Originally posted on 12/8/2011.

Overheard words
on a Germantown street

a toothless woman
a rusty gun 

have kept me quivering
for two full days

perhaps because
I fear that I myself am growing

toothless 
and rusty

Whatever put them there
the words have clutched my ear 

I want them to leave
They are having a hell of time doing it

I don’t know where they should go
I can’t send them home

So struck was I by how they captured me
I never even looked up

to see who in Philadelphia
was using them

Never even looked up
to see who truly owned them

Originally posted 10/30/2009.

I think of what I won’t finish
and break a little.

It’s a form
of grief I’m feeling,
akin perhaps
to imagining clouds
meant to bring rain
that will never even form.

This work would have been
the nearly perfected explanation
of me;
it might have even
engendered
some kind of forgiveness:

yes, it is a form of grief I am feeling.

Someone will do it
because it will need doing.
Because they’ll know the need for it.

Because my name is unimportant to the doing
as long as it’s done.

This is also a form of relief
I am feeling.

Originally posted 5/9/2012.

A man approaches.
He has dirty arms.
I look closer.
No, his arms are inky-pictorial.
There are dirty pictures
but the arms themselves are clean.

He spreads his arms out.  
Wants to give me a hug maybe?
Big arms with dirty pictures and he wants a hug.
Wants a hug or wants to give one and get one back.
Oh, big armed men with art full of sex on their arms!

I have known another like this.
He also wanted hugs and arms full of body.
Wanted to rub his dirty pictures on me or anyone really.
Man, oh man,
he was a dirty man even after a shower.
Man had the grip of a roughneck.
Man, he had the arms of a bear.
Man, man, man —  
he had the appetites of a bear man,
bear art on the skin, the teeth of Ursa Major — 
constellation man.
Can’t be out at night without thinking of him.
He led me to the North Star without my looking up.
He had a tattoo of the Bear King tearing flesh.
That was the old man I knew with arms and dirty art.

I don’t know this new man.
He might be lovely.
He might prefer Ursa Minor.
He might be less of a bear.
Might not even know the Bear King.
Might not even know I knew the Bear King.

He was walking toward me just now.
He turned into the arms of another, must be a lover.
He’s not the same, even with dirty pictured arms.
I knew there were other Bear Kings out here.
I knew I had only to wait to see one again.
This one might not be one for me to savor

but there will be another.
There will be another.
There will be another.

Originally posted 2/7/2013.

My dance, my bad;
here’s my deep
bad dance. 

I gave a sorrow entrance,
loosed it on
the gap within, now there’s 
tantrum, keening, layabout,
fling about and cry. 

Going to victim this whole long day;

bury face in kudzu, funeral bouquet
for never ending grief show. End up one 
sad grinder.  End up damp with bad 
with bad still soaking in deep.

Still, got rocker hips, 
roller ass, jazz groin;
joy ends up somewhere
when pushed out of 
head and heart so
off to music while still in the hole
to give my bad, my deep 
some resistance.

Rhythm’s big mole digging in;
earth body now a quake 
spilling light, starts rubbling
the dark village.  I, frightened, shake; 

dance my dance, my bad, my deep.  
My gotta happen. My joy’s
on the far side of gotta happen.

Originally posted 5/11/2009.

No sir,
no.  I won’t
grow up — I’ll
grow down instead,

drawing from the earth
shadow nutrients, 
gritty water.
I will serve the Goddess of Dirt;

though I may present to you
a form that seems
symmetrical
and bright,

it springs
from the insistent tug
of holy underground.
I grow down.

I send up into the sun 
trunk and branches
to be seen, admired, climbed, 
used for shelter or shade, 

logged and laid out
in board feet 
or carved into
utilitarian shapes.

The tree is what you count as important —

but that’s not the truest part of me,
no, no sir.
That stump you leave behind?
That grip of roots holding on

long after you think
you’ve gotten
all of me
that matters?

Try grinding me out,
blowing me up, poisoning me. 
I will remain Hers.
I’ll be there, somewhere under

your feet,
well and deeply dug in,
still saying my 
“sir, no sir”

to you
with the ring
of sucker shoots
that will rise from me,

offering Her
a live crown 
for Her dark
and somber head.

Originally posted on 8/25/2010.

Enslaved to a horoscope:
some won’t drive far when Mercury is retrograde.

Engaged by humor:
offense slides off their numb tongues.

Enthralled by heritage:
no credit ever given to others.

Eviscerated by holy writ:
scourging unbelievers while in prayer.

Enlisted by history:
they reap and pile the designated scapegoats.

Every time it happens
we call it inevitable, divine will

or the stars setting wheels to rolling,
when in fact it comes down to

whatever excuse we allow to rule us
without forethought,

and from horoscope to Holocaust
is not all that far to travel.

Originally posted 2/10/2012.

The whisky drinker says,
“I suck the tongue of truth
in every glass.”

The wine expert says,
“This sweet burning
puts my eye on Heaven.”

The pothead at silent devotion
sits on his hands while praying,
grinning at the answers.

Whatever we stone ourselves with
revives in us the kick
we last used in the womb.

We smoke or sip as deliberately
as we would swing a leg,
trusting in that illusion

that in here, we’re utterly safe
even as we fight toward 
what might be out there,

certain that
although we have never seen it,
it’s what we are meant for.

Originally posted 9/28/2009; original title, “Remembering What Four Stones Said.”

There in the stream 
the first: 
white as fish belly
and small, so small.
It said the Way
has no sense to it, but
leads forward in any case.

The second:
black, seamed as wood
long submerged,
slick as a suspect.  It said that
if you could risk believing
that it offered solid footing,
you would find yourself
halfway there.

The third:
rusty skinned, top high and dry
above the current, solitary and distant.
It mumbled a secret worth hearing,
perhaps only minimally intelligible,
but still invariable and true.

The fourth
lay below the surface.
It was no more than a shadow
holding a threat of tumbling
and of immersion.
It urged and coaxed:
venture, it said;
leap, it said;
it said come now,
steady as you go.

That far bank was high and green.
There was sun
on the high meadow,
to be followed by
moon on the high meadow.
You fell in love with it at once
from this side of the stream:
it seemed a perfect place for dancing
with wet feet, wet shoes, 
and wet knees
still knocking with joy  
from the journey,

and so it was.

Originally posted 1/19/2013.

I will soon read Borges again.
When I do I will wear dark clothes and glasses,
eat pork on rough bread,
smoke an unending series
of bowls of cheap tobacco from a cheap pipe.

I will soon re-read Joyce 
but only in the spring and only upon
completion of the works of Borges.  
I shall wear a cloak, if I can locate
a store that sells cloaks.  A cloak and

a whiskeyflask cane.  A cloak and
thick soled shoes and a whiskeyflask
cane.  Yes.  I will resume reading
Borges, then Joyce.  And after that,
Djuna Barnes; then, Wallace Stevens.

For Barnes and Stevens I will change
to a suit of seersucker, and I will not iron it
ever, even the shirt, even the hems; I will feed
on rumcakes and seedcakes and cupcakes
in public cafes, with my books tucked under my chair.

I will be done with reading
Borges and Joyce and Barnes and Stevens
soon enough. Then I will buy a home
and lie around naked and not read anything
I don’t want to read.  

All those trappings I affected!
I must have looked ridiculous. What the hell
was all that about? I will cleanse by dressing in sweats 
and reading John Grisham in French 
while downing supermarket croissants till I pop.

I won’t care who sees
my wide ass in the library
when I am checking out books on getting ahead in real estate,
and books on Stephen King and Patricia Cornwell:
not their works, mind you;

books about their clothing and diet.  
Clothes, it is said,
make the man,
you are what you eat, and maybe
you are what you read.  

Well, I don’t want to be anything anymore.
Want to be dumb, anonymous, devoid
of a reading list or its worsening symptoms. 
Just gimme a burger, a roll in the hay, a dead sleep
on a dirty mattress. An easy way to vanish.

Originally posted 5/27/2012.

Three look over the side of their
soon to be foundered boat,
staring out at the storm, down at the sea:

what’s coming up
from the dark water —
corpse, crab, blue pearl?

The teacher says,  
I spy only the blue pearl,
lustrous mystery rising. 

The practical one
seizes on how the crab, once seized,
seizes back — seizes on deniable pain.

The undertaker says,
my concern is the corpse.
Wash it clean. Swathe it. Sink it.

Which is it?
Maybe there’s nothing
down there 

threatening or promising anything,
just memory
playing with shadow,

trying to claim its place
before the storm
begins to work at drowning.