I hear people call themselves
empaths
Read a story about
empathy
Someone said
we need a world with more
empathy

I don’t understand that word
at all

I don’t much care for
too many people
I mean
I like people well enough
but they are largely
a mystery to me
because I no longer feel much
beyond myself

I don’t know how
or when exactly
that happened
I seem to recall 
a time before 
it happened
I seem to recall
such feelings

I don’t know much 
about how I got here
or what I am now
except
I am broken
How broken
I am

but I am not sad or scared

for when I look at myself
it is like looking at
a carburetor
a nearly obsolete device
that no longer works
and I have forgotten
how to set it right

I try to do right by others
because of this
I try to do right by others
because I do not
trust myself
to understand how they
might feel
if I have done them
wrong

Tell me
how I’m doing
Explain to me
what I’m doing
right and
wrong
It’s a long way
from you to me
You might have to shout
to reach me
I will be straining to hear you
I will not likely do it well right away
from my broken stand
I will try as I am
always trying

to reach you
I promise
I swear
I vow
I am trying to reach 
you
to reach 
out
get the mix right
run right

staring up from bed with
no desire to rise

a copper mouth morning

feeling no joy
at that taste 

remembering instead
ancient flavors of mint
of good tea

old memories 
fading

it has been 
industrial within
for so long
can’t recall
such shades of green

when this
copper mouthed morning
has its own hue

color of statuary
of gutters and lurid puddles
under bad pipes

lying here
in ruins
with no longing to rise
into that kind of green

trying to recall
green tea

mint

promise

A curtain pulled back
reveals the lie

that there is
an outside. I know

better.  All there is
is an inside — this view of

a “window”
is an extension of

that lie.  It suggests
an exit may be possible

when in fact all there is
is more of this cell.

Now a “door”
is being “opened.”

Even as I step through into
alleged downpour

or supposed
scalding sun, I am

being lied to: nothing
of the false outside

touches me here,
centered in cold stone

and lockdown.
This is

my weather, climate,
forecast. There is

no other — I’ve been
outside to see and

there is no outside.
None. You can

stop. Just stop —
I don’t like being lied to.

After all these years
I know:

there’s no window
and no door.

It’s too early,
the body says,
to be up
and considering
brain and soul work,
especially this current
irritating obsession with 
God-work.
The body says

it’s time
to fall
back to agnostic sleep,
to worry
about all that
later; the body says,
“take care of me,” says

it’s time to roll over
and away from the stinging
hymn that’s trying to come out
of mouth or hands
into the growing daylight.

So I turn over and try
to fall back into sleep
though I know 

that the song
will be in there
with me, like a bad
mattress or pillow,
giving me pain
in the place where I keep
my definitions.

If I succeed
in getting more sleep
it’s going to hurt
as much as if
I stay awake wrestling
with it —

God, it all hurts 
all the time. It all
hurts from bruised hip
to cranked neck
and deep into the back
of my dearest names
for myself

but it’s too early 
to think about this;

I don’t want to think about
any of this
until I’m dead but the body
won’t stop saying

“not yet.”

From the window
I can see Pound Hill.  
That’s where God
lived before She moved
to Far Mountain on the
opposite horizon.
She left a ghost 
behind to watch the place
and keep in touch with us.
We go there only
when called,

crossing over
the sacred boundary
called Silver Creek, careful not
to dip more than a toe
or else we have to go
all the way back
and start over.

Once over safely,
it’s a slow walk only,
no running no matter
what God and Her Ghost
show us — and oh, the pain

if we’re not holding flowers
picked from the far meadow,
under the shade
of the Tree.

It’s all worth it
to go through
that and be home
and look out the window
toward Pound Hill
over Silver Creek and know
we went and saw and heard.

Sometimes in Winter
I see the stone church
of my neighbors through
the bare branches,
hear them singing

for a God
they can only imagine.
A God locked
in an impressive heaven
many miles away.
They mention a Holy Land
now and then, its hills,
its rivers, but most 
have never seen it; it’s

so, so sad.

You claim to want
and love nature
Your fantasy of it
seems to be
a longing

to walk in the forest
untroubled by rain
or beasts or bugs
or the inconvenient
mess of wet leaves underfoot

to stroll along the beach
unaffected by the smell
of kelp tossed up earlier
to bake in the sun

to walk a mountain walk
with no stumbling upon loose rock
no thinner air
no need for careful steps or
taking thought for safety

You seem to suppose
the avoidance of
the truth found in nature
is possible and that
as such it’s
less dangerous than
facing it

but the truth
serenely oblivious
to your delusion
as always

will deliver
what it sees fit
to deliver
in its own time
on its own terms

the locked box in your head
is colorless or rather
has no specific color

could be brown right now
might be red right now
is not white right now
is not blue or violet right now
but it might be
next time you look at it

you are fairly certain
you keep the key to the lock
for the box in a pocket
in your other coat or
pants

it is always in
your other coat or pants

you know you must have it 
though you don’t recall 
ever holding it or even
seeing it

you have not
seen the contents in years
decades even 
but you know deep down
what is in there 

you can hear it
knocking at night
sometimes
all night

sometimes all day too

as much as you would like that
to stop you know you would need
the key to open it so you could silence
the knocking and that is not possible
right now

so you shrug and turn away
and cope by tuning your life to the chaos
in the rhythm of the knocking
coming from inside 
the colorless
locked box
in your head

noticing as you do
how every one else around you
seems to be dancing as well
to something they are hearing 
that only they are hearing