I often spend my time here
in darkness because 
too often I am compelled
to it but then again 

I have never been good
at doing what I’m forced 
to do or tortured into
doing, so for a moment instead

I’ll celebrate how
that squirrel is eating
the hot suet in defiance
of the packaging

that swears they hate 
such flavors and even though
it means I’ll be refilling 
feeders more often 

than I should
and spending
money on
something I shouldn’t

if it makes me recognize a fellow contrarian
and offer them a bit of fat and seed
in solidarity, then I shall do so
and be, for one moment, content. 

See myself,

cup of congealed blood
in shaded hand,
clouded leopard behind
in twilight
under broad leaves.

As always

what it means 
is literal
in one phase
of this plane, 
metaphorical
or nonsensical 
in others. 

The growl

of the cat. 
Iron sour stink
of the cup. All the 
gray light, shadows
moving slightly. The same
in whatever place
this is. All there is to do
is choose
between them.

A complete rewrite of a twenty year old poem. 

She sits with her hands
twisting in her lap 
like kittens in a basket.

Her voice is just as furry
when she says, “I swear to God,
I can hear a piano

coming through the wall.” I hear nothing,
but try to soothe her by saying,
“Yes, it’s next door, they really like ragtime,”

and she clarifies, “NO, I MEAN A REAL PIANO
IS COMING THROUGH THE REAL WALL!
THE WHOLE DAMN THING IS BREAKING

ALL THE WAY THROUGH!”  I tell her she’s safe
and shake her noon pills from the sorter,
pour a glass of water.

She believes the walls exist
the same way I used to believe in God,
the same way she believes in the deadly piano.

I feel like I’m standing
watching a house burn
on the edge of a wilderness

as I rock her in my arms
amid the smell of smoke,
the soft meow she makes

in her sleep, 
the faint sound of music
from somewhere else.

I don’t know
where the spaceships are.
They’ve been promised
so many times and yet 
they’ve never shown up
in any provable way.
Now and then a sighting
suggests we’re all
just missing them:
looking at the wrong time
in the wrong place. Mistaking
them for strange clouds,
dismissing alien music
in favor of the cluttered percussion
that is the human way.
One way or another
the absence
of the spaceships
is troubling
and I fear I’ll die
knowing nothing of them. It may
mean nothing, but I feel
that all they’d have to do
is show unquestionably up
and everything, whether miserable
or ecstatic, would shift a few degrees
toward balance. I hope
they come soon because
I don’t know
where the spaceships are
and in their absence
it seems that 
everything miserable
is swallowing
everything ecstatic.

Trying to understand how things happen.
Silence is the whiteboard upon which
the teacher writes with a small
stick of light. The words glow blue-black
up there before us all. Each minute of class
contains a lifespan. All minutes
are lifespans, in fact. Do you know
how many lives end as quickly
as they begin, how we thankfully
are never fully aware of it
but can sense, somehow, at times,
the sputtering back and forth
of ghost beings who were never here
long enough to register as such?
Human and inhuman alike, they mattered 
as much in their impermanence as we do
in the only slightly longer time we are held here.
The teacher writes on the whiteboard with light
drawn from the flickering in the room.

Trying to understand how anything happens
in such poor light. How in all this cycling
there is no moment where everything is alive enough
to have full agency, and no moment 
where everything is dead enough to have full peace.
The teacher writes in silence. Feel, it is written.
To understand how everything happens, you must
feel the static from all these comings and goings.
The stones themselves flicker under your feet.
Can you now feel them? Nothing and everything
happening at once, lives and deaths, existence 
a flame first here, then there. Consciousness
humming a steady note with a name
we keep meaning to look up to see
if one truly exists for this. The teacher
writes in what we once called silence
with a small intense light on the whiteboard, 
dismisses us without turning around, keeps writing
as we go out single file from the room.