By accident
I’ve cut myself.
Considering 
the number of knives 
in the house,
I am surprised it 
happens so seldom.

As always, I put
my freshly-opened thumb
to my lips as if to draw
the freed blood back
to its home. 

Surely it had rejoiced
at first touch of open air,
and I resented that joy.
What warm life, released
from its prison, would not
feel such release?
But to my mind
it belongs in the dark,
in my darkness.
I cannot let it go
so I suck it back in.
It may die on my lips, as so much
of what I’ve let go
has; nonetheless
I need it more
than it needs 
to be free.

I bind the wound
out of habit. I wash the knife 
out of fear of discovery.
I write this all down
out of fear of thinking more
about all this, and in the end
I put the knife back within easy reach,
back where it belongs.

Woke up
on fire
from some fiery
head-noise.

Outside high wind
and are those
crackling sounds at 
foot of bed?

This is how my mind says
blaze, boy; bad boy;
get up smoldering, flare
with penance before punishment

alone in darkness with your
history; only freed up enough
to feel an all over diabolical
regret that scratching can’t help.

Later this morning when
I’ll be crossing town 
to get on the highway north 
to work, there will be

sunrise to my right
and windows 
in downtown buildings
gone red to my left.

I thought sunrise
was supposed
to make my city look lovely
or some similar expected way

but I know I will be thinking
of nothing but unholy fire
I lived through last night,
heart and brain scorched 

open; I understand I will
never heal at all. I know the song
by heart: Bad boy, blaze boy; 
this is where you live now.

Flatbed trailer
beside me in traffic.
Full load of wreckage
including one smashed up
white Accord with glass
gone from every frame…

look, I know it’s some reflection
or my fatigue but it’s looking
like Jesus is up there
behind that cracked wheel,
smiling and waving
and looking
David Bowie fine.

It’s been
a long workday,
a long home commute.
I’m sundown run down
and ready to fall down
on the couch
and just be lonely
and trust me — 
no Jesus will raise me
once I’m down
like a pancaked car
and safe in the living room’s
everlasting arms.

I’ve been told
I could make this place beautiful
by poets and 
realtors and
rarely by lovers
but I have always thought
that’s too much to ask and
the wrong kind of work to demand
of someone like me. 

It would take
a lifetime of bone sacrifice
and blood-bathing
for me to get this place
past acceptable. 

I could make this place tolerable; perhaps
with an act of God or two
could clear away everything else
so comparison becomes impossible.

If I ever find myself 
in a land without mirrors
or morals I might fall into
some default called 
until something better
comes along
but until the improbable happens
this place won’t be made beautiful.

The realtors and the lovers
and most of all the poets
will have to make do
with this: that I will make the place
less wretched than it was
when I found it, and then others
will have to take it, leave it,
or do their part to make of it
whatever they can.

City
is still quiet,
not yet ready
to accept bustle. 

Out beyond here
small towns,
home towns,
sleep on and on.

All those people
are allegedly my people.
They aren’t 
here right now.

Instead
are elsewhere;
in more desirable
lands, in their heads.

I’m not in there
with them, nor am I
in my own head. Instead
I am trying

to understand
why their peace
has never been contiguous
with my own,

trying to understand
how I do not have
dreams anything like
theirs, no shared definitions

of what awake
should mean, of what
that life
should be. 

Five days later.
I’m trying again.

Morning, again;
keyboard, again.

Silence — well,
almost. Space heater

and occasion cat noises
from elsewhere. Otherwise

it is just me and
a runny nose

simply relating this note
that has been repeated

and repeated and five days
later, nothing new to say.

I will not call this writer’s block.
That would imply that I think

I am still a writer, some kind
of artist at least. Beware

this self-identification,
I say.  It can trap you.

Look at me: five days since
I last tried to live up to 

my label and I hear nothing
but moving air and impatience

from a hungry cat. On social media
my friends are either cheering

their way through good lives
or dying from a case of

being America. I am 
increasingly doing neither.

I disappear instead. Five days 
from now you should stop looking for me.

Five days from now this will be
all I will have left behind.

For our future
we ought to dance more — 
cranes at courtship,
swords at friendly play.

You live longer
with a little banter,
a little back and forth;
when our eyes meet across

proving grounds
with a moment of
uncertainty that fuels
right action, wrong action;

any action, really. Inaction
can suck breath and blood away;
we will go to our graves 
wishing we’d done more

with each other. As good
as it can be to sit by a river
and dream, we have to get up
sometime if only to find

events about which to dream.
So let’s do it — shake a leg, do that
primal bop, bring good swords
to this big dance. Let’s play.