All these people
seem more concerned
about others than I am.

I’m frantically searching my head
for a bump in the right place
that will explain this; some scar
on a crucial spot might be keeping me
from loving my fellow humans.  It all seems
so smooth up there, like I’ve never lived
and been hurt by anything or anyone.

I think I’ll take it out on someone.
Maybe they’ll hit me in the head
and break the numbness wide open.

Maybe they’ll forgive me
and I’ll feel the dam of concern
bursting within me.  

Maybe I’ll just tumble
and fall, get up cursing humanity.
Honestly, that seems the most likely outcome,
and frankly preferable to how I am now.
I’ve got to have a hole in my head
to feel so little.

M is for mescaline, for peace
of mind.

O is for opiates on my
hip, just for kicks.

D is for drink, drink
all over my lap and belly.

S is for smoke
the color of eyes.

L is for my life’s
that’s wrecked. Got no job,
no true home,
family’s a cipher,
love’s a horizon.

G is for the gold rush,
the hope of easy street, the fine wares
of gangster and greedyguts,
for groaning
under the weight of pretending
that I expect something to go well.

C is for cleaning up
the stains that are always on the floor
no matter how C for careful I am.

A is for absolution, absinthe,
how amazing the way I am when left
to my own devices.

Z is the place I end up
when I lose the thread. The last place
I remember to look. The place
as distant from a beginning as I can find.

If you enjoy cutting others

If you learned that early
and found you had a knack for it

If you get a kicky gut-gasm when you feel
soft pillow puncture or shock of bonestrike up your arm

If you love the weapons and own them by the dozens
carry them in pairs in boots in pockets and small of back

If you know how to use them
not from movie or video but from hard training

If your family taught you manhood
depended on hard skills like these

but if even beyond that you learned
that for you it was a pleasure and not grim need

and you ran from that 
and became a good boy and never hurt anyone

except that one time —
maybe two if you are being ruthless

and honestly
all you’ve cut since then has been yourself

and even then only a few times
and those were a while ago

if you are settled and urbane
and only taste the desire to cut now and then

and never do it with your knives
at all

tell me
are you still a monster

Salt in the wood
from hands on the handle
for many years of work;

leave it out on the lawn
after raking and you may see
the porcupine come and gnaw it up.

His long teeth carve and cut across the grain;
his back arches up against attack.
If you think of going out to stop him,

recognize that he will move slowly
if he does decide to leave the tool alone,
and that’s no given; he may instead choose

to do nothing, his steady assault
upon the handle certain and assured
in the knowledge that there’s really

nothing you can do about his appetites.
When he leaves, you’ll put the rake away.
The incident may change you. Maybe you’ll feel

the toothmarks under your hand next time you rake,
and think then of how your sweat
must have tasted.  Perhaps

you’ll lay your tongue to the wood
to find out for yourself what the attraction was.
In your dreams you’ll imagine you own a back

bristling with quills.  You’ll begin to move more slowly,
deliberately, confidently.  You’ll leave your home
and move to the woods, 

learning to love the feel of leaves
beneath your feet, start to wonder
why anyone would want them gone.

Obsessed this whole winter
with looking 
like I know what I’m doing,
I’ve clung to a persona.
Today
I whip off the mask,
break the spell,
and decide to plant.

In my dirty hand,
a clump of earth
full of pale bulbs.
Black under my fingernails,
shit-brown all over my knees
and shirt.  A streak of filth
on one cheekbone.

Do I look like
I know what I’m doing?
At last, it doesn’t matter.
Like any laborer,
any artist, 
any of us really,
I just lay my ghostly little balls
in that fresh grave
and hope for the best. 

What I say 
when I sense
Anima underfoot:

“Come up
and love me.”

What I say to Cecil Taylor:

“I wish I could scale cliffs
as nimbly as that.  How do you see
the micro-holds you move between
in such tiny increments of just-in-time?”

What I say
when the guitar
is horrible in my hands:

“Whether it is you or me,
I am sorry.”

What I say to my pen,
keyboard, paper, screen:

“God said so.  It’s so,
I am sure, even as I shiver
here with you.”

What I say to the air
on my front porch:

“Won’t you come in?  There’s
beer.  There’s song.  There’s 
air I’d like you to meet.”

What I say to myself,
always, when presence
seizes me, when I am alone
and caught in alone, when I am
clasped close to a chest
imbued with a Krupa pulse
or to the ribs of Indonesia
come East to present themselves
at the court of honor and understanding —
the kecak men whooshing and clattering
a charm of rope looped around
what I fail to understand:

“Yes.”

when the end comes
and is accepted
it’s almost always with resignation

if there’s relief it’s coupled with 
mild surprise

a gently exhaled “oh”

raised shoulders
falling back

eyes softening into peace

and the process in the brain
no longer well-described by the word
“thought”

becomes something better
an unanalyzed awareness
that swirls Sufi 
before it quite settles

Eventually,
I’ll get back to the narrative —
I do want to get home —

but for now,
I’m content with this fruit
before me, this peach.

It’s a story too.
Seed within both past and future.
But the flesh is present, so wetly present,

and it is all I want right now.
This moment free of nostalgia
and anticipation. This sweet

ball of interruption.
I reach for it
and let the narrative go.

Improvised
explosive devices, suicide
bombers, kamikaze pilots;

imagine, I say, there was a time
when no one had ever heard
each of those phrases. 

We should
try to forget them,
you say.

Try, I say.
Just try, and I will wait here
for your limbs

to rain down upon me
once the detonation
is complete.  Once a genie

comes when called,
it’s hard to uncall it.
Once a path’s been cut,

it never completely
grows over, no matter how narrow
and choked it seems.

You say
damn you cynic,
things change.  I say

bless you, naive one, I agree —
but not that much, and never
back to the original state of grace.

We just aren’t
built
for unknowing.

i wouldn’t
know joy
if it drowned me.
these are words. 
i use to call these
joy,
breathing them was paradise. 
no need
for a substitute,
as with these anything
could melt into joy. joy
had no division.
it’s been so long,
i can only describe that,
not recall that —
what was joy?
it was
words creating envelopment
out of the spinning of life.
i wrote that.  don’t know
if i felt that ever. 
don’t feel it now,
even though
i never shut up.

did you find this tedious?
as much as i did, i bet.

That coat
on the door
isn’t mine, really.
I bought it at
a thrift store,
thought of it
as costume — long,
multi-hued tweedy woven
shapeless bag of a thing,
thought it’d pass for
turn of the century
or hipster, perhaps
artsy in a shambling,
mumbling poet way,
covering a similar and
hated body to that
it had once covered.
Coupled with any of a number
of equally secondhand hats,
I thought it might make me seem
a bit more legit, too odd
to be anything but credible
in the persona I’d chosen.
The coat, not bought new
but used, isn’t mine really:
another owned it once, wore it
all fall and winter most likely,
tried to wrap it tight against
revealing, spinning wind
that lifted his cover
and sealed me into mine.

Pleased with the tightness
and the resultant heat
of my fists, I shone hard
as a youth — could have had
my picture in the dictionary
next to “righteous,” my growl
remixed as a viral
undertone to public events;
deep into middle age now,
I open my hands
but no one’s rushing up
to clasp them.  This is,
I suppose, what I get
for dimming the fire within:
I may last longer
but will also feel colder —

I suppose I have to consider
that my life’s always been this cold
and that I never knew that
because of how long and hot
I’ve been burning;
still,
I’ll be damned
if I’ll start fighting again
just to get warm.

don’t you feel a sort of sad awe
for the first light man
who denied that he’d found himself in thrall
to a dark man’s baritone?

can’t you give a half-felt shout-out
for the first woman whose head just about fell off
when she saw how people loved her more
when she just gave in and kneeled?

haven’t you expected this
for most of your time here —
an instant of realization
that nothing’s easy sometimes

except the acceptance
of untenable events?
that sometimes ending up end-up
is the only way to survive,

if not thrive?  how hard is it
to put off thriving for an unknown while
and fall in, tow the line,
even if you rot a little bit while it goes on?

will you muster a shamefaced pat on the back
for these hypocrites now?  a second of acclaim
for their failures? a startled, stifled gasp of recognition
that they must have felt what you feel now —

you’ll never be completely aligned
with everything you claim to honor.
that’s obvious now.  you know too much
about what you’re not capable of —

so now, at last, don’t you sorta envy
that dwarf with the unguessable name
and his ability to (when all else was lost)
tear himself in half and disappear?