There’s a nice small house
unfinished on the beach. There’s this

one last board to be held in place,
one last half driven nail.

There’s this hammer
on the shore, and a wave

coming in — in fact, there are
a lot of waves. Big strong

waves.  The wave
won’t pick up the hammer,

but you keep trying, though.
You keep putting the hammer

into the waves expecting one of them
to drive that nail for you.  

I say, you could just turn around
next time you’re holding the hammer

and finish this up,
drive that nail, you know.

Yes, you say,
but how will the world ever learn

to bend to my will if I do 
everything myself?  This is

the right thing to do, you’ll see,
and you go back to 

trying to float a hammer on the ocean
while your little house leans into the sand

behind you.  I walk away before
the tide starts to come in.

Big mistake,
entering the store late
and walking around not certain
of what I want —

I pick up the store detective
almost at once, hovering
one aisle over, his own certainty
about my larcenous desires
a tangible fragrance.

I lead him on.  Lean into
racks of shirts and swivel
my head around.  Duck down
where he can’t see me
and preserve the elements of proof —

dude, I used to do that job.
Not here, but elsewhere, and damn well.
I know you’re cursing yourself; been there,
done that.

I’ll take pity on you tonight.
Catch your eye, smile, shrug.
You look so angry! Isn’t it good
to know I’m not stealing anything?
Isn’t it good to be wrong about

another human being
who is not living up
to your worst expectations?
Are we both this far gone
that this is our Saturday night?

Here’s to you,
wake and bakers,
joint over coffee suckers,
hiders of whiskey
in “World’s Greatest Dad” mugs;

hail, hail,
pills at daybreak takers,
Marley rocking pajama stoners;

here’s a toast to you carpool dodgers
passing the buck in favor of lifting
the mood, here’s to your health
and the health of the children
you didn’t drive to soccer practice
on a Saturday morning
because the clouds were so…
cloudy;

raise a glass to you, 
shower tomorrow people,
maybe tomorrow people,
call it a day before 9:00 AM people;

here’s to you.

May you live long,
the liquor firing a thunderstorm
in your gullets, your eyes
red as sunrise flashing back into the dawn;

may you dance clumsily behind the blinds
and tell yourself, again and again,
it’s just this one time
as you slip into the folds of the comforter
and fall into a stupor.  

Once you’re past the morning
the day has always tended to crumble;
may you instead open the party and close the bar
before the rest of us even know you’re wrecked,
and may the sleep you enter
be dead, and may the death
be temporary.  

May you open your eyes
upon a new life
where you can swallow the morning straight
and never have to answer for these lost days.

May you find yourself drunk at last
on nothing but the good light
of the good day you believed, always,
would someday come
without having to coax it into being.

Reaching into my clay
and gripping.
What I’ve seized upon forms
a ball, then a tube ridged
from where my fingers have dug in,
then it squirts away into nothing
because I’m strong enough,

but that leaves me with
an empty hand
and nothing with which
to work.

I wanted to make a bowl,
something to drink from;

the trick, I guess, is knowing how
to hold on enough
to shape the desired form
but not so tightly
that it disappears
from the effort.

It’s a trick
I’ve never learned.
I won’t learn it perfectly,
ever.  Too attached
to being right to know
better, even when I can
put knowing better
into words.

When you’re forever gripping your own clay
so tightly that you come up
with nothing but dregs on you palms, though,
yet claim that the air before you is now
a masterpiece,

I begin to see how to proceed,
and I let go…because

while there’s nothing I can make of myself
you’ll be unable to break,
nothing you’ll make of yourself
will actually hold the water
each of us needs to survive.

I start
by drawing a line around
the things I will address.

I stare a long time
into the nest of concerns
I’ve created.

When one leaps across the line
into what I’ve forbidden myself to consider,
I know what I must do,

and there I am in mid-air
dreading the landing
and hoping I will be brave enough

to follow it wherever it leads me.
It may be a slog through
filths and scums.  It may be

an orgy with undesirables.
It may be a red road of killing
and stench of fresh flesh torn open.

It may be a quiet road
with a fence and a family 
and a good dog at the end,

with a deadening blanket to lay upon
the very desire to be there at all.
It may simply kill me at first step,

candle me in a breath,
filet me at once.  Whatever it delivers
I shall accept, though not without

a longing look
back across the line
to the place I thought I should be

and a baleful glance ahead
at what I followed
to the place I actually belonged.

When fed by darkness,
seek the tiny lights within it;

when fed by light,
seek the small darkness therein.

No one lives on one or the other
alone, at least not well:

muscles are built from striation
and stress; 

lungs must learn to breathe
both hard and softly.

The jewels in this living
that is sober as often as it is drunk

are always there to be found
as long as you know how to look

no matter the sorrow or the ecstasy
that can blind you to them.  

When Cat killed Mouse
we rejoiced and were appalled:

rejoiced at old Cat
and his obvious pride,

his swatting at Mouse
after the fact, that look on his face

that said, “You never expected
this of me, didja?”

Appalled at the mere presence
of Mouse, his laid out body

a testament to just how much
we’d learned not to expect,

how easily we’d forgotten how old
and full of holes this house is,

how obvious it was that it was not proof
against the normal incursions —

and more appalled than that, perhaps,
at the idea that old Cat (who mostly

sleeps and eats and begs for scraps
and steals those scraps then sleeps again)

is so much more on the ball than we
at what goes on around here.

You want them to be happy
but there are times when you say nothing —
you see where they’re headed, what’s 
headed their way,
and you say nothing.  

You used to pick them up
after they naturally fell
and speak small nothings
to make it better.  There were times
when you couldn’t make it better,
when you all would have been better off
if you’d said nothing.  

Now, even though you want to say
the most obvious thing you’ve learned,
that no one’s the center of the universe
and on more than one occasion
the universe will run over each of us, that
there was a wagon in old India called the Juggernaut
that taught this lesson with blood and crush
to everyone watching,

you’ll all be better off if you say nothing of it
because sometimes the wheel 
tells its own story best.

In the dark,
lying above the coverlet
in an air-conditioned bedroom
tastefully decked in calm and color,
you say nothing
although you could say so much
about peace, and living, and getting
here.  You say nothing to yourself.
You know this. You don’t need to speak
of the wheel and how it laid you out
again and again, and likely will again;
while you think of all
you could say to the crushed and bleeding
you so desperately want to be happy,

you know that nothing can be said,
you say nothing
and wonder why you hear that wheel
outside your door, when you know
that not speaking won’t put you into its path.
It’s just what you fear
impotent but pleading for grip
in the assumed voice of the wheel
before you go to sleep,

and then you go to sleep.

Look — a childhood
with explosives
attached.

It’s
waiting.  Might be
waiting a while.
Might not go off
at all.  

It’s a little one —
it has blue marks
on it.  It’s hard to see
in there but it’s there
all right,

under the fat,
under the gray.

It’s mighty strong.
It’s got a bad
sting.  It’s 
whiny and terrible
and soft.  

It’s a childhood
laced up with bombs
and it’s waiting to blow.
It’s a fussy thing.
It’s OK, it doesn’t hurt
any more.  Needs

a mommy kiss.
Not likely to get one,
which
doesn’t shift the need.

And when the childhood
goes to work?  It thinks
kiss.  When it drinks?
It thinks kiss.  When it is
kissed?  It thinks
not this — and

it ticks.

Select pleasant certainties
of my prospective daily
routine

I can spend my day listening
to a variety of songs
comprised of three chords
strummed or plucked
on one or more guitars
more or less accompanied
by other instruments
and wed to
comforting lyrics

There will be
televised
affirmations 
of my lifestyle choices

People’s perception 
of my race and class
won’t change much

My blood
will mostly likely 
stay inside my body

Anything I say
will likely not
be used against me
as long as I affirm
what is obvious
and accepted

Select
pleasant uncertainties
of the day
are likely to include

a mutterworried monologue
about the success or failure of
my bitterflying
attempts at 
allying my regulated smile
to an actual good mood and

probably pre-damned gimmereaching
in the name of the spiritchore
it is alleged I am
devoted to accomplishing

this wordcoining of
magnifications
for tiny cells of soulpoo
that render them
stardanglers for decorating
the select pleasant certainties
of a daily routine

I could not do the latter 
without having the former
I do not know how there are those
who do not
yet who can

A select unpleasant certainty
is that I don’t have to think about them
unless I deliberately decide to
The daily public affirmation of my being
assures me of that
again and again

but I select
caring
and more to the point

I choose to identify outside the certainties
stardangling
myself
in the source of soulpoo
praying to become
a certaintybomb

If this is rejected
I am
certain
it will be
a source of 
unnecessary
mutterworrying

although 
it will be no doubt
deathlaughable
to some observers

We live 
in a net
knotted from lies.

Occasionally,
as it’s dragged along,
it catches on truths.

We reach for them
through the web,
grasp them for a second,

watch them disappear,
our hands torn from them
by velocity.

But now
we know they’re there. 
And now

the net
seems weaker,
the knots looser,

the speed of the ride
tolerable, our tangle
less torture, more puzzle to be solved.