You call this place
“gritty” or “post-industrial.”  

You call this place
“second rate.”

We call it “leverage.”  

As in,
“Growing up here 
gives you permanent
leverage
against pretense.”

We learn to make our faces
movie star grim just to leave the house,
just to keep you off balance,
just to hide our laughter,

and as a reward from the gods
whenever we proudly say the hometown name
a seagull in Boston fires from the sky
and ruins a Saab windshield,
a raw wool sweater in Northampton
catches on an antique nailhead,
and somewhere on the Cape
an overpriced lobster bites back.

Worcester, Springfield,
Lowell, Lawrence,
Holyoke, Pittsfield:  
feeling ya, babes.  
Feeling
the long seasons of drought
coming up wet for once.  
Feeling how long it’s been
since we started leaving home 
for the pretty places,

forgetting how good home feels,
and how handsome we are.

When we see how much makeup
they wear elsewhere,
it’s enough to make us empty a mill
and start a revolution inside.

If a crow’s awake
this late or this early,
it’s breaking news.

If there are crows out there
who have three AM opinions,
they are keeping them
to themselves.

If there are 
insomniac crows,
they probably die young.

They probably die 
young, die sick and silent,
their eyes hardening,
their bodies falling headlong from their perches —

but are killed only rarely
by the crow’s greatest enemy and predator,
the owl.

The anticipation
is killing
all of us — why don’t They
just
get it over with — why don’t They
just
do Something?  We all know
Something
is going to happen — we all know
the Score, the Drill,
the Story —
none of us were born Yesterday —
the ones born at night
weren’t born last night — 

Last night there was a moment
when we stopped waiting, when
we thought It was going to happen —

the scent of Wreckage in the air,  a whiff
of Rebuild potentially behind it, an undernote —
it was welcome relief, shouts of Welcome
in every throat which we did not let rise
to our lips
because (and again it happened)
They kept it from happening
Kept us from the object of desire 

Yes, I spoke of our desire for it

We will take a Disaster
to get to the Rebuild —
that is how we are now, addicted to
the Long Small Pain
of waiting
every day for 
The Great Chastisement
to begin

We say
Watch This Space
Something will happen
They have something cooking
We wish They would just
get it over with
Start the Flood
Bring the War
Unleash the Kraken
Set It Off
Open the Vials
Break The Seals

At least we’d have something
visible
to fight and when we died

we would have had a better name
to curse
than 

Them

You wake as a warbler
while I wait for my crow to call.

You turn from the argument next door
just as I bend in to hear.

You sing with the commercials
and I imagine all of Hollywood burning.

Don’t imagine I am immune
to the kittens and babies and laughter.

I understand how light works
because I am the host to darkness.

So stretch and yawn and rise
to meet the day with your own glow.

It is my job to speak for the dark
when its value is being ignored

by those who forget that morning
is a dependent function of night.

For the past forty-five minutes
you’ve been hearing
a birdsong.

That listening has been
like rolling silk
across your fingers.

You wouldn’t know that bird
if it flew up to bite you,
though.

Two of them show up
at the window feeder.
Which one’s been singing,

or were they both
going at it and you never knew
there were two?

You grew up with a woman
who knew individual birds
by song, face and feather.

She would not have been confused
by any of this.  She would have told you
who sang what, would have shaken her head

at how obvious it was,
at how you couldn’t be bothered
to learn something as simple

as your neighbors’ names.
She lived one street
over, and she was OK.

The morning’s finally
sinking into daylight and the bird’s
farther away than when you woke.

Maybe tomorrow
you’ll sit outside and call to them,
your voice nothing like rolling silk,

but it’s the effort
that counts,
at least at first.

Spring night: the music’s
a far cry from frogs. Wait, though;
it’s not that far off.
In fact, it’s the same:
“Here we are. And you?”

Sprung from that croaking,
all manner of beats and rhymes.
All manner of noise
and always the same:
“Here we are.  And you?”

Spring nights, musicians
do their best frog-talk for us,
tell the tales we need,
always the same line:
“Here we are. And you?”

 — w / thanks to Amy Weaver

Come fuck me till I become
elemental, tabled, bedded,
unstable, rare, noble, 
and inert after as I rest.

Come fuck me till I become
Greek pottery,
amphora so well-curved
my age means nothing.

Come fuck me till I become
not human,  I don’t want that;
I’ve been that and I need other,
I need the old and the unimagined instead, so

come fuck me till I become
the newest element to be revealed,
the old bottle holding new wine.
Fuck me from science to art and back. 

smell that love rising,
a plant coming up from the dirty dirt
breaking into sun and struggle.

it’s the medium of explosion,
the go too far,
the split a foundation,
the crack a fundamental.

it’s a whip wrench cracking
and then turning a nut
on the juggernaut wheel.

it’s a crack of narwhal horn handle
on the parasol raised
for a forgotten brilliant day.

when a god finally exists
that god is going to want this
for sacred groving.
that god is going
to go full-on backslide ape for spring fever.  
that god is going
to want love in a box for burning
on the sterling light altar
of get around.

that god will get someone to start something
and the something is going to get bigger
and the dirty dirt is going to get paved and 
struggle’s going to be big, bigger than last year.

No
resurrection! Dead,
stay dead!  Don’t the living
do enough for you
already — follow your rules,
teach your stories,
bury and burn you good
when you’re allegedly done —
no!

No
resurrection — we don’t need you,
dead ones.  
We had enough of you
the first time, you’re dead,
and life’s truly for the living.  It’s
a glow, a ripe scent, a bright flow.
Our grief blinds us to it but
it is there — it is there, and it’s not
yours.

No to the resurrection!  

If you’re so certain
of your need to stay drunk on life
that you won’t accept death,
at least do us the favor
of starting over as something else;
don’t simply come back.  We don’t need you.
You’re becoming a bit of a bore
and it’s not too much a stretch
to say you ought to be ashamed —

someone new
could have breathed that air.

early news,
lead story:
there’s been a murder
in town.

pretty woman says
these words:

carrion,
underground dance club — 

oh,

Carrion

is the suspect’s name,
not the victim’s? it’s not a description
of the aftermath?

somehow disappointed —
wanted the story to say
something about names and  
destiny,  something hard:

an underground dance club
a stabbed dead body 
a knife found
in a killer’s possession
and carrion, carrion everywhere

somehow disappointed —

where is this underground dance club?
i have a right to know 
if it’s nearby. 
a right to know
how I’ve been missing out.
i have a knife in my possession
but it didn’t kill anyone and
i would gladly trade it for a cowbell
and go dancing after hours
among the dead —

somehow disappointed — 

shit,
i wanted the news to be a poem
and instead it’s just the news.
dead meat in the dirt
outside the club.  
someone under
arrest. nothing else to say
about that.  i’m no poet,
not this early.

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.