I apologize
for not at least offering
a temporary embrace
to all that passed my way.

I could not fit
all of you into my arms,
turned away often 
to hide my shame
at failing,
left you wondering,
left you thinking me
mean and small — 
forgive me.  

Forgive me
as I fail
again and again —
until it becomes tedious, 
until it 
becomes
tedious. 
Until it becomes

obvious.

Behold, there are 
some prodigies
who wield 
the right spacing and 
typography
like swords, 
eschew
or explode cliches
like proper little 
trick hounds, 
wax street
or academy prolific
as lice
or lemmings,

and not a one of them
moves anyone, in fact
not a one of them
could move a fart
out of an overstuffed gut
at a chili cookoff,
reminding us

that virtuosity
left out in the sun
on reckless display 
without feeding
the greater good
bleaches, like 
dog shit,
to the purest
matchless
white.

I’m down
to my last hundred bucks
waiting for 
a late paycheck
and thinking of Sal Paradise
who (disguised as
Jack Kerouac) used to
wire back east from Denver
for twenty dollars
and consider it
enough money with which
to see the country
traveling across the continent
screwing women over
romanticizing the hustle
I will grant you
it was the 1940s
Money and hustle went farther
back then
but now I won’t even go
to the grocery store 
with only a hundred bucks
I sit at home 
fuming and sobbing
counting pennies
trying to do right by 
the woman I love
The only thing I share with Sal
and his friends 
is the whole suffer for art thing
They claimed more joy and less care
than I do
the feckless bastards
I don’t envy them
They mostly all died
drunks or fossils
They were fire sale artists when alive
EVERYTHING MUST GO
GO GO GO
I’m just the opposite
I wanna hang on to something
but a hundred bucks isn’t enough
in 2014
to buy much that will last
Anyway if poverty
kills so much around me
that I have to hit the road
at some point
I won’t last long
In 2014
they just shoot
the mad ones

1.
Cleaning out the apartment
of a woman
who had disappeared.

Ivy around the bedroom window frame
may once have been meant
to evoke the woodland
for a homesick
“country gal”
in the city,

but that dust caked
plastic ivy around the frame,
long ignored fake ivy
tacked to the grimy window frame
with its broken blind, its cobwebs,
its setting among
clothing strewn
in disarray, 

suggested instead
an archway
into an otherness
long ago entered
by someone from this side
who has yet to return,
is overdue
to come back through.

2.
Cutting foam rubber
with bandsaws
into pillow shapes.

If the noise somehow
can be absorbed by the foam
and enter all those
sleepyheads,

if people
end up in nightmares
about a ribbon of steel
whining through them,

all the boredom
of this job might be
worth it.

You might call that cruel,
but only if
you’ve never done anything
like this.

3.
Industrial
corn chip maker,
or at least
the one who mixes
the batter.

Hair net, beard net,
gloves, safety glasses,
steel toed shoes, smock —

I entered the factory
on my first day
tricked out for
radioactivity
or
The Ark Of The Covenant 

only to find the hazard
was in knowing evermore
that the corn chip powder
I poured
one thirty five pound bag
at a time
into the hot tub size mixer
became neon green
when water hit it.

It cannot not be unlearned
once known.  It cannot be
unseen. I have not had
a corn chip since then,
and thus am denied
part of my national birthright —
something to eat at parties,
something to eat
from vending machines,
something eaten in the car
to stave off hunger
for the last fifty miles
of any given journey.

4.
Surveillance
of a deadbeat renter.

Hours in the DMV waiting
for him to renew
a license I’d learned was expiring
paid off.

He’d tried to vanish,
but I found him,
tailed him
home.

The house
was covered in ivy,
and for a moment, a wild
moment, 

I thought I might solve
three mysteries
at once,
if you could count

my muddle of a life
to that point as one —
but no dice.
He lived alone.

I made a note
of the new address,
called it in,
and quit.

5.
I’ve truly had no job odder
than my current occupation

which insists upon
incessant reporting
of connections and meaning
where none are visible;

demands that details
be magnified
until they are totemic;

tastes, sometimes,
of swift steel severing
tangled false ivy;

of hunger tainting long hours
of inert observation;

of ghost salt, poison corn,
and the tears of the diisappeared.