A full grown gryphon
has come out of the woods
near your apartment complex
and now perches upon your car,
staring at you as you prepare
to walk to your spot and leave 
for work.  This is going to be 
a problem, obviously — 
how to explain this
to your boss, how to explain this 
on the clearly soon to be necessary
insurance claim, how to explain 
the fierce power of the real world
to this beast in such a way 
that he slinks,
embarrassed, 
back into fantasy. Fortunately,
you were born and bred
American, thus having had long experience
with grand and august mythology 
bumping against dirty facts,
so you square up your shoulders,
step to the gryphon,
and get it done.

Radio preacher, how you do talk —

lips looser than Lucifer’s,
forever spitting hate
from a so-called Christian face.

Did your God forget
to put a muzzle on your judgment
when He laid His manly paw
upon you to make you,
or are you insisting 
He was perfect at the craft
and this is — YOU are– 
are as good as it can get?
Are you really your God’s
best marketer, making claims
for your own humility
before Him
even as you
aggrandize yourself 
and scrape
another layer of patience
off of me?

Radio preacher, get you gone — 

you sticky fingered priest,  
you knife tongue pastor,
you pope of the nighttime rope,
you saint of the burning necklace,
you deacon of past prejudice and future petrified heart,
you congregant in the church of bending love
into daggers and handcuffs,
you bishop of murder under the high altar:

your game is
looser than Lucifer,
who at least
did not hide his dark hatreds
behind a Cross,
who at least
owned his pride
at not being in the slightest way
anything like God.

Once more
down the old tracks
we go speeding into the dark,
a massive weight
carrying us along,
a rumble in our guts
from the journey.

Once more
charging into the dark
with our heads down and
no sense of where
we might end up, clatter
of steel drowning out any talk
of getting off before it 
crashes. 

Once more
aimed into the dark — 
most deliberately, most directly,
most certainly aimed 
at a moment where we will look up
and say we are utterly lost,
starving, with no time left
to turn around
and head back up the track
toward what we used to call
home.

Not feeling much of anything;
my face hovers, detached,
no light from within it.

If I were to float back up — get up there again
where the sun shines hot and then
track with it around the planet,

I would surely shine. It wouldn’t matter
that it was not my own light. I recall 
the heat, remember what it was like.

Instead, I’m bobbing along down here
with a seared, dimmed face, loosed
from my moorings, trying to illuminate

this thick night with all I have,
though I can’t feel what good it will do.
Not feeling much of anything, in fact, 

beside fear of the dark.

Sometimes I wish
we lived in the woods and 
things were quieter and nominally 
safer; but then

Next Door Up The Hill Lourdes
brings over unexpected
baked fish, rice and beans
in a reused cold-cut container,

asks to borrow ten dollars
till Tuesday. It’s a pretty good deal
as she always pays up on time
and the food, fish or chicken or 

steak tips well seasoned and
always with rice and beans,
is always at least good
and sometimes far better. 

It’s not anything more 
than a city neighborhood
— rarely too quiet,
sometimes too loud, but overall

not terrible — a little too tightly packed perhaps; 
in winter we shovel our own driveways before helping
each other, but we do help each other;
we don’t call the cops, handle our own shit — 

barely look up anymore
when I do see them, guns drawn, arguing 
over who covers the back and who 
covers the front when they go in

across the street and come out 
disgusted, shooting me
nothing but a dirty look when I smile and wave
as they drive off empty handed again — 

maybe next time, guys, maybe next time,
though the person they seek moved away 
months ago and we don’t know where he is,
really, not a clue — 

it’s a city neighborhood, the low end of town
hanging on the side of a hill that’s never plowed in winter,
a place where we plant backyard gardens
in one small patch of sun — we make do, we get by, we make it work.

Right now for instance,
I’m sitting outside enjoying this baked fish
as Next Door Up The Hill Lourdes sways,
a little tipsy, up the street to buy

more sweet red wine and then home to her TV before bed. 
I think she watches game shows, the volume turned way, way up.
From my steps I can hear the applause, I can hear the shrieks
of someone, somewhere else, winning.

Once, I walked around on fire.
Left no bridges for miles behind me.

Someone said
try writing it out,
it’s a good
healer, a good quencher,
you’ll be
at peace.

Safer now,
older now,
I sit up late
and spill into 
paper and ink 
the fuel that once
would have been held
under pressure
within.

The ink
never smolders,
the pen
never scratches out a spark,
the paper
never ignites.

Where did my fire go?

Standing on a high old bridge
in the dark, 
in a place I’ve stood before,
looking down into the white water,
feeling nothing.

Can you tell me why this is better
than burning?

When I end
I hope you, my friends,
will stop a second
and see my closed eyes
for what they are on that day — 

precious stones returned to their beds
under the thin cover of my eyelids
in order to keep the earth
in balance.  

I hope
no one weeps at not ever 
seeing them again — living
requires us to move on
from each moment regardless
of its importance — 

but if they must weep,
let it be the right kind of mourning,
the kind that doesn’t bog us dead down, 
leaving us soggy in the ground
before we get even a day to understand
where we are. 

Don’t weep.  Let me be;
do the right thing, 
at least at first.

Don’t wonder aloud, for my sake,
about what happened
or how I finally slipped aside
after that last unbearable moment
of storm —

enough.  
Enough.  

Let me pass and don’t worry
about what it means. When I end
it shouldn’t be a recipe for self-annihilation.

Grief, acceptance;  the push and pull
of a shoving match between brothers.
It’s barely news at this point 
to say it too will pass. When I end,
when you are grieving for me,
angry with me, sad for me and for yourself,

remember that this, too, shall pass.

dear me, mr brown,
how is it that 
you are that stupid —

this game of “being”
you thought you’d win, somehow? nope.
you’re feeling the big nope now,
of course — 

you won nothing.  
you win nothing. no one does; 
that’s the beauty of it, but

somewhere in your reptile brain
you bought what they sell about changing 
the world through poems — no.

it was never supposed to be about anything 
but good work. never supposed to be anything 
but art valuable for being itself — 

if any change was to occur
as a result it would be
in the poet — in you.

you knew this years ago
but have pretended to forget. faking for survival,
you forged God’s signature on a few poems
and called them “the truth as delivered –” 

please. dear me, mr brown — 
have you read your poems? 
have you changed at all 
by reading them, by writing them?
has anyone or anything? 

dear me, mr brown,
admit it —
you’re one of the bad guys.
always have been.
admit it —
you’re one of the sinners
spitting on the sand
outside the church, and though
you’d love to go in and feel the love
there’s a joy in spitting on the earth
before the church you can’t shake —

you know they won’t let you back in — 

you’re feeling that big nope now,
mr brown, dear me;

that game of being
you thought you’d win,
the one where everything worked out
and there was a horizon and you
could see it and knew one day you’d learn
to ride
and you would ride into it flinging 
magnificent words, a Magnificat, a 
Hallelujah chorus on the wind —

dear me, mr brown,
you stupid glory hound.
face it: your work
was a modest ripple at best,
and now what?

what does a dead man do now
when he doesn’t believe in the horizon
and can’t help but smell the decay 
and knows it for his own
and his hands are rotting off 
and his lungs can’t push a breath 
and he’s the big nope himself — 

dear me, mr brown,
you’re the big nope,
the dead poet
with no society to hold you.

no one at all, in fact,
will touch you
ever again.