the perfect dive barroom
is the one without conversation
I don’t initiate

except when it gets me
beer, beer nuts, chips
or another beer

it’s not the kind of social place
I go to get social
I’m not looking to get picked up

unless that by chance happens
and frankly
it’s not gonna happen here

in the perfect dive barroom
in my hometown
where all my relatives drank 

if I see one of them here
I’ll freak out a little cause
they’re mostly all dead

tonight I’m apparently safe
from angels or scolders
I didn’t bring with me

tonight I’m apparently safe
in the dive bar, the submarine bar,
the bell helmet bar, SCUBA bar

drunk
deep underwater
and flooded with cold 

A party’s breaking up nearby,
you can tell by the cadence of the voices; 
people talking on the steps,
one group headed for the car,
the others dying to go in and go to sleep.

I’m here listening
from my nightly awake
with the nightly heartburn,
the nightly insomnia,
the nightly no soild sleep.

I don’t want to talk to my heartburn,
coax it halfheartedly to stay
in order to get it to see how badly it wants to leave
because it won’t leave, who are we kidding?
It lives to rouse me from sleep.

I don’t want to talk to insomnia,
we don’t speak the same language,
doesn’t understand why it’s unwelcome
and I get nowhere when I explain —
by nature and nurture, it has no desire to sleep.

I wish I knew my neighbors well enough
to go to their parties, to drink enough while I’m there
to make the passing out once I’m home
at least understandable, if not socially acceptable.
If I were socially acceptable, I maybe could sleep.

Half a century ago,
a fugitive miracle
of shared pleasure
brought me here.

Two strangers joined briefly in joy,
then stayed a long time together in guilt
or shared and dreaded sense of duty to have me,
though they did not want me.

Brought up to be
a good deal more ignored than wanted,
forcing myself (through a mix of overreach
and misadventure) into as many faces as I could,

I have lived a hot life of sweat and discomfort
trying to run from the accident of my birth
that they made me feel, one way or another,
each moment of each day.

Here I am, half a century later,
asking questions I was born with
with only slight changes
to accommodate the changing times:

If I am formed, how is it that
I should I not be formally acknowledged?
If I am perpetually streaming live
is that not enough to say that I by definition flow?

No matter how I affirm for myself that I matter,
I still flatter myself that one day others will agree.
That day I will try to forget
that the two who made me

never chose to see me
as little more than the regretted pleasure
that ended up meaning nothing at all
and that would not fade away.

you have the coolest winged thumbs I’ve ever seen  
you express your delight
at experiences, flavors, people, birds
by raising your hands high above your head 

you sit there thumbs erect and digits trembling
until the wings unfold and slowly flap
slowly they raise your entire weight
into the formerly gray and now lemony sky

I do not imagine the Romans
would have been thrilled to have you in the Coliseum 
hovering high above them affirming life 
as the blood steamed below

but then again how beloved is your optimism now
no one likes the overly enthusiastic anymore
we fear you are the rebuke to those ironic lives
we are prone to live 

in spite of that or because of that
I dig your winged thumbs proudly lifitng you
above the merely mild and affectless 
if i thought you could lift us both I’d hang onto your ankles

instead I’m jumping here in place
two thumbs up and jumping in place
hoping to sprout wings like yours
practicing like mad for take off

Listening to Jaco a long time
Long time is how he played
stretching time in between notes
Long Time
And all the notes took up the same space
at the same time!

How he did it — was Crzy, was Md
how some of us 
have to be
and that’s how he ended
drunk a little
and Crzy Md enough
to get himself killed

Listening to Jaco is easier
when I am not Crzy
When I am not Md
it is easier to let Jaco be it for me
But the times when I most understand
how to hang on Jaco
and limber growl lines and bark notes that yell Showtime
and skein along on the lines
and oh the notes all at the same space
so I bump into myself in the moment

those times I get why I am so loving
of the idea of a death in a nightclub
so none call it what it was

if I never get to the streets
I can still be an artist can’t I
Crzy and Md are all that it takes
then time will stretch and notes will hang
the skeins will be obvious
in the daze is the loss of boundary
required here listening to Jaco
chasing Jaco
into the unyielding night

In the warrior
a dislike of war,
a disdain for the love of killing,
a disgust with the killer self.

Yet, also,
a skill at all the art of death,
a willingness to be Death
if Death is who is needed.

I knew a poet once
who disdained the art, who disliked rhyme
but was good at both, too good in fact
not to be famous in spite of herself.

Once, the poet
met the warrior
and they sat and talked
a long time

of comparison and metaphor
and sniper’s range and lyric’s force.
They spoke of throw weight and arc
and how slippery a battlefield can be

after a war has passed, of how slippery
the world is to a poet
who’s described it often enough
in stretched and violent ways.

They make me uneasy, sitting there
with hands full of liquor, heads tipped in close,
seeming to agree on everything.
I like my poets gentler, my warriors more taciturn.

I like to see them not love each other
as much as these two seem to love.
I like my world to have a place for each,
and for that place to be somewhere

out of earshot, sight, and reach.

We awaken to 
Elvis Costello’s
“Miracle Man.”

What do you want
to happen next?

Argue again
about why the radio
was left on all night.

And what do you want 
to happen next?

Get over it, then claim
our inheritance
from a spooky old nun.

What do you want 
to happen next?

 Go on an adventure
with a better car — 
something bitchin’ and rugged.

Then what do you want 
to happen next?

Take back every instance
where I have ever used
the word “bitchin,”
and still get to keep the car…

Then what do you want 
to happen next?

Stop being so frivolous

and what do you want 
to happen next?

and easily distracted

and what do you want 
to happen next?

and get back to the story
we started with
about the adventure and the car.

and what do you want 
to happen next?

Oh, I want to be
less tired of adventure

I want our inheritance
to fall into our laps

Want the radio to wake us up
with music we both love

and boy do we need a better car
Something we can make love in

when we pause
from our adventures

and what do you want 
to happen next?

Not a thing
Nothing at all
Let’s just stop right there
for now and always 

Let’s take the money
and buy a Thomas Kinkade house
full of butterscotch light
It’s soaked into everything
Let’s eat it all up

Let’s even eat
the couch
Swallow its little spongy
yellow chunks

Wonder about what 
might happen next