As you serenade me
with your inconsistencies,
railing against
your own fluid
nature, your failures
and poor choices,
ask yourself
as you wail: aren’t you 
at least half in love
with this song
you’re making
from your
contradictions?
It seems so obvious
that you’ve
written your life
as rock opera,
grand bombast
with one eye
upon the charts,
that I can’t fully believe you
when you wish out loud
for a simpler tune
to dance to. All 
you’ve ever done
is make this music
and call attention to 
this music and tour
endlessly behind this 
music and now you claim
it’s all been against
your own desires. It’s not
pity I feel exactly, although
I can imagine your pain
if it’s true; it’s not anger
or insult I’m feeling, as I love
you too much in my way
to fail entirely to see how
you do indeed believe this
on some level; it’s more 
a fatigue with the soundtrack
of the tale, a sense that
it’s been overplayed, a dawning
irritation or even boredom
with the sing-song chorus, the
repetitive verses,
and that confounded bridge 
like an earworm that keeps me
only half-aware of how badly
you need someone, anyone,
to listen.

The rock star for all time
stepped onto her stage 
just as it broke and disappeared
from underfoot. Falling
toward death she began
composing a final song
to tell at last her full tale
of how having talent and will
and luck got her here —  
it opened with grand chords,
shifted into slim-fingered picking
in the bridge, had of course
a singalong chorus, a fist in the air, 
cadence building to catharsis —
it had everything
and she wrote it in her head
in the two seconds before she died,
probably for the best as it sounded
like all her others — all that drama
and urgency as she fell translated
into her being there anyway,
sprawled in the ultimate cliche,
her last song utterly ordinary
and thankfully unheard — making it
a song just like the one
we all sing upon telling ourselves
for the last time:
this time, finally, I’ll get it right.

Seed to stem, stem to school, school
to work, work to bone, bone to hand, 

hand to mouth, paycheck 
to paycheck, worry to more worry,

desperate to despair, despair to prepare,
prepare to ruin, ruin to rash, rash to reckless, 

reckless to reckoning, reckoning to armament,
armament to carry, carry to itch, itch to shake, 

shaking guns drawn to sudden discharge,
steady guns drawn to clearly aimed executions,

bodies to fall, fall to faint, faint to disbelieve, 
disbelief to convictions, convictions to whisper campaigns, 

whispers to scream, scream to chant, chant to 
march, march to war, war to end all war, 

end to end and head to head laid in lines
border wall to wailing wall, silent sea to shining sea,

stem to stern, stern to solemn cry, cry to cradle,
cradle to cold and lasting grave.

Recently spoke
in mysterious tones to
a dog on the sidewalk,

not expecting a response,
and I got none; the point
of doing so was to exercise

a sense I had not used 
in years — the ability to sense
God in a dark brown inhuman

eye, to recall that divinity may be
a muted answer to a clumsy
question asked in an absurd way

to an impossible
respondent.  When there was
no answer at all, I did not despair

of God’s existence,
instead choosing
to believe I was rusty

and out of practice
and with more time
would get it right. 

I swear now to practice,
to ask every creature
and plant I see

similar cryptic questions,
and to then think
on whether any further lack 

of obvious answers
from them speaks more
about my inability to understand,

about an actual nonexistence
of God, or about how language
is so often just inadequate

for important things. I will figure it out
and in the meantime try
to simply enjoy

the silence,
fooling myself that
is all the answer I seek.

Israel dances a half-stumble 
to Jimmy’s Corner Store for cigarettes,
banging through the narrow doorway, 
all of his body-music colliding with 
door jambs and point of sale displays
until Jimmy 

(whose real name is unknown
but is certainly not Jimmy,
Jimmy having been
the original owner of the store,
Jimmy having been gone
for fifteen years at least)

shouts at him for raising a ruckus
and insists he buy something or get out,
and after he buys
his pack of Mustangs

Israel drum-bangs his way
back to the street,
Israel strum-dings his way
back to the street,
Israel smoke-songs his way
back to the street where Israel
is lord of the dance and his name
is exalted, though it isn’t his
real name either, not the name
he was born with in his homeland.
That name is long gone

into this city’s alleys 
and distances
that instead named him Israel 
for no reason other than he looked 
like another guy named Israel
who walked these streets before him,
who bought his cigarettes from original Jimmy,
who had his own halting music to dance to,
who is himself long forgotten
having been easily replaced
through the city’s greed
for colorful characters
to people its own delusion 
that it is in fact
a promised land.

So Israel dances out,
lights up,
butt-chunks
his path, spring-strings
himself along.
So Jimmy shakes his head,
watches him go,
turns back to the counter
and the sweeping up.
So I begin to forget that I
play my part too: the bemused
observer who makes it all possible
is necessary to the play; without me
to make it into a myth,
what would it be except
just another hard town
pretending
to be a home.

When my left hand
goes completely numb
I fall into my bed
and lie there between sleep
and pain,

aware of 
a third in the bed with us

whose name is Fear.
Is this a stroke,
is this the end
of something, or the beginning

of the end? Fear
chatters on and on. 
I lie there among
states of being,
tingling and fretting,
and it’s not hope

that gets me back up later
but the discomfort
of how crowded
that bed’s become,

how noisy it is in here.

I use this word
“moment” so often
that I may have
cheapened it, may have
obscured my reverence
for how many universes
may be found inside it

so let me correct this
by saying that “moment”
contains the entirety
of northern lights
and orgasm and stark
anger when faced with
a piercing incident of
hate and the gentleness
of a hand smoothing
a child’s hair and how breath
sucks away after a body blow.

Give me a moment
for “moment” being 
a snapped pole and
transformer explosion 
pocketed within a 
captured gaze and 
dawn through the window
of cheap motel after
a sleepless night of your
choice — despair, lovemaking,
anxiety, anticipation of 
family arrival after long absence,
the moment of loading the pistol,
settling out the pills, the moment
of sweeping them back in the bottle,
of putting the gun away.

A tender moment, a moment of
clarity, a momentary fear.

Give me
a moment, and then another,
and another. A gift of
presence in the present. Every moment
the last, and the first.

No better word
exists; the others all came to be
merely to hold onto that one.