If only I could tell you
everything I know
about this space
into which you have come

and see how your face might change
as you learned of what is in
those dark corners
and got a glimpse under

its shadow-born foundation
to see the hard stone
it is built on,
I might feel better

about how I breathe now.
I might learn to inhale
without fearing the worst
has entered me.

I might imagine
exhaling no trace
of poison into
your available air.

Instead, wordless and unable,
I sit and wait for you to just feel
the same nameless
everything I know.

It’s all I seem to be able
to do: this waiting, this stunted
breathing, this fear of full living.
This selfish dying within

that offers you nothing
but precipice.
It is unfair to assume
that you should fall when I do.

Any time at all, the sacred.
Over the moon with that which calls.
Behind the diner, making God.
All night. Staring at the ceiling. Unable to breathe.
Break syntax in case of emergency, is what the doctor said.
Pick up after. Leave it as good as it was.
Did you wash? Are you clean enough to be jewelry now?
Want to see you, sparkler. Want to see you, altarpiece.
I require nothing from you, sacred. I take you whole.
Whole and puzzled and here we are at church everywhere.
Profane left behind, mundane made sacred. You’re the priest.
Also, the deity. Also, the adversary. (Also, no adversary, no deity.)
I am coming to look you in the eye and beg you to stand up.
Stop pretending you are anywhere else.

At the drop of this season’s
first red leaf

I was no longer
what I had always been

and appeared
to those looking on

as something other than
surely human,

a figure obscured,
backlit by evening-slant glow.

Dear friends, fellow citizens
of this hard-changed world,

know how far we have come
and how far is left to travel;

know as well that I see you as
more or less the same way.

I assume we are still
the same as we were before

but, tempered now by isolation,
shifting light and cooling air,

we have somehow
moved closer to becoming

implacable, pure spirit; humans still
but now grimly enhanced

by a sense of how little time
we have left

before all around us
grows terminally cold.

I am not a fancy man
Just a man bound
in service to
necessity

To stay there
I drink
a pot of coffee by sunrise

and by this I mean
neither a pot
of French press
nor a pot of artisanal brew
poured from some new invention designed to extract
the floral flavor from some ancient strain
of mountain grown wildcat shit bean

I mean instead
that I drink a pot of coffee
made in a Mr. Coffee using
whatever decently farmed bean
is on sale in whatever market
I went to on my way home last night
from whatever
last rideshare I gave
or long return commute I made
from some far too far away
per diem contract job
I just completed

I drink a pot of whatever coffee I can get
that will pull me awake before sunrise
after too little sleep

then sit down to steal some time
for trying to tell the truth
about beauty and justice
and all the good abstractions
we live for
before heading into the concrete

terror at unpaid rent
nagging pain in my teeth
worry about every stranger
I let into my car
who might carry not one
but every virus
the memory of
every sugar shock
that laid me out
for lost days unplanned

I drink a pot of coffee
not for its flavor but its effect
and ritual
I can’t afford flavor
I can afford effect
and can make some comforting routine
out of the gurgle and hiss
of the old machine

All I look for from each day
is not to curl into a ball
or end up laid out
on a cold bed
to never write again
or work again
or love again

Flavor is a luxury I can’t afford
to seek

though I do remember it

Behind Mr. Coffee on the counter
is my grandmother’s stove top
Bialetti moka pot
and behind my regular drip grind
is a can of Lavazza espresso grind

for someday
some afternoon respite
with a blank screen
and a free from worry hour or two

When I see these things I tell myself

Soon

The junk drawer in the kitchen.

Behind the microwave cart.

Under-the-counter, in the cabinet
where you store your mother’s
battered stockpot.

In the roots of that immense oak tree
near the high school — not the old one,
the new one where there used to be a sandpit
where you partied, where you learned to fuck
without killing yourself on the stick shift.

In the depths of a pond
where you think someone must have drowned;
it’s so dark, so cold; keep diving, resurfacing.

In a group photo on a travel brochure
for a place you may have passed through
on your way to a conference for some job
or another back when you were working.

As you search, if you find little
to give you hope of success, go non-linear:

is there a sitar in your name? A
giant zither, a sidewinder’s hiss on sand?
Were you ever in a Cave
where the shadows looked like home?

Start at someone else’s beginning and try on
all their varied history of names. If any of them
resonate, perhaps yours rhymed with theirs
at some point; sit up all night practicing,
interrogating your tongue as to what feels familiar.

You were somewhere once.
You might still be there. Retrace
your breath. Your first atoms, long ago
shed, have not disintegrated. Someone’s
got them. Look in someone else
for yourself. Tear them apart
until you are satisfied you aren’t there.

Are you certain
you are not in the junk drawer?
Look again.

Did you move the razor blades
in the medicine cabinet
to see what’s back there?