Nine years old
I wrote something
Teachers liked it
I got noticed
I was doomed
I instantly knew it
I kept at it
Was picked on for it
Was applauded for it
But soon it became
Its own reward
It was how I breathed
That was enough

I found my doom
Another voice
And offstage sustenance
Onstage became pure and creamy junk

Still doomed

Someone loved me
Someone real loved me
Someone real paid me a bag of pennies

Now middle aged
Still doomed to this
Still amazed at how often it’s enough
Though too often because
I have to eat
I have to lay my head somewhere
I have to be warm and able to breathe
I have to have an arm around me as I sleep
I have to set it aside

I kept going
Long after I should have
Should have stopped
Should have kicked the junk
Should have died and taken
The acclaim accorded to a dead artist
But
I am what I am
Not happy exactly
Wholeness isn’t always nirvana
But doing something else and
Being something else
Aren’t my doom
And doomed
is who I am
Is why you are reading this
Piece of apparently necessary
Crap

A man I know
calls his preferred
prospective partners
“chicklettes.”
Because they’re young,
young and sweet,
he says.
Because of their fragile shells,
he says.
Because he spits them out
when the flavor’s gone,
he says.

This other man I know
has jokes up the wazoo
about women, about
“how they are.”
Because that’s just
letting off steam,
he says.
Because of the need for a break
in the battle between us,
he says.
Because it’s better than shooting them,
he says —

and laughs.

This other man I know
likes to stick his elbow into me
whenever he pretends he’s down
with what women say where we work.
Because they think I mean it,
he says.
Because as men we know the score,
he says.
Because, anyway, where were we before they talked?
he says.

Other men I know
lose track
of bedmate headcount.
Other men
keep track,
notch something soft
to brag about.
Other men I know
have heard about “no”
but they say it’s just a lock
to be picked apart.
Other men
don’t care much for locks,
bust down the door,
swear they heard a cry for help in there.

I know many other men
who I’d have sworn
are none of these,
but too often I learn
of one or more who are
not the other men
I thought they were
and now when I say

this other man I know
or
these other men I know

I stop and wonder
if men are in fact knowable,

why I seem to know so many
of these men,

why these other men
seem so comfortable with me.

about to author
a fatality and offer
my last words

I recall
how less than a hundred
feet away

is a backyard giant oak
so large and old it has sucked in
an entire chainlink fence

its roots protrude
like knees from our bad soil
it threatens to fall

in every halfway
scary storm but still
it survives

here I am about to say
“I’m lost” and cut
my wrists or throat

over something as petty
as despair and lack of hope
which are of course not real

that tree has beaten
every obstacle
and grown immense doing so

I remember my chainsaw
is gassed and good
to go and soon

I’m clearing that tree
that ancient smirking rebuke of an oak
not caring what neighbors think

this is why
some empires happen
this is why we scorch and rebuild

something catches our attention
that counsels patience and acceptance
that tells us not to panic

and we say
not now tree
I can’t right now

so you don’t get to be here
you don’t get to be here thriving
you smug bastard

Past midnight
I awaken: the daily mask
that I left on the nightstand’s
gone —

I can hear one of my fictional characters
typing somewhere;
I’ll bet he
has it on.

He is creating
a fictional character.
I can tell by the tempo —
he’s killing those keys.

When he’s done
I will take my mask back.
I’ll put it on, although as always
I’ll struggle to breathe.

It’s hard to understand
how someone I made up
handles my day-face so well
he can make up another:

my myth
is taking over
my life, as if I were being kept
by my own lie of a brother.

He’s better at being me
than I thought.
I built him well, it seems,
and he’s caught my spark

for creating.  I think I’ll roll over
and maybe skip living tomorrow.
Let the two of them handle it.  
I think I like it better here — 

breathing calmly, listening to myself in the dark.

The animals are off the grid.  Think
about it: no jobs, so no need to keep time.
What’s the point to having a Monday
or even a Tuesday if you’re an animal?
Friday?  Pointless.  There are no weekends,
people, and no Sabbath!  It’s intolerable.

I propose that we give the animals jobs.
These will of course have to be tedious —
how else to depress a deer or make a clockwatcher
out of an owl?  Soon enough, they’ll develop
calendars and then start crossing off
the days to vacation.

Of course, we could just kill them.  Nothing
gives you a reason to put a structure on time
like your own death.  “It happened on a Tuesday.”
This assumes, of course, that there is an afterlife.
An aferlife for animals.  Will deer get their own, and owls
get another?  Will they be close to our own?

The new world is coming: forest cubicles.
Rows of antlers visible, bent to their tasks.
Owls calculating in the trees; now and then,
a shot will ring out and a corpse shall be dragged away.
This will show them what Humpday means!
No more slacking, no living in the now,
and of course, they’ll line up
to get a good pew on Sundays
from which to worship a benevolent God.

I know less than I used to —
or more to the point
I newly distrust what I have known;

discard certainties, ask more
questions, live more with no answers
to old questions.  Fire-feeding,
all the time, using past platitudes
for fuel.

What little I still trust
doesn’t glow or shine
as much as burn low,
those slow burnished embers
a dull rose under fluffed ash.

One can keep warm a long time
by a heat as small as that.

Dismayed daily
by our capacity for violence,
how a desire for it seems
never to fade entirely
from our nature.

But it’s unreasonable
to expect that the children
of swords
will mature into ploughshares
on their own.

They are swords
as we are swords —
built to cut, built to spear
and shed, built to last
and to itch at all times for war.

There isn’t a moral here,
or at least
there’s no intended moral,
certainly nothing you could hang
a blacksmith’s hammer on.

You should probably just move along.
Hold your children tightly to you
and try to pretend they don’t feel like hilts
when you use them
in your war with Death.

Nothing to be done,
except it be done for you.

No world to save,
except it be saved for you.

The injustice you decry?
Only as what may be done to you.

The famine you wish away?
Only as it feels empty inside you.

What you love, what you hate,
what you protest — only what involves you.

How in particular you love or hate
or dismiss God?  Based only in what’s seen by you.

Is your pang for tuna-slain dolphins
not for how their absence will sadden you?

Is your scream for loss of polar ice
not just a cold reflection on how such loss cripples you?

Every day a track to you, every night a rail to you,
every breath a sweet cloud raining all for the growth of you.

I know you.  I know you, though I’ve not met you.
I know you and your infinite regard for you.

In the larger scheme of all there is and all the pain there is
there are worse things than to be taken up as a cause by you;

there are worse things,than being taken by you.
One could wake up one day and find oneself you,

empty of cause or idea except as offered to you
by all those waiting to see which will swallow you.

Stagger
from bed

into dim kitchen
before first light: there,

voice of steady rain
through open window.

“Steady there, ambition;
settle, urgency. No need

for haste.  No need
to water a garden, to

run, to do anything.
Turn around.  I will give you

a good day later.  For now,
sleep again, just a little.”

I do not make a practice
of arguing with rain; instead,

I sing “Hallelujah” modestly,
mostly mouthing it as I comply,

trusting that promise of
a good day later.  Rain’s always

made that promise,
always followed through.

As insidious as the notion
that the universe is pulling for us
can be — always putting slippery faith

into visions of intervention
slipping under doors, bleeding through cracks
to fill desperate holes within —

so too is the evil of believing
that it never pulls for us at all.
Choosing to forget we’re part of it

with a part in it that might require
our continued presence
is a denial and a mistake.

I don’t need personalized divinity
to explain it, or an Almighty God
to define it.

All I need: the notion
of living as a purpose in itself —
my choices as my choices, but not detached

from all others.  I don’t know
what to call it.  No one really knows.
We simply practice like mad for what it might be.

missed most mornings
in the rush to start the day

the gray trail behind me
back to the farthest point
I ever was from here

gray figures
beside the trail

gray figures
in the woods
on the horizon

gray figures that beckoned me
to continue on the trail

encouragement
so indistinct and
necessary

so cloaked now in routine’s amnesia
but visibly present

on the good mornings
I see one or more in the periphery
and stop wherever I am

to nod and acknowledge gently
swiftly so as not to slow my progress

before returning to the trail with
increased confidence
for today at the very least