I don’t mind your drug full eyes
any more than I mind how cloudy
the steel of my own brain becomes
under the threat of smoke. I am
no hypocrite. I prize the undue mix
of clarity and deep confusion one needs
to get by in this climate of insult and
anger. You have to get ripped up like
a wrecked paper crane, unfold your awareness
in pieces on a desk, try to reassemble it;
if you need a chemical to make the glue stick,
use it. You need an herb or a pill, burn it
or swallow it. A clear head can mean different things
to sane people now and then, and now
it might mean survival to let it go. I do not mind
your sweet muddle, your gentle fog,
for the same reason I do not mind my own.
I cannot embrace the world today
without acknowledging how illogical
one must be to do so.
Category Archives: poetry
Take A Little Trip With Me
Monologue: The Nature Of God
Now and then I am challenged
to define my spirit and my beliefs,
usually by someone deep in the binary.
I see dichotomies coming a mile away:
are you a good Christian or an evil Satanist?
Are you a stupid believer or a brilliant atheist?
Do you hajj? Do you kneel? Would you
have lit the pyre or been one of the burned?
I do not speak of these things precisely
to avoid the silliness of such talk, but since
you did not ask and yet seem curious
I will say this: whenever I come to a place
where my road ends in a choice of right turn
or left turn and everyone around me urges
their preference upon me, I turn around
and go back the way I came, or I sit down
on a spot in the middle of the road
and observe the land and sky all around,
see if perhaps there is a pond or ocean
nearby, or a river or stream.
If you do not understand this
you could never understand what I might say
about how I apprehend the nature of God.
You would not learn enough of who I am.
If you decide that I must therefore be
among the ones to be marked for burning,
go ahead: burn me. Burn me
for what kind of fuel I am to you.
It seems that in your world there must be
a name for everything, whether or not
you understand it. Decide later,
after I’m gone. Name my ashes instead.
I’ll shrug off your name for me
as the wind carries me off
in small eddies and tornadoes,
in all directions at once.
Singing the Vision
honor the light inside you.
I honor it by allowing it
to cast the shadows it casts.
People say,
it is better to light a candle
than to curse the darkness.
I say, why would anyone
curse such a warm blanket
as darkness?
I say, yes, I do —
and then I turn around
and adore the spill of deep night
from which I came,
and I turn and run back into it.
I say, I am happy —
I am fully in the folds of joy,
though not without sorrow
backing it like a quilt,
like the lining of a curtain
which holds back the light
and the eyes of the prying people
who cannot imagine this
quiet, this sacred shade.
that turn life into a switch —
light on, light off, this is good,
this is bad. I say, here is the idea
the deepening. I say
both sides seem to beckon me.
That I stand in one to better see
the wholeness of the other is my
role and calling. I cannot stop singing
the vision long enough
what people say.
Crucial Bloom
In the first moment of flesh upon flesh,
spirit begins to open one of its blooms.
How one approaches that aspect of spirit afterward
depends on what one felt in that moment.
There are approved myths that tell one
what that feeling should be;
one says, one should, one feels, one does…no.
Talk to me, talk to yourself, take agency.
Let go of the impersonal, the passive voice.
If you bloom yourself after, then bloom.
If you don’t — ah, do not even listen to me. Just this:
the myths call it “deflowering” as an insult.
Take your fragrance and beauty wherever you find it.
Spirit is a different field for everyone
and there may be a carpet of flowers in yours,
or none at all.
Migraine
the first in years.
seems to be screen related,
lays me out and leaves me retching
when I stare too long
into the light and dark of it.
all I’ve got in my head
is a deep blue mistake
rimmed in white daggers
for the last several hours.
still here.
still doing it.
still staring.
this is the most american thing I’ve done today:
given myself
excruciating pain
through the act of discussing
excruciating pain
and using the source of
excruciating pain
to do so.
Retail Therapy
When I am lost and disconnected
my retail therapy
is to buy a new pipe
or flask. The process
of breaking in distracts me:
do I go with bourbon or Scotch,
dense purple or loose green? At the end
I’m still lost and still disconnected
but warmer. I own a lot of flasks
and pipes, but can always add more
and that gives me something
to look forward to.
When I’m less disconnected
than enraged
my retail therapy is
to buy a folding knife. Do I go
with assisted open or simple
old folder, liner lock or frame lock
or old school switchblade
from a disreputable source? I tell myself
it’s the workmanship that draws me,
but I know better, you know better.
I own a lot of knives: not as many
as I once did, but I can always buy more.
When I am lost and restless and need
to reach out on the deepest level, seeking,
my retail therapy is to buy a guitar.
I lose what little sense I have and
the last money in my pocket for the joy
of stumbling the same old chords over
the stiff strings of something new, and even if
nothing or no one answers, I try. I struggle
toward nothing new with the same hands
that I’ve always had, I try. I own fewer guitars
than I used to, but then again, I try less, too.
When I am broke, I write.
I don’t have to feel anything
when I write. I don’t have to
pretend it’s going to work
this time. I don’t have to pretend
I know what “working”
even means anymore.
Is any one poem
better than a pipe,
knife or flask? Is this keyboard
better for me than a fretboard?
I can’t say. I just know
I’m broke more than I’m not
so I have a lot of poems
and though I’ve not spent a penny for them
they still cost me plenty.
Reenactment
There’s a shooting —
maybe at a school or
a night club —
or an injustice — rights
being taken from someone
or a swift deportation and
separation from family —
or a scandal — a sex thing
or maybe it’s espionage
or a mix of both —
and while shaking your head
and exclaiming your now-routine
amazement and shock
at such goings on
you are shocked and amazed
all over again when your head
falls right off
and rolls across the ground
for what seems like an eon
before it comes to rest
against a Civil War replica cannon
being used in a reenactment
and without warning your head
gets rammed down the barrel
and in a blast of sulfur and flame
you are flying toward the other side
your loose and empty head
having become someone else’s ammo
for this drawn out massacre called
The American Experience
and you realize
if you had just had your head
tied a little more tightly
to something solid
like an understanding of history
to hold it down
instead of being so floaty
with reaction and awe at
the everyday more of the same
you might have avoided this
you might have at least been
the one firing the cannon
you might at best have been
the one who stopped it from firing
Liturgy
Some say there is
a singular God,
a mad male monster.
We ought to stick him
in a dumpster and move on.
Some say God
smells like grand incense and
is made of love and gentle words.
Some say sulfur
is heaven’s breath and
you’ll smell it forever in hell
to remind you of God’s withheld kiss
if you don’t watch out.
Some say, c’mon,
you morons, you children,
you can’t prove God so there isn’t one.
They shit on the notion
and laugh as they make you
wipe up after.
I’d like to tell you about
the God I don’t worship
but keep at arm’s length
because of all those people
I just mentioned
but you scare me, you
whose certainty blinds you
to how often received truth changes.
This God I acknowledge
but refuse to worship
resides in a crack in a dungeon wall,
holds a handcuff key sacred
without having hands,
seeps like groundwater to the surface
in the dark and soaks the land
before growth, but never
causes anything to happen.
I don’t understand it,
neither do you.
But clear as day
there’s the water,
there’s definitely
a prisoner singing
in the dark,
and there without question
is the sound
of manacles cracking open.
Silent Alarm
I’m so tired
of all this outrage, tongues
clacking surprise,
horror, post-verbal wringing
of digital hands
in cyberspace. I mean, it’s been
a colony for a minute now.
People keep forgetting —
one privilege of being
a colonizer, I guess, no matter
how many generations you are
removed from the first,
is that you are alllowed
to forget
how the good old gears
turn and grind and
who and how many get ground
changes, but the colony itself
always remembers
that it was built to grind.
I am trying to be like
everyone else around me
and be shocked and surprised
and wring my hands
and say the right things
but I can’t.
I can’t. I feel alone
here because none of this
seems new to me except
this general bewilderment
that it’s happening, as if
all the shrill wailing of history was in fact
a silent alarm and only some
heard it, while others have had it
in their ears from birth; now it seems
everyone can hear it,
but most are paralyzed,
and those still in motion
are scattered and separate,
grains fallen unground from the mill.
After centuries
of listening to that,
the wailing is
an insult
almost as loud to me
as the grinding.
The Stream
I keep an image of myself
as a stream on a shelf
in my chest. Now and then
I take it down and remind myself
that I was made to flow
at the worst of times,
even when I am nearly dry,
even when I’m only a trickle.
Even when I am leached full
of poison and death, I try
to see myself as a stream:
even with the pollution
I am better as a stream
because you cannot step into
the same stream twice and
that makes it hard to maintain
my accustomed level of self-hatred
for very long.
Regrets (I’ve Had A Few)
That was a time:
anyone who said “let’s go”
found a friend
in me.
I’d be ready at once. I insisted
on buying the tickets or driving.
I’d hold the door as we glided out,
a company of foolhardy beings
adrift in the mysteries of the world.
But even then I knew
I did not belong among them.
I was raised instead
to sit by the window
in a hard chair
on a sore ass
and snub the rude world
when it approached
but somehow,
I kept standing up befuddled
when it came for me
and bewildered I would walk to the door
and swagger out among those
urging me to join them and
I would although
I’d be terrified the whole time.
Now I stay home pretending
I can still be counted among
those ragged, brave ones
even as I know
I never truly was
cut out for danger,
and when the world knocks now
I hide behind my curtains and say,
“Shhh…go away…”
and I am proud of myself
for ten whole minutes
after the knocking stops,
after which I curse myself
and begin, once again, to die.
Dark Matter 