How stupid:
an American outside its yard
with no flag to protect it.

It wants to believe
it is camouflaged and wary
yet is as loud as a bridle full of bells.

It wants to stray deep
into a foreign affair.  It wants
to be slick yet it’s stomping everything.

When it moves, it tears out
the spot
where it was.

See the country folk shaking their heads
at the city slicker
shining them on — or so it thinks.

They know better
what side their history is buttered on,
as well as how it tends to fall.

School buses are rolling on our streets this morning.
Pictures of a friend’s daughter and her baby arrive in the mail.
I’m waiting on the last tomatoes to redden before frost.

I’m ready
for something to happen.

Maybe it will be
starfire sourcing itself between my eyes.
A beam as wide as a freeway will sprout there
and traffic will begin to bustle back and forth
from within to without.

Hoping for
a new energy,

I’m going to cut off
my beard tonight, and then shave all the hair
from my head.  I will be a bullet, a cannon ball
with a beam of light in the middle of my head
and traffic going in and out, in and out.

I’m ready for something
to happen all right,

because not that much has been happening
with all my old hair and no light to travel on.
Hope is a new energy.  I have to believe that
it will happen.  I’m going to shave and then shine.
I’m going to change the way I look to represent
the change to come, all starfire-beam and speed-revelation.

Here’s to hope,
its own kind of new energy.

Here’s to the close shave of making it through today
with some kind of optimism.  Here’ s to getting stuck
in the traffic going back and forth from my bald head
into the far world.  Here’s to me, cannonball, aimed at peace.
Here’s to me sitting on my fat ass,
waiting for anything to happen.

1.
All weekend sharp-faced old Jacqueline
sat way back in her deep dark porch
and watched her grandson park cars on her lawn

for those coming to the big fair,
helping her to pile up the money she lives on all year
in her firetrap near mansion

where the windsock in the colors of the Irish flag
hangs straight up and down, motionless,
from the pole on the post at the ratty porch stairway.

2.
A leather-skinned couple
bickered lightly by a booth
selling straw cowboy hats.

“Whatya want with that –
you ever ride a horse in yer life?”
”No, but I’ve ridden my man plenty.”

I passed by too quickly
to hear all that followed that,
but it started with smoker’s laughter.

3.
Packs of teenagers — is that the right
collective noun? are they ever anything
but a collective noun? — roamed the midway:

4-H T-shirts
and blue hair;
cowboy hats,
(Connecticut cowboys, again!)
cowboy boots.

Unmistakable: the ones made up
of couples in first sexual union
could not let go of each other long enough
to put sugar and syrup on, let alone eat,
their shared funnel cakes.

4.
The cigar in the face
of the woman tending the shooting
at the midway game
never moved the whole time
she was spieling the skeptical
passers-by.

5.
If the nymph
described in that old song
was ever at this fair

it was not tonight –
I did not see her
among the jostling throngs.

Perhaps the song was written
about sharp faced Jacqueline
as she once was,

and her yard full of cars
is the sequel?  ”They moved
to the fair.”  Or maybe

any woman can be a song
with the right cowboy hat
and the right eyes to see her.

I woke up and found all my deep work 
had washed away overnight,
had vanished somewhere downstream,

and my brain called it a tragedy one time.
Then my body took on the form of a cruise missile,
waiting on a destroyer for flight.  This is no tragedy;

as a cruise missile I wouldn’t even think
of this as anything more than a good joke
to be savored on my way to a real tragedy.

Six weeks ago
a smart man spoke of race and told me
that what I said I was, I was not.  He talked me
out of existence, practically; thanks, smart man.

Shortly after another smart man spoke of poetry
and told me something else I wasn’t.  I’d been that for so long
it left me a little breathess; I blued like a baby.
These poems are not poems, so I’m not therefore a…? Oh. Smart man, thanks.

A smart woman then showed me something about what manner of man I was.
I couldn’t see it at first.  A piece of me is still struggling with it
but I know it will come.  I know it will.  I have to. Thanks for that,
smart woman. Smart people want to help..

Definition, negation, redefinition: smart people 
keep setting me right. Keep me smarting; get me smarter.
No matter how idiot I am, I am grateful for smart people.
They’re good at silencing so much of what of me I need to silence.

I’ve been sure of some things since childhood; 
I was this, I was this — and I was not this other thing
I abhor.  In the new silence I am learning
that I am not those first two things and I am the third.

I will learn from this in silence.  I will surrender
my childhood and its lies.  I will burn past pages born of the lies
and render them harmless.  
I will pull a real man

from the machinery of lies and manliness
and I won’t count myself 
as much of anything again,
not for a long, long time.  

The last old hawk in this town
just lifted off from the Town Hall roof

and flapped straight over the river,
rising as she went.

I know somehow she won’t be back.
I know somehow we’re somewhat doomed.

How will I symbolize vision and reach
without an animal upon which to hang meaning?

I get an itch in my arms and legs just thinking of it.
It’s not going to be the same here without the hawks. 

I’m trying to enslave myself
to other animals’ symbolic value

but they all insist on living their lives.
How dare they!  Everything ought to be

useful.  The hawks never understood that.
That’s how we ended up here.  

Far beyond the river — dim sighting:
many hawks plunging and soaring.

Such teases.  What are they telling us?
How should we respond?

Is this, at last, the last great war?
I’m ready. i present myself, representing myself.

Do you have any idea
who you really are
once you get past
the layers of caked-on
all-American way too high
self-esteem?

The only amazing thing about any of us
is that we are each as ordinary as a long day
in a garden, baking and soaking
in sweat; stinking, dirty, and part
of a larger whole no matter what we do.

You are no more special
than the next schmuck, no more
special than I am, and I know
there’s nothing amazing about me
a little hard work and rough time
won’t knock away.

Humble, humble
is the only path
to something better,
the path to losing yourself in the truth
of this astounding world: that you’re a peg
and no more,
just an inglorious, necessary mote.

The men of that country
are sick.

We don’t know
why they are sick
or how long they’ve been sick.
Curing them seems out of the question. 

Call it a country of sick men
erupting everywhere
there’s a crack to spurt from,
burning their surroundings
whenever they open their mouths.

The sick men appear
to have been rendered mostly mindless
by the sickness.
How else to explain their

comb-overs, wars,
long nosed cars, long reach guns, 
filibusters, a weaponized God, hangings,
unfortunate colognes, blood feasts,
the casual seizing of women, of children,
of other men,
the willed ignorance
of lack of consent, 

the leveraged buyouts,
the wolf pelts, the blessing of
radioactive oceans,
the balls of old oil
in the bellies of seals,

the blank-eyed drooling
in rooms full of vintage guitars
and game balls,
the blackout drunks,
the hard-engine bikes:

all the exquisite arts of suicide and genocide.

The men of that country are sick,
so it is called the country of sick men.
I was born there, live there mostly,
certainly will die there.

There are women there too.
Some of them are sick too
but mostly, I think, they are sick
of the sick men.

They have stories to tell and
you ought to listen,

but if you want to hear those
don’t ask me to tell them.
My tongue’s more than a little sick.
You can smell it a little
or a lot.  I know I can smell it
every time I speak.

To hear those stories,
get into clean air.
Get away from me,
go to the source,
and listen. It will seem 
like a different country
forever after. 

He’s like this 
at every gathering:

sullen
when acknowledging
friendly words —
contradiction by body
and face of true
response.  

Leaves people
guessing: is he for real?
serious? good? sick?
worth the bother?

Truth is,
he trusts few. 
Most compliments, 
he has found, are backed with
future darts and he has pulled
more than many from his back.

How long ago did that begin…

What a smart imperfect kid.  
What a less than complete package. 
What a festival of “if only.”

You think
you’re getting past that
with one slender hug
and a few slobbered, slippery
affirmations
because he smiles at you
a little. 

He smiles at you a little
because he thinks
you have a limited repertoire
of gestures and
do not know the definitions
of many effective words. 

Everyone present
is drowning in pity
which explains
why everyone present 
is holding their breath.