ash
now
smoldered
for hours
without losing shape
much as a good cigar maintains
its barrel while on fire
then her one breath
drawn through
and what looked solid
fell
became a gray cloud
became soft earth
white feathers dissolute
on glass
waiting now
for wind or breeze
or another breath
will fly
Rich misunderstandings
full of bile and consequence —
frosting
on a rotten cake. People
stare across barbed cable
at each other, standing on soapboxes
built on fear, on arrogance,
on ignorance and outsized grievance —
wailing
you don’t know me, how dare you,
you’re not my kind —
who are among your kind?
Look like,
think like, bleed like,
weep like, feel like.
Like’s got everything to do with it,
and like is so brittle now
it breaks easily on a letter of law
or practice. In the sulfur cloud
that dusts up after the word snaps
we lose each other. We can’t see
how like we are. We can’t sense
each other in the poison twilight,
and everyone’s got a knife.
In Western Massachusetts
it can get noisy in the mountains.
We are not Boston,
the residents always shout,
and neither are we New York.
Come and play but dammit,
don’t claim us and overstay.
But Boston and New York
always want to pretend they are pioneers
when they come out to visit or squat
in Western Massachusetts for a weekend or longer.
Whoop dee do, yippie ki yi yo, they rough it in Noho,
they don’t stop in Pittsfield except to pee or poo
on the way to or from Tanglewood.
Isn’t it quaint
and semi-wild, this backyard of ours,
say New York
and Boston? We’re so fortunate
to have this. Such pretty colors
and how these empty mills become
so classically ruinous for us,
it’s special.
Chicopee, Holyoke, Springfield
send messages up the grapevine
to Deerfield and Montague: slit
their angsty throats in the night,
but get the money first. You, Amherst,
Sunderland, hide the bodies
out in Florida, scatter the credit cards
in Williamstown, get back and go
to ground. No one will look for you
in winter, they’ll just head
for Vermont, and they can have them.
If there’s ever a Berkshire Revolution
it won’t stay noisy for long. Western Massachusetts
will leave that to the cities. Instead
the war cry will slip like paper into
a fast stream, melt,
disappear and not be missed
until spring, will be forgotten
by next fall, when it will
start again. And it will start again
and again. It will never end.
He left the minors years ago
with an injury, has a full sleeve
of rust on his throwing arm,
refuses to play
in the company softball games.
On the wall behind his big desk
a black and white photo of himself
stretched out mid-pitch,
obvious bulge
in his cheek
from the chew.
I know for a fact
he still chews.
Sometimes
we have late meetings on projects
and since he trusts me,
he doesn’t hide
the Styrofoam cup
taken from the short stack he keeps
in the bottom left-hand drawer,
cups which
(when we’re done
and headed home)
he carries to his car
to be discarded somewhere
other than company grounds.
Under the pilot light,
under the stove,
under the linoleum,
there is something
that’s been there a while.
I don’t know what it is.
I’ve never seen it or smelled it.
I couldn’t describe it to you.
But it’s there, something dropped
by someone who lived here before me.
It’s an old house, built
in 1900, and maybe the thing
under the pilot, stove, etc.
is something that old too:
a coin, an earring, a scrap
of paper with half a letter
or word missing and no chance
of figuring out what it might have said.
I know it’s there,
sopping with grease and meaning,
kept warm by that small flame.
It has to be there. There’s no way
I can live here without having something
of those who also lived here
remain in my space
that was there space. It’s luck
or curse or just remnant, relic
trash. Nothing disappears
and nothing stops affecting me,
ever.
One of these days I might fix the floor
and you bet I’ll dig it out and hold it
in my hand. I’ll put it back before I’m done,
and I won’t bother adding something of my own —
better my own addition
be accidental as well, the perfect piece
of my life left behind for the next tenant
to puzzle on late at night;
though he or she
might never understand
what that feeling means,
it’ll be good to be alive
and present here
for a long, long time.
The money’s got legs!
It’s heading for the door.
Stop it! Tackle it and wrestle it
and make it submit
or seduce it. Lick its ears
and if you’re inclined that way,
its chest and groin.
Make yourself believe
it’s love.
One way or the other
you’ve got to arrest the money’s
escape. Detain the money
and lock it in a secret prison.
Torture it if you’ve got the stones.
Make it give up secrets you can’t trust,
pursue unproductive lines of inquiry,
then come back and slap the money around.
The money speaks a foreign language.
You’ll need a translator, one you can put
utter faith in. Listen to what it tells you!
It’s terrible how much the money knows.
It’s not possible that all your secrets
are in the money’s possession.
All this would never have been necessary
if you had just cut the money’s legs off
when it was young.
It would have just laid there.
It wouldn’t have caused you any trouble at all.
You could have outrun it
any time you wanted to.
Gold and then silver —
this lake under first the sun
and then the moon.
If you had been there,
if you had seen
that alchemy of light,
you would have wept
for the passing of the day
and then the coming of night.
We are so different!
I have tossed my gold
into the dark waters
while you’ve held onto yours —
and while I am the moon’s servant,
I won’t shed my silver tears
for her, or for you.
I am unadorned —
no jewels for me
as this alchemy dresses me
in precious shine.
Keep your day and your gold.
I have all I need —
naked under my moon
and stars.
Tags: poems, poetry, meditations, love
A good friend
spends his weekends
liberally applying
bacon grease to his arms
and drawing swirls in it.
He stinks. He plays with the patterns
constantly. He leaves stains
on everything. He’s always happy.
He calls himself
the pig tattoo king.
Yes,
it’s odd. But I’ve met
people
who swill money
like chocolate, coat themselves
in dirty metals pulled from the ground,
smell like rare flowers
crippled with salt,
build small honesty into huge lies
to keep people guessing
and off balance.
What you see is what you get with him.
That’s more than you can say about a lot of folks.
I never liked Seattle.
Too many of the homeless
looked like my father.
In Southern California,
there are seventeen faces
shared by everyone
and I couldn’t tell them apart.
Albuquerque and Gallup
filled up my rearview
with insistent new ghosts
who claimed they were relations.
Austin and Dallas
made me lonely
for those I’d never known
and I knew I’d find them
if I stayed too long.
Kansas City has a bad neighborhood
or two or three, they told me at the hotel.
They all felt bad to me.
Chicago laid itself at my feet
and then swept my leg.
I left my bags on an El platform
in December, in rain,
and never went back to get them.
I was robbed in New York City,
by New York City, of all I had left,
so I went home.
Then I was home,
one haunted room full of avalanche drums
and a slim face pinched in the closet door.
I couldn’t wait to go again.
I know my tribe
is waiting for me in bus stations
and airport bars.
We don’t talk much
and we like it just fine that way.
A nod and a flick of the eyelid
is enough to make a stool or a bench
home,
which is where we are
when only we are there.
I’m taking the best bite out of your life,
screams the dirty little tooth.
The myth that either the heart or brain
is paramount keeps the tooth amused
with its throne hidden in plain sight. The tooth
kings itself on your nerve endings
and leaps into the red square. You fall
wincing into the black. I’m taking a bite
out of your life, screams the sharp little tooth
as it sticks you a second time. The old story:
you’d give up a small fortune for relief
from that broken bastard. It’s no game
to go a-hopping in pain around the board
in thrall to the little king. I’m a bite
of your living, screams the shard of a tooth
one last time before you yank and toss it.
It leaves a raw hole. Game over? But you can’t keep
your tongue out of the space.
I still rule you, calls the missing tooth
from afar.
A claustrophobic trace
in her couture of the day
A fear of walls closing
upon her body
Curtains of cloth
flow and melt
across her thighs
There’s enough room to move
She looks good this way
Not afraid at all of constriction
this way
Her face a door
her eyes keyholes
on two locks
The prairie wind within
coming down from the far mountains
whistles through them
Stirs me
My shirt suddenly too tight
My hair in my own face
I want to run
and not stop until she says I may
It happens all the time:
a bad seed cracks
but never sprouts;
a failed hatchling remains
curled and rotten
long after shattering
his shroud;
and a man
at a counter wolfing
eggs and bacon,
staring ahead with red eyes,
thinks he is the same.
He chews meat and swallows toast
and sucks down coffee, cigarettes,
booze, smoke,
suffering,
curled in a wretched ball.
He would love for someone to bronze him
and make him into a trophy.
Maybe it will happen
next Saturday night.
Tags: poems, poetry, meditations, age
Your
micromanaging God
isn’t real to me —
mine is not concerned with my personal salvation
and I thank my God for that
My God lets me be to find my way
and is no security blanket
no anchor or storm flag
for that journey
has no care for my individual well-being
says I’m well-made
and if I fail it’s my failure
and lonely or insecure
are just my first petty words for recognizing
my small place in the only thing
that matters —
The Aggregate
Oh, far better to not matter as a person
to surrender the antimatter ego of belief in heaven and hell
to know that the only true sin is to stop another light from shining
to laugh at torture as divine test instead of bowing before the torture device
to be an easily sloughed off cell in the Mass Body Of Light
to serve the Glow and not assume
that if I am seen by God
it will be as anything more that a glint
I am the Nothing
the Small and Inconsequential
I am glorious enough
as a tiny piece
of a material creation I trust
to make its way without the need
for intervention
I’m so diamond
the mirror is terrified
of me — no, not that,
not that glamor —
I’m so oak,
acorns rush to my bosom
even after I’m table and chairs.
So coal tar shampoo,
so rough washcloth,
so pumice soap,
dirt’s gone and put me on wanted posters.
I’m so eggplant
eggplant drunk dials me
and whines,
“Why don’t you ever call?”
Hard, ruthless, delicious.
I’m the Wild Boar Of Sunday Morning!
No, not that —
I’m the smile of the mundane
that knows
you don’t get far
without stopping for me.
Hedge shears at this hour? No.
Some bird’s scissor-chirp. Nice to think
of the neighbor hard at work, though.
Is the street collapsing? No.
Trains, jostling in the near yard
of the downtown terminal. Nice to think
of an earthquake out there
changing everything, though.
Can’t feel anything inside yet
with certainty.
How’s my aching back?
How’s my aging bladder?
If I move too much I’ll find out,
so at first I don’t.
What time is it?
I must have swept the alarm clock
from the bedside table
with a mad arm sweep
sometime in the night
so I’ll guess: at best, it’s six AM.
Since I’m awake,
I’ll get up to write,
make an early start;
I find seven-thirty on the stove,
the microwave, the coffee maker.
The once-pliable concrete day
at once sets up hard.
Now
I need painkillers,
a pot to piss in,
coffee, silence,
metaphors, effort,
and wrong answers
from which to refashion
what I thought I was sure of
not ten minutes ago.
Dark Matter 