I’m not going to stop talking
until the shadow of the wheel
stops turning after the wheel does
I’m not going to stop talking
until the last panda goes negative
and black and white themselves reverse
I’m not going to stop talking
until the judgment pops its cork
and the fields of the sky bleach out
I’m not going to stop talking
until the islands become mobile
and flight from the flood is impossible

You ought to listen

I’m not going to give up my breath
until it is all but spent on futile gestures
and the last rattle of change fills my pockets
I’m not going to give up my hands
until their grip is gone and the ease of tension
breaks them open and they rest at my sides
I’m not going to give up my eyes
until light becomes too expensive to collect
and the darkness all around is all that’s free
I’m not going to give up my blood
until it’s all that’s left to wash the floor
and I need to clean up after the warriors are gone

Are you listening

I’m going to stand here with my mouth open
until somebody comes and drags me down
and my eyes fall from my astonished head
I’m going to be the hub of that slowing wheel
until the tread crumbles and the turning stops
and the axle bows and splits and is dropped in the sand
I’m going to champion and protest and call you out
until you can’t sit still without bleeding into your chair
and you slide to the ground relaxed and ready to sleep
I’m going to make the answers as loud as I can
until the ceiling caves into a wash of flowers
and the earth drowns in a haphazard funeral of song

If you’re listening and listening right
you’ll join our band of angel apes
You’ll evolve as fast as your ears can carry you
You see me up here now but soon with luck I’ll disappear
into a wall of pink and white and voice and action
I mean nothing without the listening
I hope I become extinct as soon as I possibly can
for what I do will only be worth doing
until your listening takes hold and soaks this dirty world
in sweet and attentive rain

Big Homie, they called him,
and yeah, he was big.  Around for years,
he got rounder through all of them,
and spoke more slowly over time
since it took the words longer to get out.

Big Homie used to balance on knife blades when he talked
and they’d watch to see how he didn’t fall. 
Now he’s bloody all the time.
His feet look like a cheese grater, red prints
on the barroom floors tell them where he’s been.

Big Homie used to eat lightbulbs like candy
and when he opened his mouth shone
like the Yukon at midnight in summer.
Lately he’s taken to speaking in the dark.
Lately he’s taken by how he can only talk in the dark.

Big Homie, they call him. Big Homie, whose light
and shadow aren’t on speaking terms anymore.
Big Homie, who one night knows he’ll get home
and the lamps will not light, the shadows will sink
into pure black, he’ll be alone, and they won’t care.

Crawling through a long swamp after growing up among jackals,
I came upon a house bone, relic of a family that had thrived at some point
before it vanished into the muck.

I put the bone in my hip pocket (after tossing the flask aside)
and carried it back to where I could plant it in dry rich sand.
If a bone could be a seed, I reasoned, it might grow into a home.

But all the bone did was stick up where I could trip over it
and I fell often, and hard, and bruised myself yellow and brown
and ached every time for a long time, so that I cursed the very idea

of home.  I tried to fertilize it and it did nothing.  I tried
to redesign my own place around it, stared at the blueprints
till they bled, and still the home I desired would not rise.

So I go back into the swamp every day and slop around seeking
that flask I dropped a while back.  If I see another bone,
I leave it there.  Better it should rot unaided by my fumblings.

Don’t ever give a reader
all the facts.

A good falsehood,
larded into the meat of the tale
like a dose of belladonna,
will make the readers’ pupils
grow wide.

They’ll convince themselves
they’re seeing deep
because of how much light
is getting in.

You’ll be a hero!
And
a million times
a million lies
inlaid in a base of truth
makes a heroic body of Work.

Make it vast enough
and it’ll give you time,
while the adulation and praise
for your vulnerability rolls in
to sit back
and try to differentiate
what’s a lie from what is true
at your uncomfortable leisure.

In bed now with Virginia Woolf
and Sigur Ros, after a late snack
of fresh blueberries in yogurt,
after an evening
with the Home Run Derby, after a day
installing blinds and washing windows
and writing while listening to Thelonius Monk and
Travis Tritt and Common, after a breakfast of
whole wheat bread spread thick with jam,
after the news from the BBC World Service
woke me into this day…

You of course now believe
that by knowing my list
you know me,
and you can go coring through it
to seek meaning, for in our time
it is our right
to define a man
by the products he says he uses —

unless of course I am lying
about some or all of them,
and in learning that you begin to know
something else
about me: that I am
as untrustworthy as any other poet.

You may then wonder
why I chose to mention the things I did mention,
and what that says about me,

and at some point you may begin to wonder
what it says about you
that in that list there are things you like
I may not, or that I may like
and you do not, or that you don’t know,

and then think perhaps that I do not know
some or all of them either,
simply choosing to mention them
and then identify the mentions of them
as potential untruths
in order to assist us both in reaching a point

where the only thing there is left to do
is lie awake before dawn,
at sea without anchor,
utterly disgusted with poem and poet,
stare at the ceiling in complete silence,
swept pile of books in disarray on the floor
beside the bed, radio broken, computer off,
stomach growling with hunger
that will not abate,

and begin to understand that some voids
in our understanding of each other
cannot be so easily filled.

If there had been more rain
there might have been a chance
that what grew so little might have grown more
and the cats and badgers that stopped hunting and rooting
in the sun savaged yard might have stayed at it longer
and there might have been life in the house

If there had been a little more snow
there might have been cover
over the dirt in the wind beaten yard
and the sparrows and the raggedy squirrels
might have left tracks in the drifts
and there might have been life in this house

If there had been a five hundred year storm
to lift this pile of loss from its foundation
there might have been a chance to see
the worms and centipedes scattering from their holes
and it might have been easier to understand after the fact
why whatever was here did not constitute life in this house