Kids these days
are refusing to answer the phone and
thus they are dragging
the rest of us with them into
an effortless, non-verbal future
through signs and signals,
through texts and flash mobs,
through dilution and over-brief
sloganeering.

They aren’t taking “no” for an answer
when I suggest some of us
prefer to speak, use breath,
bathe each other in unique voice —
they say we’re just old dogs
and maybe they are right
but discussion is futile
so we’ll never know for sure;

they aren’t taking “no” for an answer
to any question whatsoever,
so for this and other reasons
linked to how we’re all
not getting along

I decide that it has to be,
at last,
time for
the end of the world.

I remove all doubt
about where I stand on the moment
by hurling myself to the ground
and tearing into it
to make a cave
or bunker there, a home
in the land,
not on it,
telling myself: 

if you refuse to lose
you become the “no”
they refuse to hear,
so I refuse to let go
of any chance to touch people
directly,

or at least I won’t go
without a fight.

Yes, this is what I say to myself
as I declare it’s time
for the end of times,

although to the Others
it must look for all the world
as though what I am digging
in an act of silly resignation
is my own grave,

so they kick the dirt over me
and move on.

I don’t mind that this mind of mine
takes the word “mouse”
and transforms it to “rocket” or “dagger”
or “fishing shack,”

so that the sound of their vermin feet
in my walls becomes a space race,
a war, a life on the sea.  Hear mouse,
realize everything.  I’ve learned

to live with this.  I call it blessing
and not curse, though when I thought 
the word “blessing” at first I heard
“California redwoods” and then “magma,”

and “blessing” became a vision
of forests jumping into blaze along rivers
and roads of liquid fire.  Blessing is fire
here within me.

Everything’s always in the process
of being connected to all else.
Any one word leads to another
as fire leads to ash, as flash flood

leads to canyon, as mouse
leads to dagger rocket fishing shack
or blessing leads to volcano-sparked trees
lit like candles along the coast.  

Shh, says the Universe, by which I mean
the dying willow in the backyard.  Don’t spill
all the secrets of the tangle, little mouse;
there will be blessings upon you if you do.

The more I think about how things are,
the more I wish I could stop thinking entirely —

but then I’d have to feel
and I couldn’t take that for long.

Take the case of that dog yelping
in the next yard.  Is he in pain,

hungry, lonely?  I try to discern that
from the quality of his cries.

I stop analyzing, start to empathize, and learn
it’s all three at once. I know this at once

as i can feel the howls coalescing
in the hollow at the base of throat.

Exist on the largest scale:
swallow the moon with each inhale,
change space when you breathe out.
Can a word from you change anything?  Speak it

and learn.  In particular time
this moment — your moment —
ought to shake the basalt
below your feet, though you’re standing still.

No more the tiny life, no more the exceptional
detail.  Stretch for something greater.  Thrill
to fail.  Thrill without success.  Leave behind your
dinosaur bones.  Erase the shrunken you.

you must have knocked or otherwise
fooled me into letting you in

there is no way I escaped from you
only to have you arrive and be welcomed

into my terrified arms
to embrace or wrestle for an interval 

so long since we kiss-bit
shed blood then soothed wounds

what was I thinking to let you arrive thus
included and forbidden to me but present

as no one’s ever been present for me —
full on possession down to spewing and fear

bright demon in my waist 
my center of leaden gravity drawing me to drown

holding my breath as long as I can 
only to release it at last into your own last gasp

what a pair of pistols we have become
opening fire simultaneously

without any need of a word between us
it is just exactly what we always knew would happen

On the morning I died
I was listening to…Miles…

Not to Miles in fact
but to Lee Konitz.
I suspect you don’t know
Lee Konitz, so I’ll default
to Miles and give you
some peace,
a picture to hang on to,
a soundtrack
you don’t have to think about
for the first time.

On the morning I died
I was writing.

What I was writing
of course remains
unfinished.  I’d prefer it
to be discarded.
It was just getting to a boil.
It wasn’t ready.
It wasn’t ready.

At the moment I began to die
I looked out the window.

Must I explain everything?
Will I be explaining everything
to each of you forever?
I looked out the window.
There was a shadow crossing the yard.
A large bird, a dog I just missed seeing.
It doesn’t have to mean a thing:
just a man about to die
noticed something outside
and did not recognize
what it was.

As I began to die I came up
with the next line I should write.

I came back just to tell you
that all of us end with our last line
appearing in our heads, but it feels like
just the next line.
It has no portent or finality,
just feels like a line
you should have done something with years ago
but you never had the right
place to put it.

And then…I died.

That’s it.  I died,
some stuff done,
some undone.
I got the perfect line.
I have the place for it now.
The best words.
The best order.
You’ll do the same someday.

Until then consider me
the incinerated
in the distance,
on a breeze,
vanishing.

Don’t ask for more.

More tapping,
more soft fall and landing,
more speech of dripping leaves
after rain.

More howl
to our midnight wind.
More window spatter
to our gale gusts.

More eyes that won’t
look away.
More hands making
first contact.

More rough music that makes us
terrified, exhilarated, 
dance-filled, then exhausted
and ready for silence.

More, more…
more gratitude for how painful
this world can be
but often isn’t; 

more holding, more embracing,
more firestoking, more
handing over of our coats
to those who need them more.

More long hours
of side by side play,
more destroyed beds,
more windows fogged.  

It isn’t easy
to explain this desire to suck up
all of existence
into oneself.

Enough to say
a hollow man seeks 
to be full, but
never feels that way.

In a younger time
I did my work
in late darkness,
in after hours,
fighting sleep;

at my best
in a room
with lights off,
door closed behind me
to leave
what had happened in daylight
outside.

Now,
my work unfolds
at night’s end,
before dawn;

after sleep, still
in darkness, still
in a black room
with door closed.

I once was glad
for that darkness
which pulled a shroud
over what had been;

I may be more glad
for this darkness,
a stage curtain
which when pulled back
frames and shapes
what’s yet to come.

If Eve had said

no thanks, Serpent,
I’m not hungry…but 
you intrigue me…let’s
talk again sometime…

God would have
gone to a neutral corner
and sulked at the thwarting.

If Abraham had said

are you nuts?  That
is my flesh and blood
and I’m not even going to
dignify that with a response…

God would have walked off
kicking the Biblical equivalent
of a can.

If Jesus had said

indeed I brought a sword, not a
figurative sword but a literal one,
these Romans
are killing us, let’s go…

what a world we’d have,
what paradigms would be different

if the right folks
had given God the right “no”
at the right time.

A door opens —
no, more than that: the door
to your solid home is blown open
as if in a scene from a movie

and he’s standing there, the Missing Returned:
perhaps Prodigal Son, perhaps absent Father,
perhaps Great Lost Love, the One
That Got Away, last missing link in the chain
tethering you to Who You Used To Be.

What are you going to say?
You are different, not at all 
the same person.  Drink different tea,
hold your head differently, your voice
lower, your body weaker.  Maybe you’re
a parent now, perhaps a widower or widow,
perhaps divorced or never partnered.

What do you say to the One
who defined you once
when you are no longer
who you were
back then?

You say,

welcome.  Welcome
to my solid home.  
Can I offer you
some tea? It’s what I have
these days.  
You are welcome to sit,
and certainly we’ll talk,
but close the door 
behind you first as
I don’t want anything
that might have followed you here
stumbling in bedraggled
from Beyond.

“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.”  — John Wayne before a gunfight in True Grit

According to some
mine is
always full
and
every word of mine’s 
a pistol or grenade
and

while
they may be right
more often than not

they don’t see that 
the weapon and the atttude
are vastly 
self-directed;

that any damage to others
is incidental;

that the thought
that I’ve shed blood
with my words
on purpose

is as unfamiliar to me
as the Duke’s swagger,

which on me resembles
nothing more than
a drunken, stumbling tumble
to the rocks.