably,
there will be pain.

Someone holding on too tightly will fall,
become bruised and filthy and angry.
Someone’s going to make a lot of noise.

It happens each time we do this,
and it doesn’t matter that it happens.
It has to be “we,” and it has to be “now.”

and there will always be tears.
Even if nothing’s being done.  Even if
it’s still the same old world as always,

there will be tears.  Trying to pretend
that no one ever cries is dishonest,
avoiding change to prevent crying

is being dishonest with ourselves.
We just have to let go the rope
and fall if we’re ever going to stand up again.

The rumpled
training manager from Grand Rapids
is clearly one sheet away from
three sheets to the wind when he blurts it out:

“I don’t care what you think
about the divinity angle — it’s
a heck of a story.  Think about it:
child bride, older man, infant
in a bed of straw, animals (there HAD
to have been animals, man, it was a
freaking stable), and then those kings
and the fancy gifts and the comet
in the sky above:  even if the angels
were a fabrication, the whole damn cosmic order
shows up in that little tale — and there’s death
and taxes, courtesy of Herod —
that’s a heck of a story, as if every element
from human royalty to the plant kingdom
(if you count the straw)
was in communion with the homeless
and the galaxy and the myrrh and all.”

He lifted the glass again,
poured the last of the bourbon
into himself.  “I get tickled
thinking about it.  I mean,
here you and I sit in an airport bar
like we’ve known each other forever,
brought together with all these other nomads
and there’s that bird stuck in the terminal rafters
and the lights on the runway like stars —
I think of the story
and I see it happening
all the time;
and all I have to do
to make it real
is look around wherever I find myself
and find out what’s being born.
I’m not saying
I believe it all happened that way,
of course; and I’m fine with you
believing whatever you want,
I’m just saying
it still keeps on being
a heck of a story,
no matter what you think
of the Virgin Birth part:
something to think about
while we sit here stranded
a long way from home.”

I don’t want to be here,
listening to this,
staring out the big windows
at huge, immobile planes.
I just want to be home.

I don’t want to know this guy
or think about the story
while billowing sheets of snow
scoot across the tarmac
reminding me
that even if there is a hotel room
out there, it’ll be sheer misery
getting to it;
I just want to be home.

But we’re here, the training manager
and the nice young couple with the baby in the corner booth
and all these other random folks,
and I’m here too, and while I’m not going
to take a census of us all,
I bet no one wants to be here right now
hearing this
so far from home.

He’s so loud,
so drunk and getting drunker,
and he smells of something sweet
and pungent, and he keeps talking
while home gets more and more distant
even as we’re sitting still.

I’m not going to tell you
there is any redemption here —

there’s just the story
and the telling
and the wish for the messenger
to keep it to himself
while I wonder about that sparrow
who can’t fly out of here
into the cold of the dark winter storm,
but who will evidently try
till he can try no more.

I am trying to get sleepy
but time is refusing to budge
from the track it’s on
and there are after all many hours of the day
we waste numbers on
considering how often most of us see them
I am trying to get sleepy
but the night’s flexing its muscles
showing me how strong it is
by holding me by the lapels
and not letting go
I am trying to get sleepy
without aid of alcohol or weed or heroin or death
and it’s a no go tonight for the straight man
who seems to be stubbornly awake and alive
when sleep is the most important task before him
I am trying to get sleepy
but the damn sheep are singing
at the top of their woolly lungs
I am trying to get sleepy
but the sirens outside
sing as well of other people who aren’t asleep either
it’s criminal how they torture me for their sleeplessness
arrest all the waking rascals
me too
I need to be imprisoned somewhere boring
with gray walls
and nothing to stimulate me
it’ll be like sleep
even if I’m awake
losing track
to time

The meteor never knew
how hope grew from the light
it gave to the watchers below,
or how they hung their wishes
upon it. 

It did not know
how alive it made those people feel,
how for a few seconds
they put aside their envy
of those around them
who seemed to have had all the luck
and told themselves they now had
a little of it themselves
because of what they’d seen.

Someone will no doubt say
this is an argument
against suicide, how you never know
who will be lit by your passage;

someone will be wrong,
someone will have missed the point
that awareness or lack thereof
would have changed nothing
for the meteor, which fell
into vapor according to the rules
which also gave the people below it
the light from the burning
and the hope is always
a secondary and unintended
effect.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

In an eclipse
of an eclipse (too many
clouds to see)

the sky may redden
above the cover and it may
seep through

I’ve never seen the sky
not change even when
the event was obscured

As above
so below
The event seeps through

Colors oddly burnt
onto the ground
as if all had been concussed

Shaken
into strange
shades — as above

so below
and inside
and overall

Cut me off
because I’m stupidly
long winded at times,
oversensitive, fat with a sense
of my own importance
and centered on the inner eye
of my personal storm.

Cut me off
because I’ve stopped caring
about how much I sound
like parents, like teachers,
like the people I hate to admit
live within.

Cut me off
even if I bleed because
that flow would be
the cleanest thing
to come out of me
in years.

Cut me off
and see what buds
from the scar if I heal.
It may be smaller but stronger.
It may be all the incentive
the healthy core of me needs
to get out there
into the sun
and live.

Let us all have one moment
of clarity for our pasts —
not the catastrophic moments,
not the Big Events, not the tragic
or comic or blissful climaxes
we usually hold close and call
“the past,”

but for the startling moments
when we see a person
in a new light, someone
we’d forgotten who comes back
and opens up school lockers
full of surprising good.

Let us praise unfamous people,
words that should have been recalled, statements
that should have been murmured
and branded and engraved
somewhere inside.

Let us open up.
Let us seize scraps
and set them in lockets.
Let us speak to the small
and the ordinary.

Let us learn that
pain and joy are not our province
alone.  Let us learn
that those we forgot
might have been allies
in the old battle of awkward
had we let them in back then,

and let us not keep them out
a moment longer
once they reenter the room.

Phone calls
from dear friends
buzz through
the line I’ve drawn
around time meant
to be alone, very alone
with the critical work.
Like bees
stinging through denim,
they itch me all over
though I know they’re only
reaching out to me
and reacting badly
when I swat them off.

I may never taste honey again,
but at least I’m completing
important things. So many,
many important things
I can’t remember them,

and there’s no one besides me
who knows of them all.

I can’t follow
pathological curves

too natural
too actual
too much
infinity

such curves
terrify me
to the point of
angelic fervor
possession indistinguishable
from the demonic
to these eyes unaccustomed
to perpetual repetition

pray then as taught
through exponential smoothing

thy form
is immeasurable
through my poor arithmetic
it requires new dimensions
that thou will not allow
my cup runneth over
thy will be done
though it will take me
into the valley
of lost in the curves
forever

My mind: a collection
of useful disasters.

A bundle of arrows
clutched in a dead hand,
made of different woods and heads,
all fletched differently,
all facing
the same target.

A muddy stream
running swiftly
and tainted with blood.

An industrial park
full of small, unknown firms
making small parts
for war machines.

A parked bus
growing cold in the lot,
still holding one passenger
who fell asleep
long before the last stop.

A yearbook
missing one picture.

A worn lucky coin,
a worn worry stone,
a frayed string of prayer beads
lying in dirty snow
fifty paces behind the hole
in the pocket they came from.

I have owned so much
and have so little useful left,
regrettable remnants
of regretted choices.

I live in here
where loop upon loop
of the push broom’s path
cleans up nothing for good,
only makes dirt-curbed tracks
and piles that look the same
no matter where they are left,

no matter how often they’re rearranged.

Useful disasters
only in the sense that they keep me
thinking, always,
of how I might recover, reuse,
remake them to new purposes.

Fire the arrows at last,
hurdle the streams,
bankrupt the factories,
get off the bus,
show up for the photo shoot;

learn, at last, to pray.