From here on the third floor I can tell he’s dead.
No neck bends like that
and keeps the head alive.
No leg twists like that
and doesn’t make a live one scream.

Was half asleep when it came —
the tornado of wheels and engine
into the corner, then the thud and 
the almost-slowing of the car
before it sped up again and rolled through.

Now the street’s a carnival of red and blue
with the roused crowd uneasy on the sidewalks
and in the windows.  Cops asking, did anyone 
see anything, and no we didn’t.
It was a metal song, not a movie, from here,

and not the first time we’ve heard it.  Mostly 
we’re a peaceful people but sometimes we get
ignorant and loud and fatal.  When that happens
we’re usually too late to the window to see it go down.
You’d think the cops would know this by now

but still they ask and poke and hope
that one of us might speak up.  And if we could
we might, or I might, or I would.  But I was late
to the window.  I try not to watch the neighbors
live and die — affording them the same courtesy

I hope they offer me if I’m the guy whose life
derails into alcohol or drugs, into just plain
screwy screaming one night, into walking out into traffic
praying someone else is as screwy as me
and will do the job I won’t with two wheels, four wheels,

or a gun.  Keep the other guy’s name out of it
if it’s ever me out there lying bent on the street.
If it’s ever me it was a long time coming, not
the accidental work of a moment. It will be
what was meant to be.  Don’t breathe a word to anyone. 

In a city square,
under the view of spy cameras,
a man reveals to onlookers
that he is preparing
to set himself on fire
to raise his despair as a battle flag,
a rally flag,
against an unjust ruler, thus shifting
from despair into rage and action —

and no one attempts to stop him,
to reason with him, to go and fetch
a fire extinguisher.

Some have asked why 
none of us moved to stop him, asked

how could we let someone self-immolate
before us, calmly, even announcing it 
before the deliberate sparking of the match?

Whatever choice we had in this
ended with his declaration.  As the choice
“to be or not to be” was transformed
into “death or freedom” we knew better
than to intervene — and really,

is that a choice at all?

In half my dreams I see a door
sacred to no two faced God Janus,
but instead
to a three faced unnamed god:
one face for out,
one face for in,
one face looking back to the world
that would have been
had I never seen this door. 
That’s the face that’s always
looking away. 

~~~~

I always wake up angrier than I was
when I went to sleep.

In the last dream of the night,
I am being beaten by a masked man.

How is it to be beaten,
he says?  I lie:
it is neither bad nor good, it has
no flavor.  

Let me spice it then for you
with more blows, different blows,
he says, slamming my hand 
in the door as I try to push through.

~~~~ 

Always aching when I wake,
always wishing I could
just go through the door into the day
happy, light and smiling.
It’s not likely to happen.

I live in this wrong world
of in or out, this or that.
I hate walking through that door.
Some days, I try not to

and those days my hands look like meat
from taking the beating
as I try to stand in between 
the rooms — clawed into the jams,
terrified of the unnamed benevolents
doing the banging.

Choose, friend, they say.
Crawl through or hang back,
but the door is here
and you have to choose
now that you know it’s here.

What of the promise of the third face,
I ask.  No one ever gets to look that god
in those eyes, they say. They die 
trying.

I feel productive, ready
for a day of work,
sweet tempered, sexy,
more than adequate…

then I wake up.

Some days, it holds.
Some days, it doesn’t…

Mondays
are why we invented God
and gave him the whole day before
for himself, 

figuring that he might be still in a good mood
the next day, a favor granting mood,
a prayer answering mood.

Mondays are most of why
I gave up on a personal God.
Mondays color everything atheist
no matter how long I spent in church
the day before.  
Mondays pinch hit for all the other days
some weeks…

yet I still am perfect
before I awaken
on Monday mornings,
and sometimes
for hours afterward,
and that’s why I still give up Sundays
to God:  it’s all for the hope of hope
and the fear of ultimate despair
that I still keep track of the days at all.

Your Current Wet Dream Of A Perfect Moment
likely includes
a Perfect Soundtrack
Costume
Set Design and
Casting

but
if you’ve actually had a Perfect Moment
and look back on it
do you see in it
anything you would have known or chosen
to have in it
ahead of time 
had you known it was coming?  

Or in fact
did you derive
your current conception of
The Perfect Moment 
from the one you’ve already had?

Is all you want in life
A Perfect Moment
that is either 
remake
or sequel?

strategy:

scare them out of
being themselves

tactics:

war on them
wail on them
point and laugh

turn their names
against them and
into curses

buy them out
assimilate them
pretend you’re them

be them
until they become you
make the whole deal into
a fake and bloated us
until
out of many 
you win

repeat as needed until 
there is no more need 

My band doesn’t make
late night long drive louder please
music, music to forget racists to,
music to smash states by,
music to study war by.

My band doesn’t make
late night all alone in the room earbud
music, music to lower your eyes by,
music to make love to,
music to make you feel unwanted after.

My band’s got a good name, even if only my band knows it.
When we’re on the street
it sounds like keys being struck
on a glass xylophone.  Everyone around us at once
gets well.  America, we’ve got your new anthem

right here.  It’s a happy crotch-based
tune, not old school though it went there once
and not new school though it’s going there now.
My band doesn’t believe in school — we like
the learning, hate the sanctimony.

My band is working for you, America,
working for your love, working for your trust,
scorning your dollars a little.  More than a little
in fact.  We bed with them because they’re warm
in piles in the back of our van.  But we’re not really

friends.  We’re not really friends with you, either.
We’re just the band setting up for the high school dance,
tearing down after the wedding,
lugging equipment to the curb way too late at night.
We’re your band, America,

with our hidden good name
and your new anthem put to the test.  We’re gonna be
somewhere else later tonight, don’t know when
we’ll be back this way, but if you could give us a call
we’ll consider it.  In the meantime

we’re not the band that makes good time music,
music to cheat death by, music to hook horns by.
We make daylight music with glass xylophones
and steel guitars, late night music with full string
sections backed up by wolves.  My band

doesn’t make easy music for this hard country,
doesn’t overcomplicate the easy parts,
doesn’t much care if you like the album.
My band’s got a thousand miles to go
before the next breakdown.

Hope you can make the gig —
it’s gonna be something.

a vine
grows around
the dictator’s ankles.
the dictator falls to
kudzu, or ivy, or
wild grape.

a bicameral congress
is eaten
by ferrets.
both houses
fall.

do you see the president
behind the bees?

all the businesses are closed
for dolphin mating,
their slick sex
destroying the fixtures
and merchandise.

and over there’s a church
which has no walls
so how is a wildfire
trapping people inside?

every artist is struck dumb,
throats replaced with redwoods;
sculptors and painters and dancers fall
in agony, their hands and feet torn from
the bark sprouting and scaling.

I am coming home
naked, hooting, calling
non-verbally, hoping you
have survived the same way.
it seems
the only strategy
guaranteed to work.

Once, prompted by the fatal flaw
of believing I personally mattered
to the universe,
I indulged in a moment of
disaster planning.  “Save me,
save me!” I cried,
under the spell of the belief
that I mattered, that I matter beyond
what I had given and given up
to the Swarm — and then, swallowing hard,
I loosed my stinger and died,
a nameless worker bee
dying for the hive to survive,
because that was my job and my role
and what I was born to do.

I came back as a human,
a fat, sad, disheveled male
with a house full of boxes
of my writing and music.
Last story written, last 
song played.  No one
apparently listening anymore — 
I’m sitting at my desk crying.

How many lifetimes will it take
to learn such a simple lesson?

Comes the day
I live past
my last possibility,

hang me out
if I have not hanged myself
through either disability
or cowardice.  

I don’t care
if you help me by stoning
or stabbing,
impressment or suffocation.  

Help me get over
if I’ve gotten
so far along the path
that there’s no other 
and no return trip, and if
I’m past choice.  

Line me up
and let me have
some last quick gift
of travel home on my own terms.

Can you feel how close we are
to such times?
Can you feel how close I am
to counting on you for this?

What’s that coming up
from the dark water?
A corpse, a crab, a blue pearl?

The teacher says,  
I spy only the blue pearl,
lustrous mystery rising. 

The practical one
seizes on how the crab once seized
seizes back.  Seizes on deniable pain.

The undertaker says,
my concern is the corpse.
Wash it clean. Swathe it.  Bury it.

In this light, which is it?
Maybe it’s all a reflection
of that storm on the horizon,

and there’s nothing down there
threatening or promising anything,
just memory playing with shadow,

trying to claim its place
before the perfect storm
begins the work of drowning.