House brands rock
They do the job
They meet the need
if not the want

Knockoffs rock
You can’t tell what’s what
unless you’ve seen
real more than once

Counterfeits rock
Maybe they’re cheap but 
a cheap watch tells expensive time
at least for a little while

With that Bentley grille
on your Chrysler
you oughta drive it
like you stole it

Oughta steal something
The way you have the sizzle
without having the steak
oughta be a crime

but it’s not
It’s all for the best
in this best of all
probative worlds

He is nostalgic
for the thing he used to call
his “imagination”

which has devolved
into a game
of pickup sticks

in which the sticks
are splinters of things
he thought long ago 

and picking them up
is harder harder and harder
as their sorrow is heavy 

as trees felled
by deep earthshaking
and wide airbending

that no longer grow
but lie there in random patterns
where they fell 

Flavor,
the spirit of the tongue
dancing with the ghost of
what’s being consumed,
is a fickle romance;
days on end I long for the company
of vanilla, salt, and pepper,
and then banish them in favor of
adobo, cocoa, curries, hablanos.

Flavor,
inside me as much as
entering from outside
occasionally demands as much travel
as it can stand,
but it always falls back
on good bread
and rich cheese
and the stately, almost stationary taste
of cold water.
It demands, in the end,
to come home
to the universal
that is found everywhere.

Coffee and soft skin
under hand
for breakfast.

For lunch, a good thought
well-expressed,
sweet steamed fish and rice
in a gray-white china bowl.

At dusk: figs, apples,
prosciutto, wine, a poem
on the tongue, an embrace
on the steps that lead
to the garden —

and at night,
before sleep,
drowsy agreements and
a tart left over
from the previous day’s
festivities.

Not every day,
not most days —
not even often.  But
often enough
to know what it means
to go without
contact,
without nourishment.

I have a voice
that recalls
the Sears and Roebuck catalog
and the guitar
perused ordered and delivered
to our distant farm
played passionately for six months
and then discarded into a closet
as chores and other interests
took hold

I have a voice
full of herds of starving deer
running wild on abandoned pastures
pawing through the snow
to eat the smothered grass below

I have a voice
dithered and dimed by college arguments
and first love 

I have a voice
later smoked brown by long work nights
spent on projects no one remembers
discarded by bureaucracy
before implementation
with not a word of thanks or praise

I have a voice
painted blue by self-induced chokeholds
rendered red by angry desires
purpled in beatings and yellowed in age
and bleached back to empty before
one word’s ever uttered

I have a voice
which doesn’t feel much like the one
I grew into
which has no trace of inheritance
I can detect

which is no more than a wind now lost
only knowable by the last trembling
of the slightest leaf it once stirred
somewhere

is my old guitar
playing now?  is it still 
my guitar all these owners later?
is it any different at all
from any other catalog guitar
for my having owned it once?

Lifted into my scar
for a moment by a random touch, 

I’m raised from sleep
into the pain I once felt.

Settling there for now,
I tolerate it well enough;

if there’s one platform
I understand, it’s this one.

Like a body before
the burying times, 

I’m laid out upon this scaffold
to decay and dream.

All this merely from touching
a thick white line on my body

that I barely think of
most of the time.

When I think of how I got it
and what I had to do to survive it,

I’m curiously unafraid
of the memory.

It’s not comfortable, exactly,
but it’s not a horrible thing either;

most days I can ignore it
because no one can see it.

But there are those nights
when I’m not alone

and I have to explain it 
to someone.  

Later, I awaken 
thinking of the story,

reliving its plot and characters,
its surprise ending.

It is not horrible
but not comfortable to do this;

to consider what I learned in blood,
what I gained, what I lost.

Only in intimacy can I explain it
well enough to recall its lessons,

so to rise into the scar and dream again
is why I’m driven to this.

Exposed and naked in the myth each time
it happens, I become the once-injured party

and take another chance to touch
the scar that underlines my healing.

I only visit it now and then
to show how far I’ve come,

how comfortable I am, how not horrified
I am to harbor such a ghost within.

Looking to you
for support
is like longing for
validation
from
a pterodactyl:

not only would I likely
age and die 
as I waited,

I’d have to forget
you were dead
to seek it
in the first place.

And if it were possible,
if by chance you were
to come back to life,

what are the chances
that I’d survive
coming face to face with you
after the pilgrimage
to your lair? 

Still, I’m saying this
out loud

as a way to pretend
I’m not scanning the skies
even now. 

Once your ears are folded and stitched in
to block the voice of Outside,
you’ll sit back and expect to hear
what you’re really like.
You’ll be disappointed.
Once you realize
how much of what you tell yourself
is a lie, you’ll need to seal your eyes.
Seeing how much of Outside
rejects your Inside, rebukes
your thinking, and negates
your perspective, you’ll want
to be blind.  You’ll want to be deaf
too, but it’ll be too late for that. 

I love dark toast.
If the tips of the texture
of the slice are just singed,
just enough to hint of carbon,
so much the better.

I love a bad note
dropped into an aching run
by a horn player hanging on
to the edge of music
by the love of music. 

I want the crestfallen temporary failure,
the dinged-in-the-attempt, the just-ahead-of-broken.
I want imperfection
that praises perfection while knowing
how boring perfection can be,

that honors the pursuit
without exalting the capture.

Also, I prefer hot
and fleshy curves
over cool, gentle slopes.
Give me real skin that rebukes
all the popular defaults.

I want a little warfare
in my personal peace,
reminding me
of why I value peace
without submitting to its tyranny,

its demand to be all of time
and all of history.  Give me a Bronx cheer
over undeserved praise. Give me
an obituary that tells the tale
of me as constant bastard and frequent fool,

of my fits and starts, my graces and my stumbles
toward extracting moments from undistinguished time.

Give me sun in a pre-tornado sky.
Give me a beach
scoured of its tourists by storm.
I always cheat in favor of the emptied,
the desolate, the contrasting view.  

I yearn to be with those like me
who smell a rose in the compost
even if we won’t be here to cut it;
the ten year old kid with broken sunglasses
singing loudly off key at the local open mic

while his mother shoots phone video
and beams and struts and smiles.  
I love the way I applaud him
as if it was the last time
he’ll ever do this,

and maybe it is. Maybe he’ll go home
and never sing again after seeing that…but I doubt it.

I applaud and seek
any grand charge
toward the rejection of oblivion’s dominion
however it manifests, even when it manifests
as a mistake. God doesn’t make a mistake,

it’s said.  God leaves us to make them
and when we now and then fail to do so,
God reminds us in the next second
that while divinity is not impossible to touch,
it skirts away from us as quickly as it arrives.

I munch on near-burnt toast 
with a possibility howling inside me.
I hear a music I can’t imagine how to play.
I scramble for the ring I can’t quite see.
I call on a God who will pull it away.

There’s that edge, so bright it hurts.
So slick, so smooth, so present, so hard to seize.

One of the deep
moments that keeps itself
face up in the memory bed,
asleep but ever-stirring, threatening

to open its eyes and fix me
like a bug on its pin:

the time I killed the squirrel
on the front lawn after
its mauling by the big stray mutt
we all hated. I pulled

a good strong knife and slashed
once then twice over the tooth-mashed throat,
saw the spurt, saw it relax at once;

then I reached for a stone
and nailed that dog in the ribs
and it took off howling with me howling
after it, running it off, its shallow flanks
pumping ahead of me too fast
to catch.

I do not fear the memory
for its horror,
but for its delights —
its promise of deus ex machina,
its flavor of massacres, camps,
and gallows blessed by others.

Its tang of permission.