Sickness poverty
White whining
New American routine:
WHEEEEEEE
Enjoy the slide

In the stop at the bottom
Clarity
You’re never happy unless
some parent’s jiggling house keys
over your face

Flat on your back:
WHEEEEEEEE
Can you feel 
Earth rotating

Someone’s broken into old coffins
Stolen the skulls
Put em up on a pedestal on the Internet
Someone says:
WHEEEEEEEE
Worship here or don’t
Techno-heathen is the new black

This is
A test of the emergency broadcast system
Every time we hear the signal we say:
WHEEEEEEEE
This time it’s for real

We’re pretty sure we know
what’s what
We’re pretty sure what’s up
We’re pretty
Sure
We’re up but we’re unsteady:
WHEEEEEEEE

At bat in the fields of the mock-pocalypse
and every day’s a sinker we can’t hit

at night the dark dribbles in
as does hourglass sand
piling slowly up until all at once
the house is full of it

that’s a lot of darkness
and now I have to wait until the AM
to try and live

turn a switch and chase it
you say

but that’s not how it works
around here
where there’s always a stray grain or two
left to stain my daylight
long after sunrise 

Come here, Isaac,
and fetch a knife before you come.
There’s a thread I need to cut
from my dragging hem.

Maybe it leads to a seam
and my clothing will fall from me
once it’s gone; I don’t know.
Perhaps nothing will happen, 

perhaps I’ll end up
naked and ashamed
before all if I act;
I can’t see that far ahead.

I only know it bothers me
to see it hanging there.
Almost would say it’s calling me
to take it from my view.

Almost I’d say
there’s a sadness in its voice.
A melancholy
that compels like none I’ve ever heard.

I never heard a thread speak before.
That means I have to listen. Isaac,
fetch the knife.  We’ll go far away
and I’ll do the deed in private

with only you to watch me
and you can cover me after
if I am left exposed. This is what
a son and father do, Isaac;

the father acts as he believes is right,
the son then, usually, moves on.
Fetch the knife, and let us go.
There’s a thread that binds me,

irks me, keeps me from my life,
and I need to cut it free.  It demands
that I cut it free.  What else is there to do,
Isaac?  What can we do but do it?

Is there
anything here
that’s my size?
I fit into
nothing — 
too tight to most,
too loose to a very few.
Nothing feels right —
damn country with its
image role models.
I’m supposed to be
beautiful.  The offered styles
of crazy don’t contain me
and the preferred fashion
of talented is too large.
I swim in it. Almost drown in it,
constricted by the crazy
so I can’t move. I’m getting to 
prefer naked, though no one
else likes it.  But that’s me
being myself –what are we
thinking here when that
is considered past season
ugly?

Brinksmanship
is routinely defined
as pushing
to the edge of disaster
in search of
advantage

Today is an exception

Today it’s 
the inexplicable blooming
of this rose
after the first hard frost

and 
the sun bothering
to illuminate
that rose
now that the last leaves
that had sheltered the bush
have finally fallen away

i was the war in the hole at the center of their peace.
I was ape moving into evolution, ten rungs up and climbing,
and no one would acknowledge me there all fancy
in my slick pelt and tool-imminent hands,
so I started howling and it was good rain
on a parched desert, but they wanted the dam
more than the flood and they jeered me.
They jeered me and seized me and dressed me
in the horns prescribed by tradition
and laid guts of homicides and suicides across my back
then drove me into the wild outlands
where I scrape and crawl and try to shed the regalia
of their hand me down shame, and they try to forget me
and it looks like they’ve won,

but they’ve still got the hole at their center,

and I’m snickering
because out here
I’ve learned
to chip stone into knives
and to speak.

All we want:

hair on our arms
to stand up on end
often

a smile that splits the face
immediately after

calm after that
peace and secure
warmth spreading

belly and chest
swelling with a spontaneous
song
sometimes an anthem
sometimes a hum bent
toward one particular ear

unshakeable faith
that if this is the last time
any of this will ever happen
it will only be because
this is the moment
of our last breath

Starved plants visible
in the windows
of Hilda’s house.

Hilda’s in
assisted living now.
It was the neghborhood roaming

in her thin housedress
that brought her family at last
into town from the suburbs.

They’ve moved her closer to them.
They sold her car.  Other cars
I’ve never seen before

are over there all the time.
A lot of stuff’s been carried out
and stashed in a silver van

or loaded into the big
silver pickup.  They come
and pack up and leave.

The leaf stems on her plants
look like threads now.
The stalks are drying; I’ll bet

they’re stiff and would break
if anyone touched them.  No one
seems to have touched them

for a long time.  That seems
a little evil in the middle
of so much urgent care.   

I used to shovel Hilda out
in the winter.  Each of us
took our turn at that.

But now there’s no car
to dig for, no Hilda here
to worry about.  

It’s going to be
a different winter
around here. 

Set your stance,
know what your moral is,
and go.

Stay linear.  
Stay arrow-
tuned into target.
Announce
your target.  Announce that you’re
setting the arrow to string.
Announce that the string is
made just for this and any music made
by the humming string
is incidental to the shot on target.
Tell the gallery that the bow is tool only
and its arch is not beautiful on its own.

Fire directly on the target, flat trajectory,
do not raise the point higher than is necessary
to strike the bull’s eye.  
Do not cry 
for the bull, suddenly blinded  — note only 
that the target’s been hit.  Make this 
whole theater last a set while —
sit back, wait for the scores,

and while you’re waiting marvel
at the ones who hit the target
by pointing the arrow left, right,
up, or down true vertical, letting it fly and then
watching as the music of the bow and string
sing the point curving home
to incidentally return sight
to the wounded bull.

Say,
I could never do that.

Say, 
I am doing that already.

Say,
I want to learn that music.

A movie we’ve been watching gets up,
leaves the theater,
goes down the street for a smoke.

A building the approximate size of the screen
bursts and falls in, smolders for a while
as the movie passes by.

Once it’s gone
the building reconstitutes a few inches farther East
than it had been before.

All the deaths that resulted are voided,
but the people don’t recognize each other now,
even the ones who have worked together for many years.

Meanwhile, back at the theater,
we have barely noticed that the movie has gone.
We’ve been too busy thinking of our lives outside.

When we come out, the movie survivors
point at us, say we’re a little different.
They say we’re a few inches farther West than before

but at least they recognize us.
As for themselves, they don’t know that they’ve changed,
treat each other coldly, aren’t saying much.

The movie, by now, is on a bus for the next state
where it will perpetrate its flight and its magic on others.
We’ll issue an arrest warrant for it but it will elude capture.

It will show up on our late night television screens
and we’ll point and say, “here’s the bastard vision
that has caused all the trouble,” but no one will move

on apprehension because we have come to recognize
how much we need it and its messy path.
We wouldn’t dream of stopping it — can’t dream at all, in fact.

Whatever that is shining behind you

Whatever that Maker of Shadows resembles

Whatever the nature of your Shadow

Whatever you do with the Shadow
Whatever your fear of it
Whatever the bead of sweat on your back tells you to feel

Whatever your holy books tells you
Whatever any God-keeper says you should do for penance
Whatever the fetish you keep in your pocket prescribes
Wherever the trees tell you walk to avoid your Shadow

Don’t listen

Turn and embrace that slippery wraith and listen to the whispered name you were born with
The one that no one wants you to know
The one that holds your power
The one that the rest of this forward lurching world seems to have forgotten

The one that grounds you

The one that explains why darkness trails you even in the strongest light
The one that makes the light visible at all

You!

Tower of smart dirt,
intelligent water, 
column of excited minerals
drawn up into a storm
of atoms chattering of prophecy
and the pure light
hidden in crevices:

all you want to talk about
is money and power
and the end of the world?
Get serious.

This world is not going to end.
Our species may shuffle off at some point,
perhaps soon; other species will fall with us,
there will be suffering, it’s all a big mess,

but your atoms are going to keep talking
and in a thousand years
come upon better truth
than you ever conceived…
or the same truth you won’t acknowledge now:

we’re an extension of
the pure thought of stones,
as ruled by infinite gods as they are.
Nothing’s going to stop them
from thinking, no matter how hard
we deny.

You!
Get serious.
Ease suffering, redistribute wealth,
play fair, establish guidelines,
make this a comfortable grave indeed,

but do it because it is the call of joy
to do this,
not because you will create
anything lasting
by doing so.