We say

day by day,
minute to minute,
now and then:

no more. 

Instead let’s say

day by hurricane,
minute by lava flow,
now and riverbend.

There is no reason
cliches become cliches
except that they are true
and express something
we’ve all agreed to accept

so let’s make time
flex from concept to 
solidity, make it 
tangible, even surreal;

let’s accept that today
is casket, tomorrow
is rotted eyes, next year
is dust; let’s agree
that passage is 
fruit, that aging is 
white cracked leather;

that day in fact precedes hard wind,
second is best followed by cobra,

and now and then?
Now is ecstasy
of drunken hands
on an antique keyboard.
Then is a fumble, a mistake
in the stream.
Now and then:

Now music,
rapture then.

There are words in print
that I am not certain
I know how to pronounce;

they are stones in my shoe.

A dry patch of skin
high on my left cheekbone
that come and goes,
is more gone than here
but which worries me
all the time — is it back,
is it there, is it visible,
is it hideous —

it is a stone in my shoe.

Trying to replicate
a lightning one string slide
in a Robert Johnson song
that I’ve played well exactly once
and never again to my knowledge,
a note I pursue and fail to catch
so I lay my head down
and weep over it when no one’s here —

a stone in my shoe, a stone in my passway.

I am a prisoner of these shoes
that crack me from sole up.
When I tell you I’m hurt
you sit there and ask me
to grit my jaw 
and grind my head to dust
to get past this and produce.
To walk for you in spite of the pain,
speak some words I don’t know how to say out loud,
flaunt skin I cannot heal,
put my hands and voice to a song I cannot fathom.

Your insistence
upon such things is
a stone in my shoe.

My joy demands
that I tell you
that none of that 
is ever going to work.

Outer silence, yet
so loud within;

to still that clamor
you try everything.

You transfer 
your inner noise out

to page or stage. That
quells it, doesn’t end it.

You stone it, you drown it.
It coughs, it gurgles. It lives.

You turn off, tune out.
Inside gets louder in delight.

You sit zazen,
claim success,

stuff your ears
with lotus blossoms.

Your roaring head
blows them out 

like unsolicited
opinions.

Perhaps you
should resign yourself

to noise? They say it’s all 
the rage these days.

This is also an 
unsolicited opinion,

of course. If there was 
peace making to offer

that was tried, true,
proven? Shout it

into you. Break
your exterior silence

with it. Leave you
to ponder it

among your 
souvenirs. But it’s not

real. Nothing
applies universally

when it comes to
storms inside.

Outer silence
notwithstanding,

all anyone can do
is toss you a line

and whether or not
you grab it is 

chance or
fate or something else;

whether or not it is
long enough, strong enough,

easy enough 
to hold fast,

is chance or fate
or something else again

that might have a name
you can’t hear above the wind.

Down with this easy world
we live in now

where thought becomes word becomes deed
at the blink of a trigger 

one hard thought
breaks a heart

and hard thoughts fly like missiles
in the night 

one hard word
breaks a spirit 

and hard words fly like bullets
through the halls

one hard deed
might break a world

and hard deeds wait in shadows
for their time to come

Here’s to a harder world
than the one we have now

where thought and word and deed
work together to keep things right

one soft thought
keeps someone alive

when it leads to one caring word
against the darkness

and one simple deed changes
a hard moment into something shining

Here’s to the end
of playing it easy

Here’s to the start of doing the harder thing
until it becomes easy

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
said Robert Frost that one time.

He was making
a point about how weird it is to think
walls help anything, that the earth itself hates them
and tears them to little wall bits;
you had to keep at them to keep them whole;

something there is that knocks them down
then knocks them down again.

What he didn’t say: something there is in us
that doesn’t love another. Something in us 
that doesn’t love, that pays love lip service 
even as it short sells love against some imagined
future gain, and that’s the force that builds the wall.

Perhaps he did say it when he said so little
about the neighbor who comes to set the wall 
back in place, who only knows how to repeat
what his father told him even as he casts aside
the poet’s note about the folly of pines and apples
devouring each other?

Perhaps when the speaker named the neighbor
as some risen caveman wielding stone
he was trying to tell us something — 
Frost by all accounts was himself
a bastard and a half
and he might have had
a moment of clarity there
when he put the speaker
right there beside the savage
as the two of them mended wall;

think on that —

even though he knew
every wall will someday fall,
that in the long run
that wall would do nothing,
a man stood beside another man
and together they built
a useless wall.

I don’t do nostalgia.
It wasn’t better then.

I hated life a while ago.
It improved, failed, improved again.

That was a bad body I had.
I was a bad, bold mistake.

My mother was a bad cook.
My father wasn’t wise. Or maybe

I’m the dumb one and my taste buds
got too numb to feel comfort.

The music was the music.
Full of promise, most unfulfilled.

Some came true then other songs
came along and made those wrong.

The movies were rude and crude
and shifted little, if you look around.

My old books smell as musty
as the ideas therein.

Even the sun was dim back then
in exactly the way it’s dim now.

The only thing then had over now
was the feeling that hope had a point.

I can’t live on that full memory
when I bite down on tinfoil today and every day.

It hurts exactly the way it always has.
I remember that and only that from my youth.

Hope was a luxury then,
a luxury now. 

Go on living. Bite down. It’ll hurt. It always does.
That’s the lesson of the past:

you will only remember how the world can glow
once the agony ends.

Observing sparrows,
drab and puffed, pecking
at my homemade cakes of
suet and seed.

A squirrel climbs the feeder post
but will not touch the food itself
thanks to red pepper flakes
in the seed mix.

Squirrel skips about 
below the feeders, nipping up
bits of neutral, unseasoned
feed fallen from above.

The sparrows 
seem unbothered. Maybe
they even like the small fires
in their food. 

I should be
putting my talent into
saving the world,
unless this

does save the world;
perhaps I fret needlessly
that there is so much more
to be done. This is such 

a small thing, this feeding
and saving and replenishing
while not harming as I go.
I do not like thinking

it’s all I can do, but it might be.
I do not like thinking I am reduced
to rendering fat and making poetry;
would rather imagine myself gunning

and shouting, slicing and 
leading a charge. Instead
I wince at my pains, stay off my feet,
nurse my confusion and memorialize

all I once was
while the sparrows
eat, the squirrels eat, the cold
settles in

and the world 
goes on without me 
to stand and bar
its crushing way.