sit back, ease a hand into
the cooler, snag a beer,
open it and take a long pull
with one eye on
the neighbors and how they
wash their cars, how they
garden. they’re doing it
all wrong. you are better 
and faster and more productive
with your time than they are
which is why you’ve got
beer time now and they don’t.
of course, they don’t know you’re
watching and judging, you
neighborhood ghost — as far as
they are concerned you’re just
the mystery crank in the old Camry
that no one talks to and that’s fine
with everyone. it sure suits you right down
to your pale toes. leaves more time
for beer time, for sitting and judging
and watching incompetence
while wondering how you got so old
and everyone else got so damn stupid.
ease back with another beer and think
a little more, for a little while longer —
how much longer, you wish you knew
how much longer it’s going to be.

In a crowd of those
laughing and pleased
with themselves and their words
for a minute or two

Been trying to write my own ticket
Spending my words
like subway tokens 
to get nowhere really

Realizing that my tokens
are anachronisms
for this crowd
I look around for

a faintly rumbling track
and get myself up
to the edge
to wait

thinking to disturb them
and make myself
a splatter of memory for them
for at least a minute or two

But of course I cannot jump
so I get on the train
with everyone else
Seeing how many of them

have the same clear
and hunted look I am wearing
Recalling how many of them had been
standing as close to the rails as I

In a minute or two
this train will stop
Some will file off
Others will get on

using their own versions
of tokens or transit cards
Many wearing the same clear
and hunted face

which may in fact be
the truest and most trusted ticket to ride
If you are born to ride this train
through these darkest tunnels

for anything longer than a minute or two
your certainty that you don’t belong
may be the surest proof that in fact
you do

Insistent mistakes
frame the debates
among the factions
righting wrongs
and dispensing justice;

insistent mistakes spilling
from mouths and documents,
trickling into the water supply,
chuckling as they embed themselves
wherever they can live longest;

insistent mistakes
disguising themselves,
and once disguised becoming
prayers, doctrines, orders, law;

clothed in what they claim 
is faux-leopard — don’t believe
it — can’t you smell the blood there?
Speaking in what they say
is God’s only tongue — how odd 
that it’s the one language
you understand.

Insistent mistakes become
conventional and eventually 
canonical, and then 
insistent mistake is piled upon 
insistent mistake;

the stack reaches the sky,
blocks the Sun,
confuses you into taking
Dark for Light — 

insisting upon it, in fact.

An inclination
of mine that sets me
rolling downhill
more often than not
is to begin each day
with a question
and then spend all day
not answering it. 

Not just not answering it,
but fleeing from the work
of answering it,

sometimes through pleasure,
sometimes through wallowing
in agony or what to me feels like
agony — it would likely
resemble simple irritation to you,

but then again, 
you’d probably just
answer the question
off the top of your head
when it first came up
and get on with living.

We are inclined differently — 
you toward the ascent, me
facing the other way. It’s not
a moral failing

but it is a failing, a hole
deep in my metal
that you can’t see, a hole 
that will crack open
and break me someday
when at last I collide
with the bottom of the drop.

On that day I will be unsurprised
and frankly disappointed
if you do anything beyond social tears
and a shrug to see me off;
if on that day you break
because of my breaking
and you don’t quickly heal,
that will mean I was wrong

about everything,
about all of it, it will mean
that I should have faced those questions
with the first answer
I could come up with
whether it was wrong or not,
and then gotten on with living
as if I was right.