I’m as irrelevant here
as country blues
in a metal club

even though I’ve met
the devil
too

and made my deal with him
long before
half these imps were even born

I love you, dead actors,
rock stars lost in plane crashes
and drug hazes, writers full of bullets
and unseen masterpieces. 

I love you, Otis Redding, Buddy Holly,
Eddie Cochran, Kurt and Jimi and Janis.
(I don’t love you, Jim Morrison, but that is because
you were a dick, not because you were unfulfilled.)

I love you, Ernest Hemingway, George Sanders,
David Carradine, David Foster Wallace, Anne Sexton,
Sylvia Plath: all you did and said was genius
lit by the fire that took you from craft to ash.

Something there is that doesn’t love an old artist
who does a life’s work in a complete lifetime. 
Something that sees that
as invalidating the notion that is is dangerous to be an artist.

If we don’t celebrate the pain,
creation looks too pleasurable, and then
everyone would be doing it.  Who knows how many people
would turn to art if there were not such cautionary tales?

So love to you from me, all you tragic figures,
you lovely bones, models of what I’m supposed to do
if i want to reach a personal best:
I have to get rid of the personal part.

I see myself, dying to be on top of my game.
I can die myself, going out on top, thinking that
the going out is all it will take
to get there. 

You were doomed
to do this before
you ever picked up a pen.

Your first word wasn’t “Mama” but “apple,”
although by that you meant “Mama.”
No one could see that even then,
you thought in metaphors.

You read from cereal boxes
before you learned to eat from them.

You cut yourself wide open whittling an arrow
with a Bowie knife at six, and still remember
the sight of the bone
in the center of the cleft in your thumb,
and thinking of that now,
it should have been clear

that you would be hurt
every time you tried to create something,

that you’d open yourself up
on impulse, just because you could,

and that you’d always reach for the biggest tool
to do the smallest work.

Fat pen in the hand tonight
and all that blood still inside.

What a gift, they tell you.
What an inspiration.
How you have moved them all.

That scar
still hounds you
every morning at breakfast,
a note in plain sight telling you
to stop wasting time eating
when words are still everywhere,
and you still haven’t explained
why “apple”
is another word for
“mama.”

so
you think you can dance

you can

you shouldn’t be fooled
into thinking otherwise by
these hardbodies
all air and fire
slow burn turning to flash power
with presence of mind
and uncanny kinesthetics
reminding us all
of those occasional moments
during the best sex of our lives
when the body did exactly
what the body was asked to do

if
you think you can dance
then
you can

think of all the great dancers you know

grandmothers
rotating their wheelchairs
around awkwardly tuxedoed grandsons
at wedding receptions in VFW halls

spontaneous office party freaks
loudly regretting they had that last Jagerbomb
but secretly thrilled at the cheers and screams
busting out like firecrackers around them

construction workers pirouetting
over the piled up prefab sections
of the first new house they’ve worked on in a while
while sorting out which bill they’ll pay first when they get paid

that baby girl shaking her tiny butt to the loudest radio on the block
until big daddy scoops her up and she giggles
and buries her face in his shoulder
while he bounces along to the beat

same baby girl a dozen years later
catching hold of something bigger than the stripper pole
and one tuesday afternoon in a half-empty gentleman’s club
making one man swear off ever seeing another dancer after seeing her

a greasy man doing a driveway oil change
timing the turns of his wrench to some old C&W twang
and only sliding out from under the car satisfied
when the song burps up a pedal steel epiphany

dropout in traffic
on steering wheel drum
hands and hair flying
in heavy metal tarantelle

if you think you can dance
then you can
the only time you can’t
is when you settle into
the can’t
of your couch
and let them convince you
that you’re wrong

there’s nothing wrong with imagining
perfection and admiring
the journey toward it

but if someone with an agenda
about picking your soul’s poorer pockets to make his money
ever clowns you
into telling yourself
that any dancing that is not perfect
is forbidden

get up off the couch
and dance
all shaky heart and floppy fingered
dance
all blisterheeled and trippy toed
dance like someone died and made you
gene
cyd
elvis
shakira
michael
or mikhail

you have always been a dancer
everyone dances

even if just once
all alone
in a bedroom
in front of a mirror
transformed
and deathless
breathless
in motion

Ten empty cans of Dr. Pepper
are tossed into the bin
to be carried to the curb,
every one of them a discarded
Rosetta Stone.

You don’t know which one
you were draining yesterday
when you noticed that the last poppy
in the front yard had bloomed,
after all the others
had already dropped their crepe
and begun to turn to seeds.

If you could only remember now
how seeing it made you feel
young again, how you made yourself
a promise to play more guitar, drink more water,
eat better, love more carefully and with greater focus
on what comes after the loving is done.

You swore you’d look for hope
in the last place you’d seen it.

If you could find that one can
and hold it to your lips again,
pull one last warm and sticky drop from it,
you would remember.

But you don’t and you can’t.
All you see is that ten cans are empty
and only two are left in the fridge
for today.  All you see is that you need
to buy more Dr. Pepper,

so you make a note of that
on the pad
on the refrigerator door

and go back to sleep.

It was
going to be something.  Something you
expected to happen,
even if you didn’t know what
it would look like, sound like.
How it would be.

Something
that had rippled the lake lying still

just a moment before,

a monster or a nymph
under the surface,
just out of reach
of verification.

Something,
it was going to be
something.

There are nights now when you can’t sleep
and all you can do was stare at the pillow
and imagine it cooling as you left the room
to tend to —

something, something

wailing and wet
but exactly what you had desired
even though you had tried to picture it
and failed.

Something in you is breaking open —

it would have been something,
something worth having, a voice
asking for you and you alone.  A face
not seen before.  A potential
grown from your own possibilities.

Something that won’t happen, now.
A plan deferred for the moment or the ages.
Something, you keep telling yourself, something mine —

something tangible, real,

something as alive as you suspect
you won’t be again,
not for a while.

A French plane crashes in the Atlantic.
Auto plants all over America prepare to close.
The last survivor of the Titanic dies.
A doctor is shot to death in his church,
presumably by another religious man.

It’s keeping us up at night.
Peaceful sleep is an endangered species.
Soon churches everywhere will be holding
round the clock services for bleary congregants
demanding that prayer and supplication start working again
at their usual job of keeping hope afloat —

because it’s sinking, isn’t it?  What we knew
and counted on is disappearing under wave after wave
of unfamiliar tragedy. ( Or, rather, tragedy
once unfamiliar to us all here, in this place.
It’s not like people haven’t died before, or been killed,
it’s not like industries haven’t failed before.)
It hasn’t been the same since the Towers fell,

we keep telling each other.
We tell God that all the time too.
We beg Him to put them back up.
We keep reading the news to see if He’s been listening.
It’s hard to say.

Some of us,
supine and insomniac
in the lightless tent of our worst imagining,
are afraid that He is listening,
but to someone else this time.

Some of us believe He’s dead, or vacationing,
maybe in the south of France.
(Maybe He was on that plane?)

Once in a while,
someone points out how strange it is
that we should care so much about
the specifics of who is dying and what is failing.
People, they say, are dying and killing and destitute
and scared and angry and they always have been.
It’s always felt like hell to be alive for some.
It’s just been a while since it was our turn to feel it here.

We usually do something to the ones who say that —
nod at them before turning our backs on them,
or else we kill them.  The difference, we tell them,
is that it isn’t supposed to be us.  And when we say “us,”

we include everyone we like to think of as “us,”
the most mutable category in our world.  “Us”
changes.  It gets bigger, smaller, elongates,
closes in on itself late at night in our cold houses,
blows out its own walls when it’s sunny and warm and
all is going OK.

The news keeps reminding us of what “us” means.

It’s a plane full of people, maybe some Americans aboard.
It’s our very own auto industry coming back strong, maybe.
It’s the last link to the last iconic tragedy disappearing
and leaving us with mythology we’ll have to make ourselves.
It’s the doctor dying for his cause, the killer killing for his.
It’s saying that it’s all gonna be alright, and warm, and sunny,
once we get over this rough patch,
glimmers of hope out there,
it’s saying
shhhh…

go back to sleep…

but we can’t.
The sound of of that new tower
being built
is keeping us up.

Stumbling along in the twilight
still wet from the fear that
this path will end
in the same place the old one
ended, he understands

that it’s out of his hands now,
as this downhill trail
has become steep enough
to keep him from turning back.

Behind him were boulders the size
of mansions which he’d had to slide down
and cliffs just high enough to jump from
without dying, though the landing
had sent a shock up his legs to his chest.
He’d never get back up again.

Night-running now.
Here it flattens out a bit
but the roots of big pines
ridge the packed dirt underfoot.

Owl calls in the trees.  The birds themselves
unseen.  Twigs cracking twenty paces
off the path, in the moonless dark.

Ahead is the thunder of the river
cutting the bottom of the valley.
It’ll lead him out if it doesn’t kill him.

He strips off everything but the shoes
and runs faster.  The plunge ahead
will freeze him but it’s all that’s left to do.
There will be no need for modesty if he comes out alive
and if he dies, he won’t care about how it looks
when they find his body.  He’ll end up
as a story of folly
for the ones who might come after.

Only he will have known
how it feels
to hit the water running.  To forget
failure and success.  To fall
into the impersonal night and become
one small part of the Whole.

To chill down as he smashes
along in the current, the pain fading.
To see the stars as he goes blind.
To be alive at last.

Before the parade,
a veteran
lit a cigarette,
saying:

Some of us
that went to war,
we enjoyed it.

Some of us missed it after it was done.

Consider what it took for us
to resettle ourselves
among you folks. Keeping that
kind of fun quiet isn’t easy.
We wanted to tell someone
about it, just to get past it.
But no one wanted to hear,
so we tried to forget.
Ever since the Towers, though,
no one can get enough of us.

We’re smoking together now.
No one’s sitting near us
because to smoke, these days,
is to translate undesirable wisdom
from a language
only marginally less taboo
than the warrior tongue.

Ok, I’m listening.
What was it like?
I ask him.

A blue fog rolls
from the old mouth.
Then:

Just like this,

and held up the cigarette.

I knew it was bad for me
but I did it anyway.
I started to do it
because
others did it.
I kept at it
because I couldn’t stop.

He looked
at
my shining eyes
and at
the butt
burning bright
in my own mouth.

You’d have done fine there,

he spat,
before
the band
drowned him out
while making my heart
float out of my chest
like a big
bad cloud
of Martian wind,
or delighted razors,
or something else
no one
could fully understand.

Part of me steps aside
and another part of me
steps forward
to make a name for itself.

It says:
I am the ocean,
I cover everything that is deep
and swallow everything
that dares me…no, wait:
I’m the harbor, the destination,
the notch in the edge of the ocean.
No, sorry:
I’m the slave ship arriving,
carrying stolen anguish.  No,
that’s wrong: I’m the trader
waiting to sell the pain of others.
Again, sorry: I’m the new owner
of what shouldn’t be owned at all.
Ugh, wrong, wrong again: I’m
the cargo, the village of origin,
the buyer’s tag, the auction block,
the chain, the whip,
the eyes leaning on the crutch
of the North Star…

A part of me tosses in bed for hours
listening to this until
another part of me steps up
to elbow that first liar aside
and say:

I’m the feather on the plains,
the oil full of ghost trees,
blood on sand I’ve never seen,
the dirty songster in an alley
glimpsed once from a cab window
and then reimagined
to find room for my moral
at the end of his song.

No, says another part of me,
then tosses pennies at the others
to drive them back long enough
for a chance to say:

I am sponge enough
to have sopped up
everything all my lovers
ever told me.

I’m the mask
that gives me the freedom
to let them call themselves “cunt”
as I misquote them.
I am above reproach
when I put myself
in their mouths.

Closer,
says the sleeping part of me,
admitting that he’s indeed been listening
to all of this.

That part of me
becomes awake enough then
to say:

I’m stupid
and exhausted
from division.
I’m groggy
at this hour
but trying to figure out
who deputized me
to speak on behalf
of what has been screaming unheard
for eons. Why wasn’t it ever enough
that they could speak for themselves?
It’s like everyone and everything
is asleep and I’m an alarm clock
banging out “I, I, I, I, I, I, I…”
on behalf of full-on daylight
that ought to be enough but isn’t,
chattering
until I’m shut off
with a backhand slap
to the panic button.

Yes, that’s it,
that’s the answer,
I tell myself.

The part of me that has been
so fitfully drowsing
for so long
rolls back over,
while another part of me
smooths my hair, tucks me back in,
lullabies me into distant dreams.

When the breathing slows
and becomes regular,
that part of me looks up and says,

I am
the dummy on an insistent knee
with a hand up my back
and a substitute voice.

Look as close as you want,
you’ll never see those other lips move.

That part of me
will accept your applause
while the rest of me is put back in my box
to sleep.