Stop calling it therapy.
I’ve written thousands of lines
and I’m as broken now
as when I started,
maybe more so.

Stop calling therapy
what exists
to spite disorder,
what persists after
breakdowns and
attempts.

Stop calling therapy
what I would do more of
if I were less a mess.
Stop calling therapy
what I call
breathing.
Stop calling therapy
what I call
myself spread out.

Stop calling
triggers on guns
material.  Stop calling
triggers on others’ lips
material. Stop calling
too-blunt knives and weak pills
and slender ropes
and bed restraints
and hours
of paying to talk
around agony

the dark timber of my art.

Stop calling.  Stop
insisting, stop speaking
of therapy.  Stop in fact
your fantasy of why
and what and how
and spout as pressure valve
and verse as surgery.

If it worked,
if it was as you say,
I’d be perfect.

On the day
after my birthday
we slept late
and it was fine
for once
for me
not to jump up
at the trill
of the alarm

as if the next year of my life
was meant to begin
with a symbolic nod
to keeping time safe
from others’ demands

and just
letting happen
what happens
in its own
time and at
its own pace

It is nothing to the radio
that you have wept upon it
whenever it played
a certain song,
that this went on for weeks
and the only reason you stopped
is that you were caught weeping
and then sent away to be healed.

It is nothing to the radio
that when you returned
you did not turn it on
for a long time.

The radio is neither
friend nor foe; 
it simply has
no feelings for you.
In this way it resembles
the One who you see
as the cause
of your weeping

and so one night
not long after
your return, 
you reach out and slay your radio
by hurling it against
the impassive wall;
you are then enveloped
in silence and 
while you want to weep
you hold back.  
You can hear a certain song
in the silence, and crying
would drown it.

we all agree
to say
la di da
we all agree
to party and bullshit

then we no longer say
la di da
we choose to
no longer
party and bullshit

swinging that weight
one side to the other
over and over while
the world stays the same
that’s how we roll

the first time it’s spoken
later on it gets sung
nothing changes
nowadays that’s just
how we roll

while agents of change
find it hard to say
la di da
agents of yelling ’bout change
dig the party and bullshit

throw up your hands
when you dance and shout
la di da
throw up in the alley and mourn
the party and bullshit

swinging that weight
one side to the other
over and over while
the world stays the same
that’s how we roll

the first time it’s spoken
later on it gets sung
the world stays the same
either way and that’s
how we roll

Let us speak briefly
of those moments
when a body known to us
vacates
its physicality.

(Forgive me.  I must speak
clinically of this
to shield my own fear
for I find myself 
susceptible to greater pain

when we grieve in numbers;
although it is scarcely less
a concern when I am alone,
it is enough diminished
to be preferable.)

So let us speak
briefly and clinically of this
even as I am retching 
within, even as I attempt
to master myself.

It’s known that more
than one memory of the missing body 
remains with us and will likely  
haunt us whenever we are
where it once was.

We must endeavor
not to be fooled by this —
not to imagine we see the body
on those stairs, for example,
tucking back a lock of hair.

We must acknowledge 
that gone is gone, that 
what we hold of a gone body
is not the body itself
but our own fright at its departure.

(Forgive me, again, for speaking
so coldly of all of this. I am
not in full control of how 
my body longs to wail
right now, how my body

is absenting itself
from my measured speech and thought,
how it begins to sag
with grief and fear, how my body
admits that it longs also to be gone.)

There will be times
when we are fooled into believing
the hole in space where the body was
is filled with something 
beyond the body…

forgive me for saying
I believe this as well.
Forgive me for believing
I can speak of any of this
and hold my body together

while inside
I quake at the idea
of never seeing someone again
in any way,
shape or form.  Forgive me

for understanding such departure
so well, for still now and then
longing for such departure as well.
Forgive me, I think
I hear her whispering.

Brothers in white
on the sidewalk,
arms linked, deep
eyed, silent.

Sisters in white
behind, before, surrounding,
singing minor, singing anger,
singing rejection hymns.

Children sink to the lawn,
draw in their heads, 
huddle like rocks.
Hiding is the new playtime.

Sky, once shelter,
once cathedral ceiling,
cracks all across, one 
horizon to the next.

We are either ahead of 
the War
by mere 
seconds now 

or we are in it
and still
can’t understand
that it is here.

Caught napping
and nebulous, infirm,
soft edged,
cloud-conscious,

snapped back to semi-solid
at once.  Did someone
knock?  Jump
at that door and pull it wide

open and no one’s there but
a wisp bowing invisibly.
You see it because you’re still
mostly wisp right now

so it’s kin and it’s bowing
then straightening up, slides
past you to the couch, takes
your spot.  You step out

into the hall, the door locks
behind you — what now?
Everyone for miles
is sleeping.  Start knocking

on doors and bow
when one opens for you
even if the occupant
can’t see you — in fact,

especially then.  This is how
you learn to be nebulous,
cloud-caught, more thought
than flesh.  It’s a process,

not an end result; you realize this
when you jump from the next couch
you’ve usurped and are in the cold
again, when you go out to the street

and recognize all the spirits
and see that they have the same
indistinct, tender face
that you now bear.

If you want
to succeed
every book
on success
will tell you
the secret,
will speak of

how important
is the setting of 
personal, inspiring
goals, how 
one must

set a specific,
measurable, attainable,
relevant, trackable
goal, set it in an
“achieves what outcome
by when” format, and

set that sucker
so that it
intrinsically
motivates you,

so that the languge
of the goal
drives you on toward
completion, 

so that
the wording itself
compels you forward,
becomes a whip urging
an exchange of pain 
for gain, 

in other words,
cast a spell with
a set of words chosen
to make something happen.
Make magic of your
holy desires

and then, of course,
plan your work
and work your plan,
set step goals, 
focus on milestones,
adjust as needed,

remembering that
a person without clear goals
is used by someone who does —

that’s the Right Path
for us all,
a road full of users
and those being used
marching ahead
chanting our goals
and hoping
someone among us
inspired by maintenance
cast a goal
about fixing potholes
and getting the bridge
back in place
before we get there
and work our planbound feet
right into the Abyss.

Elsewhere
there may be
virgin forest
and fast moving
clean streams.

Elsewhere
there may be
no evil done 
and perfect love
for all comers.

Elsewhere
there may be 
an “elsewhere”
still free of the consequences
of what happens here.

You find that place,
you keep it to yourself.
Don’t come running back
to tell us about it, please.
We’ll miss you, of course,

but if you don’t come back
and brag about it,
we won’t follow you 
to trample it and become
the death of the possibility.

Your disappearance will break us,
true, but if it represents someone
finding the last happiest
place on Earth
and dwelling there forever,

we will heal 
more quickly.
We’ll be happier — not
the way you’ll be happy,
but it will have to do.

Yes Sir
it’s true

I won’t know
upon waking
who you formally
claim to 
be

but walking with you
tonight has been 
like walking with
a
Great Ghost of All-History
a
water bearer
an
artist
of all expressions 
of the Human
an
understander of all things
a
knower of everyone

When we jointly put our hands
on the Stone
by the shore
I felt a little 
of how it must be
to be you
and
I get why
you say so little

If there’s as you say
nothing to the God
we believe in
or nothing to
how it’s 
understood
here
if we’ve been wrong
I can accept that
because

the Stone
has hold of the Truth
and I have had hold 
of the Stone

So
yes Sir
I will wake up
unable to explain this
but confident
and assured that 
from now on
all I need is the shore
and the Stone
and your whispering certainty
— one Word only —
across my ear

Piranhas
feed in a
swarm
of small bites
which are
swiftly deadly;

they leave
clean bones;

put their
appetites
back in waiting.

Usually
for piranhas
a meal
is eaten
once
and soon forgotten

but we
get chewed up,
spit out,
healed a little, then
thrown back in
every
day.

They’re bored
with us but
can’t help tearing in
with savage,
jaded mouths

and it’s no less
horrible for us
because it’s
routine.