Open-mouthed and young 
I trudged into the Zero,
wrapped cap to gloves to soles
against the Zero, hollering
over the Zero wind, spoiling
for a swing and a hit
in a fight against the Zero.
I had not yet learned
that no one fights the Zero
who wants to survive it.
I was lucky. I did not fall
to it. Now, I watch the Zero
from where it’s warm
and keep my mouth shut
to keep the Zero
from getting in,
though I do tell my kids
to be wary and safe,
as it’s a cold world out there.
I think they’re still
listening to me,
though I do see them
at the windows
when they think I am not looking,
staring
into what I have forbidden
more often than ever before.

A seashell
cracked spontaneously,
a stone rotted apart
all at once.

Then, whole mountains
began to slip
and trees started to sink
into their roots.

A new music revealed in this decay
was more than percussion;
there were beats and rhythms
of course as everything tumbled

but behind that was a melody,
a minimal rise and fall;
a note, perhaps two,
humming in close harmony.

Those who heard it
had to choose
to flee it with their hands
on their ears

or to stand still
and dance with it
though ruin would surely
engulf them.

Now, all is Aftermath.
Things are still falling
but most of us understand
that failure’s become default.

Some have gone so far 
as to deafen themselves
but a few are learning to sing
or play what’s left

like kids turned loose
in a broken studio full
of broken instruments.
New world, new tunes —

old mantra, rather,
and nothing too original.
It’s more like an unveiled
restoration, or recovery

of an old book of common song.
Shaped note singing. Small
intervals, easy to pick up.
Something inherently ours.

I apologize
for not at least offering
a temporary embrace
to all that passed my way.

I could not fit
all of you into my arms,
turned away often 
to hide my shame
at failing,
left you wondering,
left you thinking me
mean and small — 
forgive me.  

Forgive me
as I fail
again and again —
until it becomes tedious, 
until it 
becomes
tedious. 
Until it becomes

obvious.

Behold, there are 
some prodigies
who wield 
the right spacing and 
typography
like swords, 
eschew
or explode cliches
like proper little 
trick hounds, 
wax street
or academy prolific
as lice
or lemmings,

and not a one of them
moves anyone, in fact
not a one of them
could move a fart
out of an overstuffed gut
at a chili cookoff,
reminding us

that virtuosity
left out in the sun
on reckless display 
without feeding
the greater good
bleaches, like 
dog shit,
to the purest
matchless
white.

I’m down
to my last hundred bucks
waiting for 
a late paycheck
and thinking of Sal Paradise
who (disguised as
Jack Kerouac) used to
wire back east from Denver
for twenty dollars
and consider it
enough money with which
to see the country
traveling across the continent
screwing women over
romanticizing the hustle
I will grant you
it was the 1940s
Money and hustle went farther
back then
but now I won’t even go
to the grocery store 
with only a hundred bucks
I sit at home 
fuming and sobbing
counting pennies
trying to do right by 
the woman I love
The only thing I share with Sal
and his friends 
is the whole suffer for art thing
They claimed more joy and less care
than I do
the feckless bastards
I don’t envy them
They mostly all died
drunks or fossils
They were fire sale artists when alive
EVERYTHING MUST GO
GO GO GO
I’m just the opposite
I wanna hang on to something
but a hundred bucks isn’t enough
in 2014
to buy much that will last
Anyway if poverty
kills so much around me
that I have to hit the road
at some point
I won’t last long
In 2014
they just shoot
the mad ones

1.
Cleaning out the apartment
of a woman
who had disappeared.

Ivy around the bedroom window frame
may once have been meant
to evoke the woodland
for a homesick
“country gal”
in the city,

but that dust caked
plastic ivy around the frame,
long ignored fake ivy
tacked to the grimy window frame
with its broken blind, its cobwebs,
its setting among
clothing strewn
in disarray, 

suggested instead
an archway
into an otherness
long ago entered
by someone from this side
who has yet to return,
is overdue
to come back through.

2.
Cutting foam rubber
with bandsaws
into pillow shapes.

If the noise somehow
can be absorbed by the foam
and enter all those
sleepyheads,

if people
end up in nightmares
about a ribbon of steel
whining through them,

all the boredom
of this job might be
worth it.

You might call that cruel,
but only if
you’ve never done anything
like this.

3.
Industrial
corn chip maker,
or at least
the one who mixes
the batter.

Hair net, beard net,
gloves, safety glasses,
steel toed shoes, smock —

I entered the factory
on my first day
tricked out for
radioactivity
or
The Ark Of The Covenant 

only to find the hazard
was in knowing evermore
that the corn chip powder
I poured
one thirty five pound bag
at a time
into the hot tub size mixer
became neon green
when water hit it.

It cannot not be unlearned
once known.  It cannot be
unseen. I have not had
a corn chip since then,
and thus am denied
part of my national birthright —
something to eat at parties,
something to eat
from vending machines,
something eaten in the car
to stave off hunger
for the last fifty miles
of any given journey.

4.
Surveillance
of a deadbeat renter.

Hours in the DMV waiting
for him to renew
a license I’d learned was expiring
paid off.

He’d tried to vanish,
but I found him,
tailed him
home.

The house
was covered in ivy,
and for a moment, a wild
moment, 

I thought I might solve
three mysteries
at once,
if you could count

my muddle of a life
to that point as one —
but no dice.
He lived alone.

I made a note
of the new address,
called it in,
and quit.

5.
I’ve truly had no job odder
than my current occupation

which insists upon
incessant reporting
of connections and meaning
where none are visible;

demands that details
be magnified
until they are totemic;

tastes, sometimes,
of swift steel severing
tangled false ivy;

of hunger tainting long hours
of inert observation;

of ghost salt, poison corn,
and the tears of the diisappeared.

If I am tolerant
of friends
who define me, if I
accept those definitions,
remain mute
as they forget
who I am
and choose what I should be,
become what little they think
they see of me,
I deserve to be stripped
of my own definition.

If I allow
smug anthropoogists
to set my name and limits, 
remain quiet
as I am measured
and fitted, let them
titrate my blood
and unstring
my helix,
I deserve
all the pins and tags
they stick me with.

If I allow bureaucrats
to grant me my ID,

if I allow my company
to give me my straitjacket,

if one drop makes some
one thing
and one sixteenth makes some
quite another,

if how I grew up
and what I was called
and what made me smile
and what I ate and drank
and what I was told I was

and what I faced
and how I was shaped 
and how I was warped
and how I was cold beaten
and forged
are discarded
because it doesn’t 
show — 
if I allow myself
to be all theirs,

I deserve to lose
what little I’ve cobbled
from my shattered history

and shall not dare to be
what I am 
again.

I’m partial to the sound
of a rising uncertain
inflection these days

as the world is no longer
made of atoms
but of questions; answers

are now bombs,
wrecking balls,
crowbars. Questions

offer foundations that
can flex in quake or storm;
firm responses snap or shatter.

When everything is
in question, best just
to stay still and listen.

Two answers at least
for each question; two worlds
at least deriving from each;

demanding right answers 
seems insane — so much
dies when minds slam shut;

in love therefore 
with the uncertain inflection
as it rings with life.

If you knew
your date of death
you’d turn yourself into
a candle with wick enough
to carry your flame 
to its sputtering end.

If you could predict
the time you’d end
you would put on 
bright clothes and dance
on the sidewalk in front of
your future cemetary.

If we loved you enough, you say,
we’d let you do those things
unfettered by our impending
grief; in fact we’d ask you
how you did it and then
we’d try to do it for ourselves.

Now then, the crisis:
we must decide
at once how much
we love you.  
Do we love you enough
to disobey, or do we dare to obey?

Worth sharing:
a description of the light

streaming between the houses
onto the melting road ice, but

better to share the light itself.
Come over and see it with me,

or wait until I’m gone to come see it
for it doesn’t matter if I am here,

or will be here
when you come; although

it would be good to see you,
what’s most worth sharing

is that light, and if I am gone
it will remain. Come see it

and if I am gone by then, think of me
for a moment, then let me go.

In my last years I swallowed
what I was supposed to,
drank not what was forbidden,
moved as I was advised to move,
and nevertheless ended up dead.

Can’t speak of what 
that’s like — there are contracts,
and it’s different for all anyway.
I’ll say this:
nothing about the passage itself

should terrify you.
It is as simple as changing
clothes, easy as a dressing room,
calm as a Saturday morning 
without mirrors, with nowhere to go.

That said, here are things to consider
before you cross over.  Kindness
to others, yes.  Taking stands
against preventable agony, yes.
Relating, loving, speaking passion,

of course.  But also,
there is a remarkable
emphasis here on whether or not
you occasionally stopped 
in the middle of the day to listen

to the day — to all of it
from truck snorts to humming bees.
You were expected to hear the world
as a symphony now and then;
they never tell us that soon enough.

So — go do that.  Go stop the moments
and sit with them.  It will prepare you
for much of what it’s like here — cannot
say more than that about it, except that
it’s not at all a bad existence.

It’s nothing like life to be dead.  
There’s more singing, if you can believe 
that.  There’s also more silence. You
are always comfortable.  You 
are always fine — it’s going to be fine.