we once fantasized
that we were
born feathered

always saw ourselves
with wings
with layers and wisps aflutter
all around
as we lifted off

assumed
that we could take with us
everything we always carried
expected our bones
to remain solid

forgetting how hollow
a bird actually is

and none of us noticed
that all birds land
eventually

today I saw you
still in flight
but with plumage rough as a wet hen
as you nattered on to the nestlings
that live on inside you

we were too young
to fly
when we laid the pills
upon our tongues and swallowed
with our heads raised toward
mother sky

in all these years
you have managed not
to come down to where we are

and you’re so tired now
I almost want to draw a bead
upon you and
fire

in the hope of offering some rest
hoping that your last feathers
will give you their long withheld comfort
as they fall soft around you
when you stretch out upon
hard and inevitable ground

in this new world, the one we attend
upon arriving from our funerals,
it becomes clear that we are not
unified on how we choose our passions:

at times in our lives we were guided to things
that were in and of themselves pleasurable to us,
while sometimes we were taken by the comfort
of filling holes in ourselves, and the things

with which we filled a hole meant less to us
than that the hole was filled, even for a moment,
even though we knew we would be empty again,
and that we’d look for that filling again.

so, while the love of food for some was honest love for
the oil of cured olives fat on our lips, or for the rosemary sprig
pulled through the teeth and savored for its burned
and its bitter, for some of us all that mattered

was how eating capped the dry well inside us, and the flavor
of anything was secondary to how feeding
forced hunger back into its cave, so we fed often
and unwisely, not heeding the taste or the joy in tasting.

each of those backward passions often led to another:
the yearning for sex stopped up our lust, the lust was a way
to stop the indifference to our own lives, indifference a stop to loneliness,
loneliness a way to hold off surrender to the larger urge to bond.

in the new world we are not that fragile, not as subject
to the whim of the vacant moment. we see the others as admirable,
complete before now, brought here to validate the holy pleasing
of pleasure as its own end. the first good day of wholeness has come for us —

but in the remnants of our old minds we wonder: was there something
to be said for those of us who were never full, always expecting the next best thing
to come and make us whole while still in full life, and did we learn something
in that search that the others did not see? did we not fill them

with the fruits of our searching? we made the things that made them
happy — the books, the songs, even the food. we were the people
who they met and loved without imagining the depth of our desire
to just roll over and fall asleep, content not just for once but for always.

it doesn’t matter now. in the new world, we do not invent reasons
to seek what is in front of us. we pull grapes into our mouths and
are happy to settle for just one, believing that perfection is always present…
still, to some of us it is unfortunate that the next one cannot possibly be better.

I’m not left handed but I wish I was
so everyone could envy me my special-
ness and my cool factor and how
I play the guitar the same way Jimi Hendrix did
or that I’m so good to have spent so much time
creating my own adaptation to life in the
righty world. Right? Right! Righty-right, righty-right,
the whole world seems so righty-right that I grow tired of it
more and more often and I reach for the door knob
with my left hand once in a while just to feel better.

I’m not a happy man but I wish I was
so everyone could envy me my special-
ness and my uncoolness as a happy man
would be suddenly cool the way I worked it
with a steady smile and a glad hand playing
the breaks the way no one else does, as if I expected
them and just did the opposite of what was customary.
Happy now, Tony? No? Then, GET HAPPY!! Let me once get joyful
as a hymn in a whitebread church or a public television cartoon,
and while I’m not a happy man I can imagine myself having a moment
once in a while where I could fake it well enough
to capture that smile on my own face.

I’m not much to look at, have no distinguishing
features other than a big gut, a grey beard, and a petty gift
for making the sound of my voice stick in a head
for more than a second or two past the end of
a conversation, but if I could be the handsome God
of someone’s religion, if the real God could let them love my own special-
ness more than I can love it, I’d be so glad to be their poster boy
I’d even cut my left hand off to spite my smile.
Give me one jealous bone of my own to gnaw and I’ll find a scrap to sustain me.
Give me one of your leftovers and I’ll warm it up for you.
Give me anything that isn’t mine and I’ll make it my own.