In the lost year of seventeen
I had blood on my hands
and a heaving song of drugs inside
but I was able to do anything
as I planned to die that soon.

In the lost year of twenty-one
I had more blood on my hands
and dead sex more than live love
so anything was possible because
this was how I was going away.

In the lost years between twenty-four
and forty-four I picked off all the blood
and washed it into the river. I had no itemized
list of seductions.  I lived as if I was
a matter of fact and did not dream on weekdays.

In this lost year, now, at fifty-two
I sing with longing to feel the blood on my hands again,
the rage in sex and passion and God yes the drugged life.
Give me back the sense that I can either create my world
or destroy it.  Help me not care about which I choose as long as I do choose.

An acoustic guitar
you can’t modify much

without destroying it.
Electric guitar though:

man, you can tear that puppy
to pieces and build it up again so new

that leaving that original name on the headstock
seems foolish, but we leave it there and we say

that’s my Fender, my Gibson.  
That’s why

the electric guitar is so damn
American —

no matter how it’s been messed with
somehow it still sounds like bombs and pie,

while an acoustic guitar always sounds like itself,
like it has no country but the one whose hands are on it

right now.  Even if it’s a country of one,
an island nation unto itself,

though of course this is only my opinion,
though of course you have a right to your own,

though of course you can choose your instrument
and play it any way you want to make your point

and we wish you would, go ahead,
the whole world, the entire family of nations, is waiting.

I watched an intellectual
state an opinion with undue confidence
and heard the snikclick of a switchblade
as he waited for response

and heard it again as he responded
to a critique of said fact — snikclick — 
and I thought of tweed and thought of
black leather and thought of textbooks

bound in tweed and black leather — of
entire libraries of tweed and black leather
and switchblades being grafted onto tongues
and how gangs of philosophers might look on Harleys

and thought of smart, picked on kids
getting their gang on with words and ideas
that have no value for them
except when they sound like “snikclick”

All priests
will tell you one thing
and forget to tell you another,
but did you expect them
to do otherwise?  
They are politicians
as much as they are
holy men and women
so trust them as far as you trust
any other human and know 
they will do what’s right for them
and say it’s right from God
because all of us do that.

If you want knowledge
you can trust
don’t listen to a human:  
get thee to an ocean or desert
or the mountains, in fact go
where high desert and mountains
drop into the ocean,
go anywhere like that
and sit near the shore for a week
or a few years.  You’ll get it,
everything you need.  

I would tell you 
to keep it to yourself and not risk
the priesthood that tends to follow,
but it tends to follow.  You will end up
lying about it to others,
telling yourself it’s for their own good.