Remember that
crucifixion only became theology 
with time.  Once it was
just somebody’s job and 
somebody else’s brutal
entertainment; some
avoided such spectacle as that
due to delicacy and others ran
like hell to avoid being the targets
of the ones with the hammers and 
the nails.  Remember that
it only became holy
with time; some say it took
as little as three days,
others say it’s still not all the way
there. Remember
that it was cleaned up and
that you’ll really never know
what it was really like; remember that
the next time you’re looking up at
the bare cross on the wall of your church.
Remember that there are some places in the world
where on Good Friday
some try to replicate it,
dragging crosses 
through the dirt streets,
hanging themselves bloody
to bring it home again; remember
how you knew of them, the penitentes,
once upon a time and had forgotten them
till now? Remember how it sobered you
up to learn of them? To learn of people
who preferred to recall it was once
routine and mundane and bloody
and vile, and maybe it should have stayed
that way; if it one day makes you uneasy
in church, if it pulls you down to your knees
in sick wonder, maybe that’s what you get
for forgetting that it did not start
in purity and that they only capitalized it
once they made it into capital.

Remind me of how
a Toblerone tastes —
it’s been so long since I
was able to have one.

Remind me what silk feels
like when drawn across the hand,
how feeling that elevates the mind
in blessed ways.

Remind me of my memory,
of senses long denied
expression and stimulation.
Is our best world still out there?

Somehow I’ve felt locked away
from it all. I feel nothing much
other than that. Those pleasures
I once held have slipped from me

and I’d love to gather them to me
again so: remind me. Remind me
of luxury and indulgence. Get me halfway
back to myself. Let’s see

if memory, once roused,
can open its arms enough
to carry me 
the rest of the way.

On a mission to take down
the pain in my leg
took a pill and a drink and one more pill
and sat my ass down
to take off the weight

On a mission to maybe
relax for a moment 
took a drag and a sip and a drag and a sip
and dozed right off
for a whole ten minutes

Tried to wake up for good
with remote in hand
flipped around checked for movies thought about finding
a music channel
but that didn’t last

When I woke up again
a little bit later 
stretched my neck and my shoulder and damned if the leg
wasn’t still a little tender
after all I’d done

On a mission of comfort
for pain and fatigue
Pain of body and soul and fatigue from fighting them both
it’s a daily routine
and it’s Friday again

so it’s been a whole week
of pills and sipping
smoking and sitting and running the word “relentless”
over my tongue and teeth
till it’s all I can taste

Your second hand rugs,
worn thin where someone paced
before you got them.

You windows that get washed
once a year. Your car in need,
always, of something out of reach.

Clothes that never
measure up to how
they were pictured before purchase

because they were pictured
as solutions or answered prayers,
when they were in fact just clothes.

The few things of substance
you cling to: an heirloom cup or two,
one sturdy chair, good pots and pans

collected piecemeal
at Goodwill, at the Sally store,
at the perpetual yard sale

two blocks over, every Sunday
morning; the same place you bought
your warmest overcoat.

You do your best though
every bill feels like
a wound and lately

blood has been seeping through
what you’ve dressed them with.
You stay home, away from friends,

from your past life,
as much from fear
of being seen this way

as because you can’t afford
to step too far off the path
you need to walk just

to stay here, to keep
the little bit of an address
you’ve got. Instead you tell yourself

those rugs aren’t going 
to wear themselves transparent.
You’ve got all night and all day,

all of tomorrow and next week. You’re tough.
Plenty to keep you busy. Plenty
left to be ground down.

1.
How is it that so many of us
can stare into the same abyss
and see different things?  

There’s nothing there
when I look into it. One sees
the authority of star charts

while someone else sees
a bloodstained cross of gold
and another, a rune hanging

in the sky above a gigantic tree.
It seems the abyss is a master
of sleight of hand. Magic

runs deep in there, as deep
as the pit itself perhaps. That’s 
why we have mystics, I suppose:

there are always people
who will try to explain
how the trick was done.  

2.
If I am to be honest
I don’t really see nothing
when I stand before it.

There’s something there,
certainly.  I just can’t tell
what it is and I’m too old

to waste any more time
on being certain before
leaping in.  If it’s a raven,

I’ll find out when I strike it
as I fall.  If it’s a coyote
let it take me in its jaws.

If it’s something I can’t name
I’ll fall into it or fly by it
and that will be that.

3.
When I peer into the abyss
the one thing I can say for sure
is that it’s not me in there.

Whatever is there
is not staring back
at all. Not so far.

It seems unconcerned
that I’m even here.
It seems to go about being

the abyss regardless
of anyone’s gaze. No use
wringing your hands about this,

it seems to be saying.
It’s not yours. Maybe 
you’ll understand someday,

but don’t give up your sense
one day sooner than you need to
thinking it will help:

no one 
has ever
gotten it right.

Food’s just fuel. For me, at least. 
Little pleasure there
beyond that of having
no more hole in the gut.

Taste’s something, sure,
in the moment but 
I don’t savor memory
of what’s good over

what’s good enough.
I know how freakish
that might seem to the 
artisanal masses. I know

you may think I’m exaggerating 
or that I am somehow compromised
or stunted because of this,
and perhaps that’s right, but

you’ve never felt how large
the hole yawns in me or how
it sucks the flavor away
from anything I might use to fill it.

To sit at home alone
and wish you were at home but
in a different home that looks
much the same as this one
but which feels instead like the starry center
of the spiritual life
of a distant world

is to open your mouth and speak
a dead language few people ever understood
and which has long been considered extinct
though it captured dreams and nuances 
not recalled since, things known then only to adepts 
and native speakers and 
now considered to be myths.

To sit at home alone and imagine
that you are not alone at all
and that the home instead is cozy
with others and the laughter and warmth
of bodies and souls are a fire
of fusion like a small sun
over a fertile land

is to fall upon a bed of salted snow
under a dim moon and pray 
for it to turn to sand and a full bright night
on an island no one comes upon
without a blessing from some deity
known to all, unnamed by anyone.

To sit at home alone
and create a song of that same home
growing full to the walls, the ceiling,
the roof and above with a sacred hum
of joy and satisfaction and all the angels
of a commonality not yet in evidence

is to wait for someone, anyone
to come to your home and make it
a home of dreams 
you’ve been dreaming, dreams
no one knows of except you,
dreams no one can translate except you,
dreams no one can enter except you.

A perfect ache:
the recognition of 
the possibility that
you’ve just celebrated
the last New Year’s Eve
you’ll ever have.

It’s not maudlin
or self-pitying to do so.
You’re just applying simple math
to the question of
how many more full years
you are likely to have left
when compared to how many
you’ve had so far; 

you ache a little at the result
but are thrilled a little too
that at least this one was
peaceful and decent and 
done early and well if it’s to be
the last.

You stack silly borrowed hats and noisemakers
on the barroom table before you leave.
Someone can use them next year.
You might even be back.  Who knows?
Not you, of course. The odds
suggest otherwise but you place
your bets before leaving 
when you are so careful with 
such simple, disposable items as these.