Originally posted 5/30/2013.

Ask me once
what I want from life,
and I usually say
that what I want from life
is to be alive
until it’s more right
that I be dead,
at which point
I will be dead.  

But if you ask the question again
and ask it often enough, 
the answering of it
transforms me
through an obvious,
delighted hysteria
that anyone
would even care to ask,
and I fall into the consideration
of a delicious engagement
with the world — 
how the taste of it
may not at all be that
of ashes on my lips;

how like a first
post-virginal ecstatic sleep
each night could feel;
how like a morning
when a death sentence has been stayed
each awakening might feel.

Ask me, ask me, ask me what
I want from life — ask yourself,
I will ask you the same,
in fact let’s run through
our town asking everyone
what they want from life so many times
that there will be no choice for any of us 
but to laugh and love
and turn the streets into a banquet hall
and our stoops and yards into tables
where we can feast on the question,
reveling in the last meal we’ll ever have
before we take our last, gentle leave
of each other.

Originally posted 6/16/2013.

Upon waking I am an engine
for cobbling together random things
and hoping they are true.

My first thought is of
a landscape
with a football stadium.

My second is of
a scrap of paper bearing these words:
“your prime is seven.”
 
There may be,
suddenly somewhere,
an esoteric cabal

of crushingly huge men
chanting prime numbers.  
I hope so. 

So much depends
on it being true
after I write it.

My next thought
is that I ought
to sit up in bed and see how I feel.

My first action
is to sit up in bed 
and see how I feel.  

I’m still afraid of social media,
angry without cause,
desperately in love.  

It is morning,
I am the new carrier
of the disjointed day, and

my first action upon others
will be to write something.  
It will be angry or loving or based in fear — correction: 

it will be angry 
and loving 
and based in fear,

but it won’t be large. It will not assume
the form of a linebacker.
I’ll be gentle.

Count to seven,
push aside the covers.
The world needs me

and people like me
who are the sand grains
outside the oyster.

We are many, we have
pearl potential.
Some become random irritants

but most likely
we’ll become the bed upon which
beauty happens, mostly in spite of us,

even as the offense
thunders forward, bearing
the irreducible math of living.

Originally posted 6/29/2013.

On more than one occasion
I’ve nearly burst
from imagining that I
was self-sired
and never tired,
on an epic solo flight — 
a great aviator,
all alone.

Self-sired, never tired;
those are my best lies — 

as if I’ve ever been anything
but a lonely son, 
as if I’ve ever been
anything but exhausted. 

As if
the sleep I rise from
hasn’t always been robbed 
from the dark.

As if I
have ever been
formally cleared to land
on my own.