People keep saying
self-care, self-care,

then back to the front,
back to the struggle.

What do you do if
self-care is the site

of the struggle? When
the struggle is about

the medications being
too dear, the therapy being

uncovered. When the struggle 
is about the job being

too scant, the money
no longer elastic enough.

When the struggle is
about your face betraying 

the nations within you.
When you ache hard

to get back to the war
you’ve always known

was yours to fight, but 
other aches pin you

to the couch. When you long
to rise on fire for those you love

but they instead stroke your hair
and pity you with their honest eyes

as fear wells up in your own,
bubbling up from former depths

that silted up long ago, 
that have never been dredged. Self-care,

self-care, then back to the front,
back to the struggle. That’s what

is said.  But self-care, self-care,
your eyes always on you,

is how you got here,
and now

you look up into the honest eyes
of those who pity you and say:

how is the battle that I am
worth fighting? And back to the front

you go, struggling
to answer that question.

Something has occurred to me.
I don’t like that. I thought I was done
with that. I’m 73% of the way
to average life expectancy and it’s
an imposition to be pushed too hard

to revive critical thought and 
discernment. Really want mostly
to slip through the remaining 27%
I’ve likely got left and settle into bed
one last time — oh, a hug would be

good too, and less pain, and less
concern about the hardness of living —
but here I am and here’s this new thought
about what I’m supposed to be doing,
and I don’t like it. In fact I’m terrified

of it. I feel like it’s going to rob me
of at least 75% of the 27% of time
I had left and take up 93% of my energy
and that will leave me less than I need
for hugs and slipping into bed and 

ending up comfortable when I’m done
breathing. Ideas and passions notwithstanding
I thought I was done and now the times
put ideas into my heads that someone 
ought to be making real, but why 

it has to be me I don’t know. I don’t
think it’s a God thing — I gave that up.
And I don’t think it’s a sense of obligation
to people in general — have you met them
in all their wasted splendor and sick clinging

to maintaining life as they know it? Somehow
it seems to have fallen to me and maybe
ten or fifteen million others to act upon
this thought that’s occurred to us, and 95%
of us are likely sitting in bed or at a bar

or at a kitchen table tonight while the family sleeps
and asking themselves why they’re 99% certain
that this new idea about what’s to be done,
this song of mayhem and disruption, needs us
to sing it, and how do we start, and isn’t there someone

or some cohort of someones
who know better than us how to do it
with 86% more efficiency and less injury
to themselves than we would incur, and 
why is it that these ideas always occur

to people like us who can look at what’s being asked
and understand what would be required of us
and understand the ridicule to come and the depth
of violence and pain to come from being
the ones with the ideas and the calling 

to follow through? All we want is to get through
the 57% or 35% or 68% of life expectancy we’ve got left
with as little fuss as possible and here it comes:
all the fuss, all the weight, all the dread and all
the obvious fear. We sit up in bed or at the table

or at the bar and say: we were told there would be
no math and look, there’s math.  There’s math about
calculated risks and divisions and separations and
the number of minutes we could stand to be tortured,
and the arithmetic processes of how to time a revolution

perfectly. I’m a long way from happy about this. I never
wanted this hugless, bloody, spitfire examination
that I will likely fail. I’m not prepared. I didn’t study.
I’m neither smart enough nor strong enough. I’m 
73% of the way to death without it and here it is

presenting a word problem: if a world view
gains power with 400% more hunger
than it showed before — it’s always been hungry
but now it seems fatally famished — and zero
concern for others,

and another world view starves
as the first feeds, how many of us
will it take to choke the first one dead,
and how long do you think it will take us
to get enough hands around its gargantuan throat?

Released from caring
for a moment about
the state of the world

through the act of cleaning
all the kitchen cabinets
and reorganizing pots

and pans and too many
coffee mugs and making
donation piles and nodding

in sadness at the need to 
simply deport some things to
the recycling bin as if they

could be something other
than what they are and have been
for their entire lives and then

collapsing into the couch
coated in sweat and my sugar’s
been stupid high of late and

I should go to the doctor but
the co-pay is beyond my means
and it feels like there’s a nuclear war

under my skin until I shower
with the water turned up high and hot
drowning me almost like a hurricane

but thankful that I left the TV off
and stayed strictly away from the news
and kept the personal separate

from the political

On a late summer day
that should have been 
a hammock day, a cookout day,
I went to war.

In the privacy of my home
I raised an ancient rifle,
long unfired, to my damp
and blurring eye.

I did not dry fire it. That much
I recalled from long ago; I set it down
and stared at the manual,
began to calm myself

by cleaning it as prescribed:
barrel, chamber, magazine,
bolt, carrier, spring. A peace
beyond understanding took hold

as I reassembled it and
once again sighted down its length,
all the time reminding myself
that this was last resort, ultimate

surrender to reality; I know
for years I would have thought it
more fantasy than practical plan
but practicality has failed, planning

has failed for too many of us now;
when I was done I sat and stared
at the news for a while with the rifle
in my lap, the ammo still boxed

on the coffee table, the empty clip
beside the box, waiting to be filled.
I held onto comfort, telling myself
at least I had no need or urge

to raise the shades and load and fire
randomly into the neighborhood,
hoping to strike an enemy 
without seeing them fall —

it seems right now they are 
everywhere and friend and foe
are too often the same in face
and word. Then I said: this is insane.

I put the rifle away while trembling
like leaves on the poplar trees upon which
I hang my hammock in which I
am lying now, reckoning with how

the newly cleaned and now loaded
weapon I’ve long claimed to abhor
no longer languishes in a chest
in the spare room, but instead

is stashed and waiting
on an obscured
but easy to reach rack
inside the closet in the hall.

I’m trying to get past hating the life I’m in
though I admit I find it bracing
to race through it with my fists up

It’s been pretty easy of late to get my fight on
It’s all I can do to keep from screaming for violence
as some kind of rapid response solution

which I’m told might feel far better
but be less effective than slowing down
and talking out the various issues and concerns

with sweethearts on the far side of where I’m at
who still keep my well being in their hearts 
or claim they do while doing all that’s in their power

to close down all the nourishing parts of my life
and the essence of this place where I find myself now
is that I’m halfway through a marathon

that should never even have been a sprint
that should never have gotten out of the blocks
and I’m not talking about the politics of the moment

or the previous moment or the one before that
I’m talking way back at the starting blocks when 
after first contact and first settlement and first

Thanksgiving and all the other self-serving myths
of first steps that were in fact kicks and stomps
so I’m beginning to think that all the calls for peace

and love and moderation and patience are in fact
exactly what all the kicker and stompers want 
so in the running of the race they’ve started

they can reach back or over
and with an outstretched arm knock us back
while barely breaking their own deadly strides

so why in the hell am I still listening to those
who believe in loving the enemy even as they kill us
when instead my blood sings the truth that we are

almost to the end of the race so there’s no shame
in wanting to cross that finish line
on my feet and not my knees 

not to mention the fact that I’m not even
trying to win this race I never wanted to run
I just want it over