I’m hating.  I’m a hater.
I drink all sweet though a bitter straw.

Whose face is this?  I don’t know
this face.  But I’ll kiss the mirror a bit

and see if I feel it.  Birdsong
out the window: forgotten.  Tree budding

under the snow: forgotten.  I can feel it,
the kiss on the mirror.  All I can feel

is the response of the screwed face.
The sweet through the bitter straw

sliding up from the dirty glass
then down the strangled throat: whose face

is that screwing me?  Laugh a little.
Birdsong, forgotten, tree budding,

all forgotten.  Screw me, face
full of sweet bitters.  I’m a hater

if that’s one in the mirror.  Myself
I speak a little to the incongruous

nature of the tree and birdsong
so easily forgotten, though they always

bud and sing no matter the cold
and the bitter.  No matter; sweet

tastes bitter, I’m a hater, kissing
my mirror, screwing my own unfamiliar face.

Given enough attention
to pay with, one can find
the universe in a wooden spoon:

how material is shaped to an end;
how the resulting tool
still recalls and is clearly
still connected to its material;

how the tool builds new worlds.

One can wield the tool.  One
can be the tool. 

The tool can break,
be discarded, become fuel
for new materials for dark or golden
ends. 

Given enough attention
to pay with, one can find
anything in anything. 

Although my body stopped feeding
that organ known as “my soul”
some time ago,

I still write messages to it
on paper plates,
and then I eat off them
and them alone,
hoping something will soak through.

When I tell you this,
all you can think of to say is,

why are you killing all those trees?

O, how I pray
that you stop asking.
This is why
I lower my eyes
in your presence
and grit my teeth:

you call attention to the slaughter
all around me,
and still manage to entirely
miss the point.

Raise your hand
if there’s never been
a violent death nearby.

With one hand in the air
turn and look at how
alone, how
privileged
you’ve just become.

Put your hand down.

Those black feathers
that have appeared
in your hair?
Pay them no mind
until you are home alone
and can pick them out
and place them in a box

where you can stare at them
whenever you feel
a little too divine
and want to remember
how human you are.

It starts with one thing
and leads to another.
It starts here, ends there
inexorably.  It bridges
surely from one to another.

It does such a boring,
steady thing. 

It makes no bones about
its intent.  It goes —
that’s how it was made.

It misses everything
of importance.

It puts step on step
and gathers moss
after gathering moss
even as it rolls.
It aims always straight ahead
on the easy path.

The people who pushed it
believe they’ve made
a revolution
simply because some things
they didn’t like were crushed
along the way.

But look —
here’s point A,
there’s point B.
In between is the same kind of flattening
that has always been;
look away from the trail and you’ll see
the same lovely, untouched,
unremarked things
to which no one ever pays
the slightest
attention.

Sitting awake tonight
despairing
over the modern craze for precision
that pretends as if
there was anything
ruthlessly precise
to this existence:

no matter how breathtaking
its mathematical
progression or how regular
its segments seem

there’s always some aspect
of the world that lies outside
of what we can measure —

its why is so frequently
beyond us, its purpose
a mystery, its being just beyond
the scribing of numbers and diagrams;

what we behold is the effect
of some power not available
to us. 

When we lift our eyes
from the charts
there will be an aura
not readily describable

that makes the object of observation
ineffably itself; something best caught
in the emotion roused
by hearing faint and distant music,

or in the slight dreaming
that we fall into
when we have exhausted
the staring and measuring

and when we at last put down
micrometers in favor of lying still
and letting the moment soak us
in that flow that is more real
than the numbers will have us believe.

We will long then to fumble words
into long sentences and lose our grip
upon precision, dancing the language itself
into freefall that glances over the nature
of things, that makes trees and shells and atoms
come alive inside the suddenly glowing heads of those
who then in ecstasy
surrender the need for exactitude
in favor of being alive
as part of some larger,
perfect, amorphous whole.

This is when I
step back from my work
with burning eyes
and ready myself
for sleep, knowing
I have the answer for the unrest
that has kept me awake
and fretting needlessly:

the answer is to let go,
not worry about understanding
as much as I do,
and fall into the wisdom
beyond precision
that makes a flame
holy beyond all explanation
of the process of combustion
and transfer of energy,

that makes it, after all is explained,

Fire.

Perception is not reality,
no matter how often we say that:

I did not see what I thought I saw,
hear what I thought I heard.
I just laid my inner upon my outer.

If I call out the perception
as being real,
I lie.

It’s not my fault!
This is how we are raised —
to crop the visual to template,
edit the audio to reduce clipping,
make the senses agree
with the interpretation.

In other words,
I know you
only as I allow you to be known.

It’s not my fault!
Can you see that?
If you don’t or won’t
you liar,
I will cut you as I would

a flower.
Let you be pretty
until you die and are tossed and forgotten.
I can cut another I prefer
later.

If only, if only. I won’t repeat that. Instead let’s
stop being so damned
American —

seriously.  Let’s just admit
we don’t know each other
no matter how long we’ve been
acquainted.   Let’s
act like we’ve been made stupid
by the damn culture.

We have.  And so

let’s pull the pole out of the center
of the earth and let the axis of perception
wobble —

when the world shakes
we’ll have to cling to each other
and maybe then,

we’ll get past it.

hard skin
on soles:
a sign of having traveled

weak knees:
relic of prayers

loosened teeth
and
roughened voice:

damage of good living
smoke and rich food

good things left
a splendid wreck

was it worth it
you ask? 

wreckage
is wreckage

Dawn.
You’re up.
You begin to dance
around the house,
feet barely touching,
it’s levitation, almost —

the cat’s as terrified
as if you were vacuuming
and in fact your crap is disappearing
from every surface.
Floors and windows are sparkling
for the first time in a while.

This is going so well you decide
you’re not going to speak at all today
and will communicate only in dance.

At the supermarket
people don’t look at you
as they whisper to each other,

who is this fat middle aged hairball anyway?

Is this dancing,
if so why is he dancing,
and how is it
that the floor’s not shaking?
How does he do that with
his feet grazing the linoleum —
maybe in fact
he’s not touching it?
Best to pretend not to notice —
stay close kids.
Don’t get near him.

The guy at the meat counter
tosses you a steak
which you catch in midair
and gulp down
as you realize that somehow
you’re not just a dancer
but a lion too.

You know you need a pride
so it’s back to the house
to call other lions, or people
who you think might be lions,
or at least dancers
who might be recruited to the cause,
but it’s pointless work
because you only communicate in dance
and the phone’s no good for that.

They recognize your phone by caller ID
and come to your house
where they find you swirling
in the kitchen surrounded by meat
laid out on a floor that’s so clean
they want to eat off it too,
but it’s outside their job descriptions
to be lions or dancers
so once they’re sure you’re fine —

and of course, you are —

they leave you alone
with the vision of yourself
at the head
of hordes of lions
moving through savanna grass
so quietly as if suspended
just a half inch off the ground…

Your cat comes out of hiding
and stares up at you,
for once,
as if you’re not crazy.

See how distant
I am now?  See me waving
to the horizon from
the far horizon?

See how I am —

it’s like I walked as far away as I could
and then jumped up and down
shouting, “See me!  See me!”

That, I think,
explains everything
from my explosions
to my sadness to my
unruly and mistaken
hair.

Why,
I might be air itself:
invisible and everywhere.
I might be weather
that is always coming and going
and present at once.

But no, I’m nothing at all
like that —

more like the damn gnat
you can’t slap and which won’t go.
More and more like that
no matter where I stand,

or how far I run.

The righter you are
the more likely you are
to sleep without dreaming
of tomorrow.

The righter you are
the easier it will be
to commit the crimes
you’ve imagined.

The righter you are
the better the chance
that you don’t really see
the mirror.

The righter you are
the greater the opportunity
to whistle a graveyard
into your pockets.

The righter you are
the more rats you’ll have
who love to nibble
at your tiny hands and feet.

Any number of
killings, rapes, anonymous
moments of violence; any number
of shared meals and acts of love;
any art, any tossed off phrase
laid upon the wind and let fly;
any chord progression
played once
perfectly:
someone, quickly —
make a book.  Make
a movie, a recording, a photograph
of the occasion —

we’ve got to resist
the history books
others write if we are ever to believe
that we existed at all.