If this is the last poem I will ever write
I do not want to fall back on The List
(Apache, Italian, White-appearing, biracial, 
bipolar, old, fat, ex-punk, ex-husband, 
ex-corporate, ex, ex, ex…cetera) again,

hanging all I’ve become
on any or all of those hooks
at one time.  Not for the last poem.
They’re what I was and will soon no longer be;
to speak of them again seems to be

more cling than release. When you look back
from a poet’s last poem, you ought to be able to see
the bright peaks and sludge valleys of all the others
in the light from the last one; it ought to be hard
to look directly into a last poem.  It should burn.

If this is the last poem I will ever write
I should deny my categories.  As I could not even now,
this cannot be the last poem.  If this had been the last poem
I was destined to write, the poem would already be burning,
and I would have leaped or should now be preparing to leap through it.

What the reader should be doing with this one
is up to the reader.  Some would tell you a poet
should never write about writing a poem.  Those people will turn away
without realizing that this is not a poem about writing a poem.

What I wouldn’t give
for a ghost autobiographer
to do the living for me as well
long before the book is due
or even conceived

Let him do the inevitable tour
after publication
Let him choose the star
to play himself in the movie
about my life

The whole reason for writing
about your life is that something
about it was or is unique
and the longer I live
the more I realize

I’m exactly like everyone else
so having someone stunt the life itself
is at least novel enough to write about
(even if that defeats the purpose of the 
autobiographical label)

Let’s just skip the book idea
Who is willing to just live for me
and not write about it afterward?
Don’t make me come after you with a gag order
to stop you talking about my life

Don’t make me hunt you down
and kill myself as you or you as myself
I would hardly know where to put the bullet or
which way to point the gun
Maybe I’d just have you do it

because I’m bored with me enough
to not want to talk about me
any more in any forum but 
the eulogy — yeah, let
my ghost autobiographer handle that one

I’ll be elsewhere not hearing that
I’ll be in Saskatchewan
or somewhere no one else is
doing what the other guy said I’d be doing
which is nothing most of the time

whose voice outside
this early?  next door’s
ray, upstairs jeff, or someone
different?

not one i recognize
right away.  it’s spanish,
now i can tell.  it’s not very
energetic.  it’s a little slurred.
it’s tired.  it rises only to fall again
quickly.

i could say it sounds tender,
depressed, resigned:  no, it’s just uneven.
slows down, climbs in volume,
hesitates, fades, rushes, stalls.

what it sounds like to me is nothing
without knowing the words,
which i cannot focus on right now

as i have looked down
and for the first time
there as promised just two weeks ago
there’s more than a little blood on my sheet,
right where i have been lying.

i need to take someone
into immediate confidence, no matter
how much i may slur, no matter how hard it is to control
my voice.  i need someone to listen to me.
i need someone to listen to me right now,
this early, no matter how i ramble, stop, start,
talk out loud, hesitate, reach out, withdraw,
seek in vain for the company
of those who will care.

The madman finds himself
among fabrics.  He walks
with one hand out, running it over
corduroys, denims, twills;
running it over crushed velvets,
satins, silks.  He is about
to become a problem. 

He is almost ready to be a crisis
if he doesn’t leave here right this second.
He’s the kind who blows up from time to time
and all this touching of the changing textures
is setting his trigger.  It’s too much,

he tells himself.  It’s all too much 
and simpler is better and clothing is 
optional.  It’s all flammable and vain
and who still makes their own clothes?
God, I am a consumer not a producer;
God, I am a flame and not a torch.  

And so he kneels in the middle of the store
with a lighter, baffled by the choices before him:
should I light the tulle, the organdy, the glittering
green Spandex?   How I do rebel against all this
when I don’t know what to burn first?

The madman is not going to burn down the store
this time.  He’s tackled, driven to the ground.
brought down screaming at how it is all too much
and too much to feel and choices and blah, blah,
blah like it is every time we hear it from one of these
who find being American so damn hard.

The dangling done
by the body at the end of the rope
is tragic when encountered
unexpectedly, especially if
the dangler is familiar
and was a friend or loved one.
At that moment the dangling
seems sinister and the antic jerking
of feet becomes more battlefield spasm
than circus ring gag to most,

but someone always laughs.

We scorn the ones who laugh,
suspect their humanity 
and call them animal or worse.

Those who can recall
the totality of all the dangling feet
they’ve ever seen
from cartoon comic to vaudeville,
from gallows and noose
to bedsheet and balcony,
are scolded, shunned, or shouted down

just as we have always done with those
who think as well as feel;
as we have always done with those 
who see all sides at once;
as we have always done with those
who cannot narrow in enough
to meet our narrow expectations.

They leave us cold.  
They leave us unexpectedly fragile
and disinclined to laugh with them.
They see everything at once

and we only let them back in
when we need them.

You have been aching a long time,
a lifetime, an endless sonorous afternoon
in a city of bells.
All that calling of the faithful to faith 
has left you empty and longing for fill. 

For fear of your wanting,
you spill down into the reeds
of a river you hold inside 
and hide there — pull
the old movie trick, breathing
through the slender stem.
So long under the water,
breathing in near-panic
and praying no one will see you
and drag you away.

Late in the day after all the bells
are silent, you come soaked 
into town.  No one will look
at you — at least, not at your eyes;
they stare plenty at the trail behind you, though,

the drabble of leaves, the wet stains
on the road.  Strange: you’re still dripping
after two miles walk from the river.  
You realize you’re a sponge

and at last you are not just full
but overfull and all it took to get there
was nearly drowning and
abandoning your home.

Sorry for this;
sorry to stand hard behind it, against you:  no.
I’m keeping my chest closed to you.

No.  You flow your own if you need to
sail on something, be your own boat
on your own river.
No.  I’m not a red port.
No.  You have not cost yourself enough
to turn around and buy me whole.  No.

No.  No blood song for you here.
I love you and love you, you know
I love you, but no I won’t sing you
another blood song.  You want too many
from me.  You drain me drain me.

No. Stop mating as if you were dying tomorrow.
You look stout enough for another ten decades
to me.  You have all the necessary clothes
and shoes and such good cheeks and
kiss fattened lips.  I think
you’re a whole flood wating to happen so
till you open the perfect smile and get it messy
with a sloppy blood song of your own,

you ain’t going nowhere,
at least not
on current
you steal
from me.

You call this place
“gritty” or “post-industrial.”  

You call this place
“second rate.”

We call it “leverage.”  

As in,
“Growing up here 
gives you permanent
leverage
against pretense.”

We learn to make our faces
movie star grim just to leave the house,
just to keep you off balance,
just to hide our laughter,

and as a reward from the gods
whenever we proudly say the hometown name
a seagull in Boston fires from the sky
and ruins a Saab windshield,
a raw wool sweater in Northampton
catches on an antique nailhead,
and somewhere on the Cape
an overpriced lobster bites back.

Worcester, Springfield,
Lowell, Lawrence,
Holyoke, Pittsfield:  
feeling ya, babes.  
Feeling
the long seasons of drought
coming up wet for once.  
Feeling how long it’s been
since we started leaving home 
for the pretty places,

forgetting how good home feels,
and how handsome we are.

When we see how much makeup
they wear elsewhere,
it’s enough to make us empty a mill
and start a revolution inside.

If a crow’s awake
this late or this early,
it’s breaking news.

If there are crows out there
who have three AM opinions,
they are keeping them
to themselves.

If there are 
insomniac crows,
they probably die young.

They probably die 
young, die sick and silent,
their eyes hardening,
their bodies falling headlong from their perches —

but are killed only rarely
by the crow’s greatest enemy and predator,
the owl.

The anticipation
is killing
all of us — why don’t They
just
get it over with — why don’t They
just
do Something?  We all know
Something
is going to happen — we all know
the Score, the Drill,
the Story —
none of us were born Yesterday —
the ones born at night
weren’t born last night — 

Last night there was a moment
when we stopped waiting, when
we thought It was going to happen —

the scent of Wreckage in the air,  a whiff
of Rebuild potentially behind it, an undernote —
it was welcome relief, shouts of Welcome
in every throat which we did not let rise
to our lips
because (and again it happened)
They kept it from happening
Kept us from the object of desire 

Yes, I spoke of our desire for it

We will take a Disaster
to get to the Rebuild —
that is how we are now, addicted to
the Long Small Pain
of waiting
every day for 
The Great Chastisement
to begin

We say
Watch This Space
Something will happen
They have something cooking
We wish They would just
get it over with
Start the Flood
Bring the War
Unleash the Kraken
Set It Off
Open the Vials
Break The Seals

At least we’d have something
visible
to fight and when we died

we would have had a better name
to curse
than 

Them

You wake as a warbler
while I wait for my crow to call.

You turn from the argument next door
just as I bend in to hear.

You sing with the commercials
and I imagine all of Hollywood burning.

Don’t imagine I am immune
to the kittens and babies and laughter.

I understand how light works
because I am the host to darkness.

So stretch and yawn and rise
to meet the day with your own glow.

It is my job to speak for the dark
when its value is being ignored

by those who forget that morning
is a dependent function of night.