Omnipotence
reveals itself
in shadow.
Anything
could be there.
Is there.
I want to diminish
what power I’ve lent to it,
so I light a fire.
Losing nearly everything
to the flame —
wondering, now,
who or what that was
in the dark; where
it has gone; why
I can’t see myself
in the darkened, savaged mirror
I save from the ruins.
addled
fat-ass
complaining
all the new music is crap
club banging loose doors
no dynamic range
and sex-twinkie full
all the new music is crap
dingling guitar crash
no resolution to the lines
of stumblebum mopey gloomtrash
all the new music is crap
canned rhymes and software
no sense of uplift or history
and who are these decorative women
all the new music is crap
hats, hats, hats and more hats
no whiff of messy hair under there
and what’s the difference among them
you bad little whiner
you age-inappropriate gymnast
on the high bars of current flavor
I salute you
you patriot
because only a true American
makes a case for used to be over right now
as he tears down old homes
to build salt box mansions in defunct potato fields
only a true American
yearns for his tradition
while spitting on someone else’s
as its getting off the ground
only a true American
bends ancient blue notes
and calls them
the latest and greatest
addled fat ass
with your watery beer
in a venerable bottle
addled fat ass
with a tin ear
on a stone head
addled fat ass
that won’t shake unless
the song’s got dust on it
you won’t admit you remember
that they said the same thing
back when you were tossing
your hair in a free swirl
and addling yourself on beat
and drugs in a field somewhere
you were young and open
but getting older by the note
but swearing they were stupid
as you did the rebel and the stomp
to something crappy yourself
and knowing it wasn’t the song as much
as the dancing in extremis
that made you
The cosmos is barking
like an untrustworthy dog
this morning. In the sound I can hear teeth
and sour breath, distant and pervasive
wherever I choose to stand
in the cramped house. It sounds
like it’s outside both doors
and every window, possibly
even upstairs and in the cellar.
I wish I had some raw meat
to toss ahead of me today
as I go about my business,
but I’m out of food, out of options
in general. I have no children
to carry on for me, either,
if I’m taken today. That may be
more blessing than regret, of course;
who would wish their aftermath
on their children is no idol of mine,
so I’ll take small comfort in being
all alone as I hear the snarling
approaching. Whatever happens,
it will be the two of us, the cosmos dog
and I, who will see it together.
Whatever war we end up waging
will be ours alone to wage.
Good morning, life, routine,
cups of coffee, toast, shower,
dress, commute. You’ll be my weapons
and I’ll pretend the dog can’t kill me
as I arm myself in chores and duties,
hoping the cosmos passes me by
to savage and piss elsewhere today.
Books about witch burnings
and occult spells
are cast loosely across the table
in the old wing of the town library.
Two of the four chairs
pushed back,
as if in a holy hurry
to get away from all that.
Two beatdown high school girls,
gothically styled,
making out
in the nearby stacks.
When they see me seeing them
they stare back, giggle,
move deeper
into the dark tall shelves.
A creased and torn Jack Chick tract
with keno numbers in the margins
on the dented radiator cover
under the closest dirty window.
Put my head down
on the table,
feeling such joy that sometimes,
things do work out.
your kid days
of magical thought
don’t go away
easily:
you
cross your fingers
against the bills
close your eyes
when there’s screaming
upstairs
finger your lucky quarter
as the boss sputters
and sometimes
you just lie on the couch all day
pretending you’re sick
hoping a cool damp cloth
will be pressed to your forehead
by some invisible
but loving hand
that never materializes
turn on your tv, kid
or your stereo, son
maybe the hand you seek
is an old song
or a book you dig out of storage
it probably won’t change a thing
there’s so little magic out there
if you think any will be spared for you
you’re likely to be disappointed
but for the moments
you’re hearing or seeing
those old images of carefree
and happy
you
can pretend
that it all
might yet
work out
Startling me awake,
the starling striking
the front room window.
I go out to see the body
but he’s alive, if dazed.
Bend over to pick him up
and he’s gone, flying away
straight, landing in the neighbor’s
lilacs. Miracle, resurrection —
what must he have thought
of the figure
bending over him? I would speculate
but then, I’d have to check myself —
who knows what theology starlings
have created already to explain us?
And what self-important god
would want to be the reason for
a crisis of faith?
Ready now
for red or gray dawn,
warm or cold day,
rain or sun, dark or
lit night.
I’m holding my face
forward. What’s behind
stays behind — recalled
but unwatched. I’ve seen
enough of it.
Fly by me, all you
winged things; crawl by,
all manner of snakes and
creatures; swim by, eels
and carp and bottom feeders.
The path behind me’s
closed, and just ahead
this one’s impenetrable.
I will be scarred, and scratched,
and die up there in the thickets.
That’s the glory of the passage —
that it is forged and cut
by those who know it leads
to an ending and an unknowable home.
Homeward bound: tied tight
to the need to reach it,
I will step out not looking
to either side. Not seeing,
in fact. Not hearing or speaking.
All I’ll be doing is walking home.
Stack your hardest imaginings
into a forest. Let go of the illusion
that they may become something
you intend. They’ll grow and change
until you will not know them
as your own. You’ll be lost in them.
Stack your electronics into a wall.
Stand behind it. Live
behind it. Here’s the coal to run it,
hear it firing its synapses into
your own. Long arcs
carry half-formed dreams
through the smoking air.
You toss fuel into the blaze.
Stack your clothes neatly
on the bed. Don’t ever put them
away. Leave them in piles
where you can see them because
the closets and drawers are so full
they may as well be empty, you don’t
go there much. Naked’s a wardrobe
too, though not one you’ll recognize.
Stack yourself on top
of others into an orgy. You’ll
shuffle often enough to stay
comfortable and fulfilled
until you catch yourself kissing
your own arm, thinking it belongs
to another. You’ll say, did I not do this
to avoid this happening?
Stack, stack, stack.
Pile up what you have.
See how high you build,
no mind to stability. This is
so America, so World,
so much a Global heap,
see words disappearing
in there, words like
solitude, fringe of sea pearls,
oysters, eagles, vision quest,
unencumbered. You mute
in it.
Made clear:
you see a box with a check mark in it
on my face
whenever you look at me.
I run my hand
over my forehead —
it feels as it always does.
When did I get this?
I don’t see it, myself,
when I look in the mirror.
Perhaps I’m
selectively blind?
Or perhaps the check box
is so large I can’t feel it
because all of me is inside?
That may be.
Maybe I made the check
in the box with every word
and deed, and all you’re doing
is reading it. Or perhaps
there’s no box on me at all
and the image is burned
into your eyes and brain
so that when you look at anything
you see it and judge accordingly?
It’s not hard to want to believe that.
It certainly would take the pressure off of me
to believe that,
which is why I’m doubly pressured
to scrub myself as hard as I can
until I bleed before I go out
into the world,
and why I am still uncertain,
and cowardly. I may not see it,
but I can feel that I’ve turned myself
into a scab just for you.
So, I know this vampire. Odd, I know.
We run in overlapping circles.
Most of the time,
we don’t talk much.
It’s mostly
a professional relationship
based on the undead thing.
Socially, we’re not exactly peers.
One night he asks
if I’m hungry.
I reply,
well, in fact,
I could do with something.
He says, why not
sit at the table
with a blood fattened man,
then?
Why not, I say.
So we sit. In the dark,
of course,
in deference to his issues.
Have this cup, he says.
It’s full of
the gray part of me.
I don’t really need it.
You’re giving up easy,
I say. Yes,
he responds, I’m ready.
Tired of chasing moonlight
snacks. Or at least,
of thinking about it.
Don’t know if I’ll die this way,
but brainless has to be better.
The cup’s full
of some wormthread slop.
It’s gooey tough and tastes like
unripe Brie.
Hey, I could use a little libation
myself,
he says.
We could trade —
I doubt it would be to your liking,
I laugh, it’s mostly dust
and other folks’ memories. In fact
there’s a particular flavor to it right now —
probably a child —
she must have seen
a circus right before meeting me
and got scared by
someone in greasepaint.
I suspect you’d hate the taste.
Well, he says, you’re right,
that doesn’t sound pleasant.
Guess I’ll pass.
After a bit he says
It’s funny, the things we fear.
Kids fear clowns,
I fear the sun. You?
I mostly borrow other fears, I say.
Not sure at this point
if I know my own.
You know, I’ve got a confession, he says.
When I sought you out
I wasn’t expecting you
to be so articulate.
It’s a common misunderstanding,
I say, sucking down
the dregs of the cup
I’ve just scooped full of his headstuffing.
It’s growing on me.
He doesn’t say much after that.
Once I’m done
I drag him into the sun
and watch him burst and shrivel.
I shamble off, can still hear his voice
long after he stops twitching —
something about immortality,
a murmur about the night.
The light makes me queasy now.
A vampire brain
keeps faith with its source,
I guess. And a zombie keeps faith
with his resources.
You wouldn’t believe
how smart I’ve become.
But then comes the howl in my head
and always, now, the damn clown.
I ought to lay off the kids,
them and their phobias —
eh.
Who doesn’t have phobias?
Suck on enough brains
and you’ll get them all
eventually.
That, and apparently an urge to juggle
the brains before swallowing them,
tooting my own horn
the whole time.
Faraway places, stay far away.
Faraway broken people,
stay there too;
I really enjoy your landscapes,
but your blood and ruin are another story.
Glad you are at a little distance.
Of course I care what happens;
I care the way a Christian cares
for Caesar — as is necessary.
That hardcore Jesus stuff sounds good,
but doesn’t hold much water
or wine for that matter these days.
I appreciate that an earthquake, a flood,
a war, whatever, is a problem for you.
It’s a heck of spectacle for me, too,
and of course I feel a little something. Well,
of course I do. I’m insulted that you’d say
otherwise. Take my money and then
expect follow-up — how hat-in-hand
of you. How Third World, how
you people of you. You ought to know
that love’s convenient for as long as
it’s convenient, then it’s
a pain in the ass, and disposable;
if you’re ever going to be
First World,
you’d better learn that.
He started young and early on he’d sold a few
to postcard shoppers or doctors
decorating their offices;
those impressed by neatness
and purity rendered without soul.
He kept painting right up
to the beginning of the war.
Small works — church walls,
ruins, architecture, cheap furniture,
humble homes and shops and such.
One curious fact: all those houses,
all those chimneys, and only now and then
a puff of smoke visible
in any scene, as if he was saving
his best renderings of it for his masterpiece.
Sometimes, the question’s raised:
would he, would the world have been different
had he had more talent or been more
validated as a genius or a true artist? It doesn’t matter
if there’s an answer to that. He painted
and failed at it,
then died in the dark
with critical bombs falling around him,
in the way that all monsters die;
most artists die that way as well.
We gawk at his work still. We seek its provenance
and authenticity, preserve and hawk
its curious value, tell ourselves stories
about his lack of merit, how much a rankless
amateur he was — and yet, the works still sell.
This egg hates the color blue,
this one smells of television innards.
This one honors all equally,
this one is resolutely green.
This one is a rant of disabling fervor…
What to make of this?
They say if you want an omelette,
then you must break eggs;
I must want an omelette.
I’m so proud of the eggs I’ve broken so far!
The egg full of the love of music, that enjoys the guitar;
the egg that can’t love as well as it wants, that yearns for more;
the egg that falls on ice skates, the egg that kneels to pray;
the egg dumbfounded before the coast of Maine;
the egg on the floor that I will have to clean up;
the egg that proved to be fertilized, which I’m mourning now.
All of it goes
into the big blue chipped ceramic bowl
that’s my hand me down mama’s boy
only relic. Big soup of yellow
and clear bits and spheres.
Sticky stringy,
but everything’s there…
now, if I only had herbs, fine cheeses,
a stove, a pan, fire, utensils,
a plate, silverware,
napkins, and an appetite,
I’d be ready to begin.
I’m a big blue messy bowl
and I’m cracked through. I can feel
me leaking. All those broken eggs
all over the last clean surface in the house,
and not a stove in sight,
but I still want my omelette,
I still want to make something
of all these shattered embryos
before I break from the frenzied beating,
before they spill, and spoil, and are lost.
It’s been decreed
by important people
that we cannot speak of anything
except our own
experiences. Cannot speak
of others’ lives. Cannot
put ourselves into their shoes
unless they are non-living
or at the least non-human.
Cannot speak, in fact,
of anything at all except
what we know directly
within the context of
what happens to us day to day —
which is why I find myself
stapled to this very irritated elephant,
holding a relic from the Crusades,
wearing the mask of a politician,
and trying desperately to learn
a foreign language. All I wanted
was to be myself, be a poet,
and I tried to do that
but I got sick of trying to use
my painful inner life
and outer utter drudgery,
so I decided that if
I could not be
that poet,
I’d be
their poet.
Triangulating
among two cities
and a desert: where I have lived,
where I want to live.
The city by the sea;
the city in the central hills;
the desert far away
which I cannot deny still pulls.
I stay where I am,
trisected. Here is where
I make my stand: not
whole but contained,
feeling the parts straining
under the tug of all my possible
homes. I won’t ever really belong
anywhere, I think.
They tell you it’s good
to put down roots, but
some roots work best ungrounded,
constantly sensing what’s on
the wind. That’s me, I guess:
the air plant. The one that grows
even with a tenuous hold on place.
The one that got away.
