if you want to understand
who that officious stranger
in the conference room is
with all those packets of papers

or the meaning of
the unfamiliar taut bodied man
in the usually empty cubicle
looking falsely bored
like a bouncer
just waiting for someone
to get out of line

or why all the human
resources staff
are refusing
to look you in the eye

then you should know
that it’s a special day

someone’s made a mess
and those folks are here
to help clean it up

or should I say
clean
you
out

Ceramic lamp on the walnut table —

clay never intended
to become a bearer of light,

but it did.  The tree
never intended to lend its strength
to the clay, but it does.

Once upon a time, the tree’s roots
threaded through a vein of clay
as they silently created its hold on the earth.
The clay had no reaction to that,
lying there underneath it all.

It was our violations of their different ways of being
that brought them together here,
their roles reversed now, making themselves useful
just for me.  I am quiet before them,
respectful of the changes they’ve been through
to end up here. 

What will I become next? 

I think about that,
nursing pain, imagining a path
not of my choosing, one that may take me
into service to something unimaginable now.

It’s the single most fascinating fact
I can imagine
that each person on this planet
has been so sensitized to some singular thing
that its occurrence can drive them to ecstasy,

and that some unknown fraction
of the world’s population
is doomed to be unaware
of it.

This is not a statement of urgency
for finding a soul mate, for
the ecstasy may not be related to
another person’s doing; rather,

my excitement comes from knowing
that their searching cannot be directed,
and that they may stumble upon their Grails
without ever realizing that they
searching, or indeed
that we were created to search. 

This is a cause for optimism.

That the fraction
may be greater than one half
is a cause for pessimism.

But you know,
I’m still glad for the search.  If nothing else,
it keeps me thinking about the gaps
among us as we nose around,

wondering what the hell we’re doing.

All you have to do
to be a poet

is to notice the way
a word slides into another,
or how it bumps against it.
Does it tickle your teeth
or break them?

Decide which you prefer.
Decide which makes for
a better picture
of what you mean to say,
or decide if what you just said
is something you meant to say.

If it isn’t, decide whether or not
saying that is what you need to say.
Decide what it is
that you say when you say it.
Get it on paper and then
decide what to do with it:
burn it? publish it? say it all again
with different bumps and glides next time
you say it?

It’s easy to be a poet.
All it takes is decision upon decision
reviewed through a clear lens
while chewing your words like lettuce,
like clams full of sand,
then choosing whether or not
to spit them out, and to decide
whether spitting them out is for your own good,
or for the good of someone you haven’t met
so they can pick them up
and chew them again.

there are mountains
under every sea
that dwarf what we can climb

we dive to their peaks
exploration there is a process
of descent

whether you choose to climb or dive
you will need to carry with you
something to breathe

whether you climb or dive
a mountain is going to hurt you
in your blood

inhale
do it
this is the way it works

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’m trying to complete 30/30 in as few days as possible.  I think I’ll be done by tomorrow…seriously.  Certainly in a week.

the best advice
I ever received
was

"c’mon, dammit,
make yourself throw up"

ok,
the best advice
I ever took

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Everyone thinks this is funny.  In common with a lot of the poems I write that people think are funny, I didn’t conceive it to be…I was thinking of advice offered after a suicide attempt.

All of our beloved machines gathered at the old farm
and dumped all their waste lubricants
into a pit lined with plastic sheets.

Whee, they said.  The old swimming hole!

Our cars looked back at us
from where we’d parked them on the fire road
and sneaked off to join in the fun,
humming more lightly along
now that they didn’t have to carry us.

What do we do now, we said,
stuck up here on the hill
without our own pots to piss in?

We’re walking home to see what’s left.
If there is nothing, we tell each other,
maybe we can start over.

But — no machines this time!
Simple stuff only.  Not even a lever,
a wheel, an inclined plane. We’re suspicious
of our own joints now, afraid
that they may leave us when unattended.

There’s going to be a lot of lying around.
A lot of thinking.  A lot of looking
at the sky, at the unmanned planes
flitting among the bemused eagles.

Loam
carried into the yard
in burlap sacks.

The old brushy pile of fill
in the backyard
hidden
under the earth that’s being spread
over it.

In a moment
(perhaps a year or two)
all of us who know what’s under there
will be gone.

A new tenant
will plant a garden
there, where we never
would have considered
planting anything.

Flowers, herbs,
vegetables — something
useful, productive,
lovely.

Who will care, then,
about what we thought?

There’s a reason
the hilt of a good knife
feels like silk in your hand.

It’s made that way
so you’ll never want
to let it go,

no matter how much gore
it accumulates.
The makers of death

understand you too well.
Keep fighting, they say.
We’ll make it easy.

Paying attention
to what the cat sees in you
is better than worrying
that your failures have made you
into a werewolf.

No point
in wasting the whole day waiting
for nightfall and the heavy moon
to fool you into horror at your changed self,
into treating yourself to absolute guilt.

Look, he’s rubbing your leg,
asking for food or a thorough scratch.
You are his understanding of love and order,

and when you respond,
reaching down
from your desperate seat on the couch
to lift him up
and offer what he is asking for,

you are that. Trust him.  He knows
more of the truth about you
than you have allowed yourself to know.

If you could say
"April Fool"
to someone in your world
once a day
every day,

knowing that it would
make everything
right between you,
even if only for
that moment,

which of the many lies you tell
out of habit
just to get by
would you choose
to disclose?