Sunshine on
mental illness
is a good thing mostly.

But it’s just like rain.
Too much
can stimulate a train of mood

that runs off the track
and kills what’s in the way.
Too little and it withers.

How much good
is enough?  You can’t
know.  That is the problem

with being this kind of sick.
There’s no clear path from diagnosis
to cure.  It’s not like tending a garden.

No instructions for this much shade,
this much sun, this much water,
what food and how much to feed.

What triggers blight
is unpredictable except in broad terms.
Don’t push it, whatever it is,

is all you can tell yourself.  And
how far is too far?  Only way to know
is to watch for failure.  Success

isn’t measured
in bloom or fruit
but by dying in a reasonable season

for dying.
A sigh of grieved relief
is the only validation that matters

and seeing yourself mulched
when all is done is all you can hope for.
It’s enough to know you’ve not poisoned the ground.

A giant heart, perhaps a cow’s,
soaking in brine
on the window sill.
(It’s always better not to ask.)

Immense cat
apparently sleeping on the counter
with a cutting board and cleaver
next to him.  (It probably means nothing,
but why chance it?)

His sudden move to block
access to the fridge when you ask
if there’s anything cold to drink.
(Oh, he’s just very private, or perhaps
he rarely cleans it?)

His hands twisting in his lap
the whole time you’re speaking with him,
his knee a piledriver ramming the desk.
(Not used to people staying more than a minute,
maybe?  Too self conscious about that smell?)

That smell…
(but who doesn’t have something they are
embarrassed about?)

Such a quiet man usually, nice to all,
keeps to himself.  (His voice, so eager
one moment, so guarded the next,
and always the shaking leg…)

You say goodbye — neighbor talking
to neighbor.  But you’re filing away details
you’ll never mention until
the news trucks park in front of the house.
(If they ever do…which, of course, you highly doubt
will happen. Why would it?)

To build a case
against insomnia
so as to enjoin it from
canceling you out
you may purchase drugs or
forget how it feels to be
awake long enough that
you trick yourself into
sleeping and thus render it
harmless.  You will have to do this
often.  Relentless and vigorous
defense is required.

To choose a tattoo
that will not be an
embarrassment shortly after
its application you may need
to look at how it feels to lack
a thing you’ve never had.  It is
often difficult to imagine
how a patch of your hide could be
improved so deftly that such a lack
could be erased.  Impulsive tattoos
may be representative of illusory
absence felt strongly but only for the time
it takes to nod your head at a stencil.
Their disappearance would reinforce
other moments of loss you’ve suffered
and it is therefore usually advisable to keep them.

To reject a parent
is to demonstrate a certain respect
for their historic presence or absence.
It is usually easier to maintain some contact
even if only on high holidays
so restraining yourself
from all touch
and declaring any bridging
of the distance between you unsafe
is a way to honor the place they have made in your
experience even when that place is a hole or a wound.

To own a life you have been given
is a rigorous responsibility
that demands a certain acceptance of folly
and exceptional flexibility in the areas
of communication and self-care.  What may seem
on the surface to be various forms of harm
may in fact be completely logical
if not always comfortable adaptations
to facts and environmental factors.
You will choose often.
You may never choose wisely or consciously

but you will choose.

I saw it on the street tonight
glowing like a Ronette’s dress.

It smelled of gunpowder and genius,
even from a distance of some yards.

A domestic rabbit picked it up
and carried it back to its hutch

to nurse it to adulthood, mistaking it
for a baby.  When the rabbit’s back was turned

the wig rolled itself into a tube and slipped away
through the mesh, humming madly to itself.

Where’s my head,
it kept singing,

a lying tune as large as that myth from the 1960s
that everything was poised on the brink of utopia

until Sirhan and Ray and Oswald
and those guys in the Audubon Ballroom had to bring guns

into the picture.  Where’s my head, where’s my gun,
where is my warm gray cloud of sound? Phil’s wig

packed heat undercover long before all that happened
and now we know that there was always a touch of the bad crazy

looming behind the innocent songs.  Be my baby, dammit.
Be my baby, be my baby.

I watched the wig
scuttle away.

I’m no longer some wascally wabbit,
it sang,

at last I’m the streetwalking cheetah
I always knew I could be,

and I like it.

Orange is to pheasant
as tangerine is to quail.

How easily lives may be peeled and consumed.

Bridge is to raft
as train is to car.

How tightly the ends of a trail are tethered.

How perfect the art of comparison
that sling can be to singing
as Goliath is to shuddering earth,
that arrow can be to correlation
as bow is to itinerary.

How obvious are source and destination,
how chilled the observer standing between them.

Blanket is to genocide
as lovemaking is to terror.

How easy it is to draw forth the latter
by infecting the former with a deadly pox.

Pebble is to bullet
as tomcat is to wildfire,
as stinger is to charring,
as bootblack is to shouted orders.

How we know these things without ever having learned them.

As fern is to memory,
so clay is to despair.
As leaf mold is to an enduring fear,
so a bone on a littered beach
is
to a whisper of crumbled lullaby.

How easy to remain ignorant
of how all things are speaking to one another.

I’m as irrelevant here
as country blues
in a metal club

even though I’ve met
the devil
too

and made my deal with him
long before
half these imps were even born

I love you, dead actors,
rock stars lost in plane crashes
and drug hazes, writers full of bullets
and unseen masterpieces. 

I love you, Otis Redding, Buddy Holly,
Eddie Cochran, Kurt and Jimi and Janis.
(I don’t love you, Jim Morrison, but that is because
you were a dick, not because you were unfulfilled.)

I love you, Ernest Hemingway, George Sanders,
David Carradine, David Foster Wallace, Anne Sexton,
Sylvia Plath: all you did and said was genius
lit by the fire that took you from craft to ash.

Something there is that doesn’t love an old artist
who does a life’s work in a complete lifetime. 
Something that sees that
as invalidating the notion that is is dangerous to be an artist.

If we don’t celebrate the pain,
creation looks too pleasurable, and then
everyone would be doing it.  Who knows how many people
would turn to art if there were not such cautionary tales?

So love to you from me, all you tragic figures,
you lovely bones, models of what I’m supposed to do
if i want to reach a personal best:
I have to get rid of the personal part.

I see myself, dying to be on top of my game.
I can die myself, going out on top, thinking that
the going out is all it will take
to get there. 

You were doomed
to do this before
you ever picked up a pen.

Your first word wasn’t “Mama” but “apple,”
although by that you meant “Mama.”
No one could see that even then,
you thought in metaphors.

You read from cereal boxes
before you learned to eat from them.

You cut yourself wide open whittling an arrow
with a Bowie knife at six, and still remember
the sight of the bone
in the center of the cleft in your thumb,
and thinking of that now,
it should have been clear

that you would be hurt
every time you tried to create something,

that you’d open yourself up
on impulse, just because you could,

and that you’d always reach for the biggest tool
to do the smallest work.

Fat pen in the hand tonight
and all that blood still inside.

What a gift, they tell you.
What an inspiration.
How you have moved them all.

That scar
still hounds you
every morning at breakfast,
a note in plain sight telling you
to stop wasting time eating
when words are still everywhere,
and you still haven’t explained
why “apple”
is another word for
“mama.”

so
you think you can dance

you can

you shouldn’t be fooled
into thinking otherwise by
these hardbodies
all air and fire
slow burn turning to flash power
with presence of mind
and uncanny kinesthetics
reminding us all
of those occasional moments
during the best sex of our lives
when the body did exactly
what the body was asked to do

if
you think you can dance
then
you can

think of all the great dancers you know

grandmothers
rotating their wheelchairs
around awkwardly tuxedoed grandsons
at wedding receptions in VFW halls

spontaneous office party freaks
loudly regretting they had that last Jagerbomb
but secretly thrilled at the cheers and screams
busting out like firecrackers around them

construction workers pirouetting
over the piled up prefab sections
of the first new house they’ve worked on in a while
while sorting out which bill they’ll pay first when they get paid

that baby girl shaking her tiny butt to the loudest radio on the block
until big daddy scoops her up and she giggles
and buries her face in his shoulder
while he bounces along to the beat

same baby girl a dozen years later
catching hold of something bigger than the stripper pole
and one tuesday afternoon in a half-empty gentleman’s club
making one man swear off ever seeing another dancer after seeing her

a greasy man doing a driveway oil change
timing the turns of his wrench to some old C&W twang
and only sliding out from under the car satisfied
when the song burps up a pedal steel epiphany

dropout in traffic
on steering wheel drum
hands and hair flying
in heavy metal tarantelle

if you think you can dance
then you can
the only time you can’t
is when you settle into
the can’t
of your couch
and let them convince you
that you’re wrong

there’s nothing wrong with imagining
perfection and admiring
the journey toward it

but if someone with an agenda
about picking your soul’s poorer pockets to make his money
ever clowns you
into telling yourself
that any dancing that is not perfect
is forbidden

get up off the couch
and dance
all shaky heart and floppy fingered
dance
all blisterheeled and trippy toed
dance like someone died and made you
gene
cyd
elvis
shakira
michael
or mikhail

you have always been a dancer
everyone dances

even if just once
all alone
in a bedroom
in front of a mirror
transformed
and deathless
breathless
in motion

Ten empty cans of Dr. Pepper
are tossed into the bin
to be carried to the curb,
every one of them a discarded
Rosetta Stone.

You don’t know which one
you were draining yesterday
when you noticed that the last poppy
in the front yard had bloomed,
after all the others
had already dropped their crepe
and begun to turn to seeds.

If you could only remember now
how seeing it made you feel
young again, how you made yourself
a promise to play more guitar, drink more water,
eat better, love more carefully and with greater focus
on what comes after the loving is done.

You swore you’d look for hope
in the last place you’d seen it.

If you could find that one can
and hold it to your lips again,
pull one last warm and sticky drop from it,
you would remember.

But you don’t and you can’t.
All you see is that ten cans are empty
and only two are left in the fridge
for today.  All you see is that you need
to buy more Dr. Pepper,

so you make a note of that
on the pad
on the refrigerator door

and go back to sleep.

It was
going to be something.  Something you
expected to happen,
even if you didn’t know what
it would look like, sound like.
How it would be.

Something
that had rippled the lake lying still

just a moment before,

a monster or a nymph
under the surface,
just out of reach
of verification.

Something,
it was going to be
something.

There are nights now when you can’t sleep
and all you can do was stare at the pillow
and imagine it cooling as you left the room
to tend to —

something, something

wailing and wet
but exactly what you had desired
even though you had tried to picture it
and failed.

Something in you is breaking open —

it would have been something,
something worth having, a voice
asking for you and you alone.  A face
not seen before.  A potential
grown from your own possibilities.

Something that won’t happen, now.
A plan deferred for the moment or the ages.
Something, you keep telling yourself, something mine —

something tangible, real,

something as alive as you suspect
you won’t be again,
not for a while.

A French plane crashes in the Atlantic.
Auto plants all over America prepare to close.
The last survivor of the Titanic dies.
A doctor is shot to death in his church,
presumably by another religious man.

It’s keeping us up at night.
Peaceful sleep is an endangered species.
Soon churches everywhere will be holding
round the clock services for bleary congregants
demanding that prayer and supplication start working again
at their usual job of keeping hope afloat —

because it’s sinking, isn’t it?  What we knew
and counted on is disappearing under wave after wave
of unfamiliar tragedy. ( Or, rather, tragedy
once unfamiliar to us all here, in this place.
It’s not like people haven’t died before, or been killed,
it’s not like industries haven’t failed before.)
It hasn’t been the same since the Towers fell,

we keep telling each other.
We tell God that all the time too.
We beg Him to put them back up.
We keep reading the news to see if He’s been listening.
It’s hard to say.

Some of us,
supine and insomniac
in the lightless tent of our worst imagining,
are afraid that He is listening,
but to someone else this time.

Some of us believe He’s dead, or vacationing,
maybe in the south of France.
(Maybe He was on that plane?)

Once in a while,
someone points out how strange it is
that we should care so much about
the specifics of who is dying and what is failing.
People, they say, are dying and killing and destitute
and scared and angry and they always have been.
It’s always felt like hell to be alive for some.
It’s just been a while since it was our turn to feel it here.

We usually do something to the ones who say that —
nod at them before turning our backs on them,
or else we kill them.  The difference, we tell them,
is that it isn’t supposed to be us.  And when we say “us,”

we include everyone we like to think of as “us,”
the most mutable category in our world.  “Us”
changes.  It gets bigger, smaller, elongates,
closes in on itself late at night in our cold houses,
blows out its own walls when it’s sunny and warm and
all is going OK.

The news keeps reminding us of what “us” means.

It’s a plane full of people, maybe some Americans aboard.
It’s our very own auto industry coming back strong, maybe.
It’s the last link to the last iconic tragedy disappearing
and leaving us with mythology we’ll have to make ourselves.
It’s the doctor dying for his cause, the killer killing for his.
It’s saying that it’s all gonna be alright, and warm, and sunny,
once we get over this rough patch,
glimmers of hope out there,
it’s saying
shhhh…

go back to sleep…

but we can’t.
The sound of of that new tower
being built
is keeping us up.

Stumbling along in the twilight
still wet from the fear that
this path will end
in the same place the old one
ended, he understands

that it’s out of his hands now,
as this downhill trail
has become steep enough
to keep him from turning back.

Behind him were boulders the size
of mansions which he’d had to slide down
and cliffs just high enough to jump from
without dying, though the landing
had sent a shock up his legs to his chest.
He’d never get back up again.

Night-running now.
Here it flattens out a bit
but the roots of big pines
ridge the packed dirt underfoot.

Owl calls in the trees.  The birds themselves
unseen.  Twigs cracking twenty paces
off the path, in the moonless dark.

Ahead is the thunder of the river
cutting the bottom of the valley.
It’ll lead him out if it doesn’t kill him.

He strips off everything but the shoes
and runs faster.  The plunge ahead
will freeze him but it’s all that’s left to do.
There will be no need for modesty if he comes out alive
and if he dies, he won’t care about how it looks
when they find his body.  He’ll end up
as a story of folly
for the ones who might come after.

Only he will have known
how it feels
to hit the water running.  To forget
failure and success.  To fall
into the impersonal night and become
one small part of the Whole.

To chill down as he smashes
along in the current, the pain fading.
To see the stars as he goes blind.
To be alive at last.