1.
The potential attacker fell,
jaw slightly askew.
That was a hell of a froggy noise he made
as I relaxed and let the bat
slip from my hands.

I suppose I could have waited
to see what he wanted,
to be certain he was hostile,
before I started swinging.

He did not report it, though.
I guess that says something.

2.
She was that remarkable,
wasn’t she?

Damn.

3.
I was offered, once,
six months in a foreign cottage
with nothing to do but write,
nothing to do but collect a stipend
to sit and write in a cottage overlooking the sea,
a cottage in the middle of nowhere,
a cottage so remote there was no
electricity beyond what a generator
could provide…

at 21, with all my work ahead of me,
how is it that such an offer seemed
so not ideal?

4.
I should have cut him
right across his good white face
just a little, just enough
for what he said and what I did
to be commemorated
every time he saw his reflection.

It sounds awful to say it, still.
But it is the truth.
I did not stand up for myself
regardless of consequences.
No matter what might have followed,
I should have.
I should have.
I should have.

5.
These greatest regrets,
it seems,
turn upon
a pivot of violence and art
and sex.  This afterthinking
is logical revisiting of poor
or ill-considered forethought.

6.
Except for this one, today’s,
an afterthought
not drawn in fact from thought,
but from a pure, deep fear:

I should have come
to the doctor’s office
much, much
earlier.

Done at last
with satisfying
the masses
with all that explaining

I shed the last
of my complaint stained skin
and emerged
still me and
thrilled with this me

though this current shine
on my familiar face
has made me  
scary to others

as I seem to them
somehow crueler
than before
somehow
not worthy
of a past sad self 
who was kind
when kindness
was deadly to me and tolerant
of poisons that nonetheless
also were killing
over time

Done with that 
I say to them
I understand your fear
of what you don’t understand
but you can love me dying
or hold me at arm’s length
while I learn how to live
in this new armor
with these new weapons

Those are your choices
I’ve made mine
I can’t go back

I don’t believe you,
sky; I don’t believe you,
stars, moon, and most certainly

I do not believe you,
Mercury,
you fleet hot liar.  

For some of us, “Mercury
retrograde” is code for
“this stuff happens everyday

but sometimes
people pay more attention to it
than others.”  For others,

it means “my whole life
is retrograde and 
I can never tell the difference.”

“Retrograde” screams a question:
who made the sky-pictures
of the West supreme?  Who chose

these myths to exalt
when every culture’s
that’s done the same

has drawn
such different
conclusions?

I’ve let myself become
so sour about all this 
I don’t even trust sunrise

to lift this weight
off my chest.
I’m so sick of all this

I want
to stop speaking
to people for days.

I’m so tired of all this
I might be ready
to believe.

The dream game is offered:
chess, or some variant,
played with the tiny severed heads
of friends, strangers, and celebrities.

What if I refuse,
I ask the darkness that gave me this.
Suppose I go back to sleep
and shove this nightmare aside?

Do you want to be a knight
or a bishop, the darkness responds.
I’ve got many players lined up for this one.
Play or I’ll put your head in the game.

Play or be played — this old line again.  Still, I refuse.
At once I’m asleep and bleeding between the fingers
of some stranger who looks, oddly enough,
completely at peace.  Of course, in his game, I’m a pawn.

Never fails:
at some point
boys gathered together
will tell each other
warrior tales.

It makes them so drunk
they offer each other
rogue proclamations and vows.

They say:
if my enemy’s head
were made from memory foam,
I would make my best impression
by punching him. And after 
he went lights out, after I rocked him
to sleep, I would lie pillowed upon it.
That would be sweet.

They say:
this one time
I was a hawk, I spotted my enemy
from too far away even for a hawk
and I fell out of the cloud upon him
and though he was steel himself
I dragged him into sparks,
and after I did not feed on the scraps
but left them to rust, 
and that was sweet.

They say:
one of these hours
I will make an enemy 
and break an enemy.
I will be an enemy
and we will be
silver and gold, and metallic 
though we are we will still bleed.
All of us will bleed.  Then I will 
drink my enemy’s blood and refill,
and it will be sweet.

They know enough already
to have started seeking
the sweet
in the sour world ahead;
with any luck,
they’ll learn soon and
with minimal harm
that a bruised head is a lousy pillow,
that blood tastes like copper
and to grow up is
to stop confusing it
with nectar.

red revving my
redlined engine, revealing
my dormant speedlove,

this one reminder of how I miss abandon
in this life strangling now
upon practicality,  of how I am

in my dreams still ahead of the curve,
high against the wall on the bank
of daytona’s turn 4, or alternately how

I am somehow also still ray charles
or his piano, sister rosetta tharpe
or her white gibson, krupa or his skins.

red revving the suv in the driveway
right up to the redline on the tach,
backing down before I burn something

out, before I bust something, before
I have to come screaming into
the too-narrow street on two wheels,

stereo up and subwoofer banging,
proclaiming that I am the last
suburban daddy of high, and

no matter how sub par the job I hold,
no matter how slow the commute tends
to be, no matter how swiftly I turn 

the volume down so as not to wake
the kids — NO, in fact,
I will not do that — kids need to hear

how daddy can still
boil like whitewater
when wildness beckons — that wildness

matters across generations
and danger matters in a small pocket
of his being at the least —

it matters, reinvention matters,
beings like me
who dream another being

for themselves still matter,
still are utterly alive
as they practice for someday

long after
it looks like
someday will never come.

My left hand became a web of roots.
I seized a rock, pulled it open
all at once instead of over many years —
thus, the power of will over instinct,
of intent to destroy as a power itself.

You may not question the truth of this.
All you are allowed to do is accept
that my hand gnarled and twisted and rooted
in the stone and pulled it to pieces, that I wanted to
do that, and that what should take years took seconds.

You are not allowed to shiver.
Fear is forbidden as disbelief is forbidden,
as is any knowledge more detailed than I’ve already given
about how the deed was done.  It’s enough,
I think, for you to know what I am capable of,

or what I can convince you I am capable of.
What if I am lying?  Enough to know I thought this up —
this rock breaking, this tree-handedness, this secrecy.
It’s a religion if you believe me, a threat if you don’t.
Or perhaps I’ve reversed those two?  No matter;

just don’t show fear and everything will be fine.
Everything will be dandy;
you can watch the rocks shattering.
We can hold hands while it happens, my beauty;
we can party, and bullshit, and party, and bullshit, and…

I was moving ahead swiftly, nearly skipping,
flying over everything, heard noise
from behind, turned.

Saw a leash caught on a thorn tree
and a white dog upon it thrashing,
howling, speckled with his own spit.

I recognized him.
This dog was mine,
was named for all the dark acts

that were done for me via privilege and in my name;
whether or not I did them myself,
I owned the hound and couldn’t ignore him.

I untangled the leash
and took it on though he bit me hard.
To this day as we walk

(I can neither run, skip, nor trot anymore)
he snaps at me and at all who pass, and never stops howling.
I strain to hold him back simply because I must.

There’s nothing heroic in it.
I own a crazy white dog
and his name is

“The Stubborn Adherence Of Hidden Favor
On The Path To Success.”
Like most show dogs’ names,

it’s too unwieldy for daily use.
I just call him Whitey
and keep one eye on him always.

Parents lie awake
in late darkness
thinking of
the previous day,

afraid
for their children, afraid
of their children. 

The children
are all asleep.

Perhaps
they’re also all
lucid dreamers,
so in control
of their fantasies
that they may as well
be real.

If these children’s dreams
do become real?  Well,
if that happens…well,

if dawn is coming,
if dawn ever comes again,
if all are wrong and it comes again,

if after this night
something recognizable as dawn
can possibly still be coming,

no one in this town
is likely to recognize it.

Certainly,
no one
can feel it yet.

If I could still dance
I’d dance a pavanne to coax back
my recently lost cheer and gumption — 
I’m sure they’re still nearby,
just barely out of reach.

If I could sing as I once did
I’d holler a big band blues shout
five times the size of my latest defeat,
and I’d drown out the whimpering
I left in the dust around it.

I can’t dance or sing anymore; 
it’s a pity that every trick in my book
was dependent on those lost skills.  Living well,
they say, is fine revenge.  Trust me,
it’s not as good as actual revenge,

which is a harsh word 
for the moment I’m in
but it’s a harsh moment.  
I want a little revenge on age,
just to still its laughter.  Just to ease

the ache of the memory
of singing and dancing and abandon
and calling them both “the answer
to a bad week.”  I’m out of such answers now,
though I can still hum and tap my foot a little

and that may have to be enough now — 
the ability to follow along
when some are living well.
Alive, responding, remembering;
it will have to be triumph enough.

Pray you never see me
coming toward you with my baggage
of wrong mistakes

not like Edison’s correct mistakes
that got him ever closer 
to the lightbulb

nor like Tesla’s right mistakes
that weren’t mistakes at all
but quashed revolutions

Like them I pulse with invention
Unlike them
I never patent anything

because I make the wrong mistakes
inasmuch as none are original enough
to sustain hope on the way to success

You will never read about me
in a book of genius
(except perhaps in a chapter

called “Cautionary Tales”)
You will never see me in a documentary
(perhaps instead a reality show

called “Really Missed
The Clue Boat Here”)
You will never see me

again 
unless I screw this up 
too

A voice or animal spirit
or other being of great impatience
screams into my ear until I wake up,
demanding that my next words
must absolutely be
about how karmic debt
is always carried in blood.  

I attempt to resist. I say 
that I don’t believe that it is, that we can rise above
such impulsive belief.

The great impetuous force
screams again that my own belief
is subverted by fact, and how
is blood not an obvious river for inevitable war
when it carries so much iron?

I am not yet awake enough to argue
so I draw my knife.
How are we now, Great Force?

It screams that I am to address it
as Lord, that I am to listen
and obey, tht I am to await further instructions
as it wails around seeking 
a justly identified enemy past or present
to hate and damage up to and including death.

I want to ask if we are doomed, but it screams
that I need to be writing. Tales of atrocity, it screams. 
The enemy’s name will as always be added when it is known.