Outside at night to write
by lantern light, on a whim.

Should I offer a representation of 
this clean sky framed by
the strong arms
of the backyard oak?

Not tonight — the Perseids
are overhead and every 
half-minute or so a streak
makes words vanish
as I watch.

If the tree
survives the night, I will 
return to it tomorrow.
Although I am not that familiar
with hope or optimism, 

I do take
a certain foolish comfort
in the magical thinking
that there will always be
another poem. 

I stare sometimes
so hard into my moments
in search of their meaning

that I forget to be respectable so

in the name of those
who live just outside
the Gates

I must ask if there is
a natural right to be
swallowed whole

a given right to be
consumed
by a passion
and follow it
if necessary

to such oddity
that you become incapable
of coherence as defined

within the Gates

and if this right exists

why is exercising it
so fraught with danger
so heavy on the shoulders
and

so hard upon our fingernails
so torn and shredded
from scratching
at those walls

Never comfortable
where we are,
certain always that
there’s a there 
somewhere that will somehow
remain forever a here,

a home away from home
that will still feel fresh
after years of being in it, a partner
whose intimate novelty
never wears, a medium in which
we never tire of messing.

Get up and go is how
we go, doing that
which demands distance
from the last thing done,
lapping up miles the way dogs
lift water into themselves,

heads down on the lines
in the centers of the roads,
the next right here to be defined
by what feels most like old Eden,
which means wherever there’s no sword
hanging in the air at the time we arrive.

I know
the nature of Evil — 

Evil capitalized, Evil as a 
unifying force, Evil not as cartoon cackle

stifled in polite company
but as policy and practice

stiffly written on solid legal
ground and traditional paper —

I know the nature of Evil
due to its presence

in my raising, my ordinary male-raising
that weaponized dense old parts of my soul

which I keep trying to change or crush away 
to no apparent effect since too often

it pushes through and then I lie awake
examining myself until I shake

from knowing how much
I’ve sparked to happen through the clumsy

and sometimes unconscious use of my Evil —
I know enough of Evil to shudder

whenever I meet another 
who reminds me of myself,

whenever I am drawn to their heat
by our common likes and dislikes,

whenever I meet someone
I am drawn to for their refreshing lack

of fucks given
for the sensibilities of others, their

overripe post-adolescent reliance
on just past prime slang and ironic slant

on the nature of the Evil they do
in all seeming innocence,

claiming the right to freedom
trumps the responsibility 

to do as little harm as possible
while living as harmfully as we do,

as I do — I know
the nature of Evil

due to having been
a lifelong carrier,

a candle that reveals
how deep the darkness has become,

and I fear that my choices now
are to continue as this

until I burn at last away,
with the last of my flame

climbing a wispy column
toward unreachable heights;

to end it now and snuff
my candle cold; or 

to find a firestorm against Evil somewhere
and add myself to it; then

(if I am not consumed there)
to come back as something

not myself, something I fear, something
I do not know how to be.

A long straight tree
half submerged; 23 turtles
sunning themselves upon it.

Ignore the tire just visible beyond them
in the brown and green growth
in the shallows.

At the moment it’s enough
that they are here and you are here
to witness them behaving

as they always have for so many
millions of years.  You, youngster
seeing this: ignore how many wounds

of human doing are visible around them.
Ignore the almost certain toxicity
of the water itself. Celebrate, instead,

how 23 turtles have survived you
and your kind. Celebrate their willingness
to let you off the hook,

to let you see them
getting on
with life.

Rocks and dust, despondent, missing
their star systems of origin,
toss themselves into our air
and burn away.

Blame the skies
for those reminders of loss
known as shooting stars.

Think about how you await them,
what you wish for as they pass;

then think about all on earth
who do the same and are reviled
or forgotten once they’ve passed:

only now and then are they noticed 
by anyone, and few can say
if the only wishes they bear are their own,
or if they ever come true.

History’s
all about
dust that used to be
under a Roman boot
or on a Union horse’s flank or
in the Triangle Shirtwaist fire
or on a slave’s chain, on
an old Apache’s
dead open eye, maybe from
under the burned beam
in a bombed Japanese house —  
who knows
where all the dust on your hands
is from? Just try to remember
you’re always leaving it
all over everything.
Handfuls of dust smearing
Now.  You are carrier of history
in all you touch and
you honestly can’t ever get clean.