Look into these woods and see
how old wheels creased a road
into the yielding earth.
Follow it
to where it peters out
in a clearing and 
a cellar hole.

New England’s
full of these — gray stones
stacked into the cold ground.
Memoirs of lost families, 
homesteads.  

The new woods
around them conceal failed orchards
where deer rejoice, a little drunk
on fermented, fallen fruit.  

Sit here a while
on the ruins and think of seeing
Nipmuc or Passamaquoddy ghosts,
though they are gone.  These woods
aren’t even the ones from their past.

Pretend it’s all still happening here
because it’s all still happening here —

seen the foreclosure rate lately?

When the phrase
“I want to hurt him”
comes into your mouth or brain
about a variety of men
as often as it has lately,

it must mean you’ve been spending time
on the Web,
on the TV,

in the good old US of A.

Some will deplore this, but 

man up — surely,
someone’s got to do it and
you’re the obvious choice.  You’re so
calm, usually,  So level headed.  You
can be trusted with such wet work — 
you’re no hot head.  

I’ll bet the eagle 
on the Great Seal that given
a sheaf of arrows and an olive branch,
you’ll choose to beat the offender
with the olive branch.  

When your picture comes up after the fact
on the Web,
on TV,

in the good old US of A,

please try and have the grace
not to be shocked 
at what they say about you.

If given one
I’d lick a gun
some nights.  
Other days
might see me
rub a knife sharp.
I’m no liar — weapons
please me, steel my
blood.  I’m not alone in this,
I know why:
there’s a tangible
thrill in my sack
thinking of craft put
in service to
a dark reflex, 
the second oldest urge
after the obvious.  
Is there shame in feeling it?
Yes.  Is there an action pending
from it?  No. But lie about it?
No, nay, never.  That
would embody it so swiftly
that I’d stop thinking
indeed.

the radical self
loves itself into
distraction from what
it needs to hate

the radical self
loves itself into
comfort with ideas
it needs to spit out

the radical self
puts itself into
positions from which
it needs to escape

the radical self
leaves itself no room
to pull away and twist
when it needs to change

I have been a radical self
who put himself into
a cage with his animated
need for validation

I have been radical
and eaten at myself over
the contradictions I embraced
when I needed to just stop

this once radical self
loves nothing completely
and is safer now
I like what I am well enough to know

when to hate myself

Some mythology was made to order
for me, some was not.  I won’t hold myself back
when I come to the border

between these; instead, I cross.
I’m an ignorant bastard mostly
so it’s not a graceful passage. I toss

my baggage over the wall
so I have everything, then drag
my privileged carcass over. At once, I feel small.

Short of that, though, I’m game to see
what’s what though I don’t yet know where this is
or how it gets along without me.

To step outside of my own 
into others’ or no one’s —

to be in the great empty
of no possessions.  To be

conscious only of that which
no one owns, or at the very least

is oblivious to our claims of possession: 
lawn, garden, backyard.  To be present

where that is meaningless.  To look at it,
and be with it, and be of it until

what looks back is conscious in a way
we haven’t recognized, but which

is now obvious and familiar from a past
we did not remember at all till now.

To be present in the world that treats us
as another consciousness, not the only one,

is the one true honor we can afford to seek
on this planet of medals and titles.

Good morning, unsettled awesome — 
my whole body just cracked like a knuckle
and I rose above the bed
to the cobwebbed dirty ceiling.

There has to be a big reason for this:  magic
wasn’t necessary to reveal the extent of my sloppiness
and casual approach to housecleaning.
Maybe the spiders want to thank me for their habitat?

Am hearing voices.  Am beginning to shiver. 
Am wondering who died and made me delusional
or divine, and will there be a sign to tell me
upon which interpretation to rely?

By the time you are old enough 
to know what to do,
there’s no one left to do it with.  

Take this last funeral
for an example: you were driving home alone from burying
a murdered friend,

someone who had just been in the wrong place
at the wrong time.  You stopped by the roadside
above a creek choked with deadfall,

and in spite of your suit
and good shoes and your blinding tears
you climbed down and cleared it

so it ran free and clear again.
You went back to the car,
scrambling through gravel, 

climbing over the guard rail carefully,
sitting there, chest aching, knees aching,
muddy and scratched and is that a tear

in the sleeve of the shirt?  There is
a tear.  You tell yourself
“right place, right time, wrong clothes.”

You laugh, you cry,
the friend you just buried
would have done the same

but there’s no one left in your life
to give a damn
about this well-set gem of a moment.

It’s time to go home, change, read the paper,
eat, change, clean the gun, do some writing,
change one last time, and get ready for bed.

Ay, roomful of columns of eyes
and mouths in Fibonacci
swirl, and then I spy

a half-chewed apple.
The apple is breathing,
or it was until just now.

The mouths were after the apple.
The apple was some being
that only looked like an apple.

I cannot speak of the eyes
in the nautilus cloud
above us all.  What they are,

what they saw before I came upon all this.
It had no interpretation before I saw it
with my own eyes.  So, call it murder

or bad dream or 
something I ate.  
No matter.  I blink.