You are too brittle,
you think, to care at all about the state
of the world.  You’ve decided
that it’s doomed. The imminence of that
is getting to you.

You crack a little.
Flakes of you
are everywhere.  You vaccuum
obsessively, picking through
the bag to fish yourself out.
Superglue has replaced body wash
on the grocery list. 

There’s a bed full of fragments
in the next room.  To hell with laundry.
Call CSI and have them find out who they belong to —
victim, perpetrator, or both.

You think Darfur, Iraq, Oakland, DC
are just bylines for the irrelevance of caring.
You tell everyone that all politics is local anesthetic
for the wounds of the personal moment,

and all of that is just a way of disguising
the tinkle of shards that accompanies you
everywhere you go. 

Dear Lecta,

You were the grandmother
I never knew.  I wonder often
at that name, and how it might have felt
to call you “Grandma” or “Grammy”
and to know you that way
instead of superficially
as just a marvelous name
from the mystery of my father’s past.
I wonder if I would think of you
more or less often today.
As it is, all I do is consider you
as a fact, a thread to be tugged
as I unravel my way forward.  There’s
never been any sense of anything more.

Except for this:

somehow, you knew how to make sweet tea.
And you taught my dad.  And he taught my mother,
and he said it’s good but not quite the same.
And it’s almost summer and I love sweet tea and suddenly,
I have a desperate need to know how to make it
exactly the way you did.

So if you are reading this,
Lecta,
I’d love to know how my Grammy
made her sweet tea.
It’s almost summer.
Please write soon.

Yours,
T

"She was a married woman
when I met her.  If she was willing
to sleep with me, she’s nothing
but a cheating whore."

A brick falls
from the wall.

"Ain’t no thing — if I’m the father,
I’ll take care of the kid, I just don’t want
to see them."

You can hear the trumpets
everywhere.  The siege
is ending.

"What?  I slept with her,
I certainly don’t love her,
and it’s her who made the
first move."

Overrun.
The army outside the city
prepares for the entrance.

What’s coming
may yet be worse than what’s
already here.

It feels so good to know
that the dishes need washing
and I’m on my last set of clean underwear
There’s nothing good to eat in the fridge
and a hawk just killed a mouse in the backyard
The bass from that Honda in the street won’t let me sleep
and the tulips are showing color on the bullet tips of their buds
Bill upstairs is doing a feedback experiment with two huge amps
and the storm that’s coming later today isn’t going to have a snowflake in it
My back hurts, my nose is running, and I can feel the headache incipient behind my eyes
and the connection is strong as the Blackstone where it pours into the gates at West Hill Dam
I would check the bank account for activity if I wasn’t sure it would all be deficit and no stimulus
and Korea is a peninsula that will exist for as long as it can without regard to the lines idiots draw across it
and we will walk, run, crawl and hump our way into the mixed up charge of living in the future
regardless of the nature of the stupidity and evil that shape it against our best intentions
because it’s impossible to separate the mundane from the epic in this life of demand
the supply will always exceed our ability to grasp its scope and rush of occurrence
There’s no food in the fridge, too much laundry, too much cleaning up to be done
Too many hawks and mice to ever believe in the permanence of want
Too much music to ever despair that we will fall silent
Flowers waiting to come out and answer the future
I’m on my last set of clean underwear
I’ll sit around naked if I have to
and let the lack feel good

An old saying holds
that what concerns the milkman
does not concern the plumber.
If my memory serves me,
it was the milkman who said that.
(I don’t recall what the plumber said.)

Come to think of it, I don’t recall
anyone other than the milkman
ever saying it, so maybe it was
just his opinion. Maybe there’s
a body of proverbs for milkmen,
and with the continuing decline

in the number of milkmen, it’s a font
of wisdom that’s being lost.  All those
early mornings going from house to house,
carrying bottles up to porches and stoops,
the same orders again and again, with only
the occasional change to speculate on: why

do the Millers need two extra quarts today,
and where did the Ducharmes go
for the week that made them suspend delivery?
The milkmen must have known a thing or two
about still water and ripples from a tossed pebble,
and talked about those things amongst themselves.

It’s different for plumbers: they show up
in the moment of change or crisis, then move on.
Their gatherings must be raucous with stories
of explosions, floods, stink, disaster.
Milkmen had a different view, a learning

that comes from watching slow shifts in behavior
and occasional mild upheavals that settle into
permanence in short order. What concerns the milkmen
doesn’t concern the plumber; what concerns me
is that milkmen are disappearing,
but we’ll always need the plumbers.

In the mythology of certain tribes
there is a tradition of using black
to represent purity
and white to signal
corruption.

When I was a child
I had a black blanket
that I carried everywhere
and sucked upon until it turned
gray.  I was my own tribe,

dwelling somewhere between
the limits.  I smelled like pine tar
and blueberry bark all summer
and tripped over my own feet
all winter, waiting for summer

until I was thirteen and I lost a ball
by the railroad track.
A man took it with a pair of scissors,
so I started trying to play catch without it —
crouching all the time in anticipation.

It’s hard to catch anything
when you’re clinging to something else.
Was that manhood out there?
I let the friendship of that ratty cloth go
and focused as hard as I could,

and so my hands
have remained cupped
to this day,  hard molded
to the need to succeed
and be perfect —

but how I wish I still had that
ambiguous blanket,
something to wring out
and cradle as it dried,

its divergent natures cooling
on the ground, its texture
a comfort.  Black, for purity;
white, for poison;
and I am the tribe of gray.

still
as the trout

resting
on the sand

in glass water

one flip
of one fin

reveals him
to be

gone

as you are
now

under the surface
with no sun above

one word

gone

or

enough

they sound the same
at times

the first drowns out the second
at too many other times

gone

the movement was so swift
as to be nearly invisible

but

it was

enough

1.
Under the sign that says
"Personalized Hairdressing,"
the leafblower guy’s got a cigarette
hanging from his mouth
and his ear protectors
perched on his head,

and he looks like
a barfly Princess Leia
swinging his black cannon
back and forth,
wiping the winter trash
out into the gutter.

When he cuts the motor,
I can hear that he’s singing
"Seasons Of Love"
around the butt end of his smoke.

He stops as soon as he knows I can hear.

2.
Sister Rosa
lived here for eighty years
and volunteered for forty,
held the hands
of the dying when
their families couldn’t take it
anymore.

With her black hairnet
and black orthopedic shoes,
clumping along in the market,
smiling at our children, she had been
the trademark of small town care
around here,

until the day she passed and,
when asked at the penultimate moment
why she’d been so willing
to do what she’d done, to do
what was being done for her
right now by so many who had asked
to be there at her side,

she said:

"One day, far too late,
I discovered that I just liked
to watch people die."

3.
Just when you think
you know someone,
a rumor hits the wind
and you end up imagining
tornadoes sleeping
in the next room, ready to blow
your windows in on top of you.

Tough.

Suck it up like a soda pop
shared in a ’50s movie.
All those kids knew they were acting.
You don’t have to pretend anymore
that you didn’t know that.

Duty, the mare’s tail,
keeps the flies away
from the Big Warhorse’s Neck
so she can trample on merrily ahead.

Honor is a carpet bombing
bunker busting drillpointed beetle
always scuttling underfoot. 
Everyone knows he’s there,
everyone’s trying not to step on him,
he always gets stepped on and then,
watch out.

Country tries to stay out of trouble
but it’s a farm, dammit,
there’s always something needs doing.

Love flees to the city,
dreams of home,
worries about the folks she left behind.

But not enough to want
to go back.

Oh, sweetheart,
daughter,
my fresh-diapered baby
at home waiting
for me,

too young to understand the notion
of Mommy’s sudden gnawing fear,
the too-temporary heaviness
of my purse bearing
the severance check,

you’ll look up at me
when I come through the door
hours ahead of schedule
and laugh.

I’m going to get right down
on the floor with you
and roll around for a long time.

pile of dead badges
on the conference table.

pens left behind
with the company logo still visible on some,
while others have been rubbed to near illegibility
from constant use.

weary managers
going through checklists
of tools, computers, cellphones
to be returned.

the last paychecks handed over.

silence throughout the office area
as escorts return from the front door
one at a time.

outside, the sun
is weakening as the day grows old.

parking spaces go from gray to black
as the mist soaks into
what had been protected
for a little while.

Your attention please!

After much thought
I’ve decided to
start using
my real name

which is
"L’Wan"

which stands for
"Left Wing Assault Necktie"

and I will be touring immediately
with my partner
"R’Wan"
(aka  "Right Wing Assault Necktie")
as one half
of the greatest politically charged team of stealth folk assassins
on the planet

We will call ourselves
"The Accessories"
and return to our root cause
of changing the nature of your ears

with big acoustic guitars
that took years of wage slavery to acquire
and a sound system made entirely of
green tech lies

We’ll bake the bread of justice
in our shorts
and toss it to the hungry

We’ll make up a song
for every genocide
everywhere

We’ll rough up the Man
and teach him a thing or two

and make you cry for our convictions

You think I’m kidding you
about this plan
but I’m not

I’m a stealth dog
and R’Wan is a deadly cat
We’re the housepets your mother warned you about
who look all friendly and mild
then steal your breath when you’re asleep

using your acclaim to feed The Cause

Sniff us out at a theater near you
and save yourselves the trouble
of having us come into your homes

We’ll bug you
all the way to the food bank
and eat well while we’re doing it

angry little pooches
yapping at you to get real
yap yap
yap

The Accessories:
changing the world
one fashionably wrapped neck
at a time

if you want to understand
who that officious stranger
in the conference room is
with all those packets of papers

or the meaning of
the unfamiliar taut bodied man
in the usually empty cubicle
looking falsely bored
like a bouncer
just waiting for someone
to get out of line

or why all the human
resources staff
are refusing
to look you in the eye

then you should know
that it’s a special day

someone’s made a mess
and those folks are here
to help clean it up

or should I say
clean
you
out

Ceramic lamp on the walnut table —

clay never intended
to become a bearer of light,

but it did.  The tree
never intended to lend its strength
to the clay, but it does.

Once upon a time, the tree’s roots
threaded through a vein of clay
as they silently created its hold on the earth.
The clay had no reaction to that,
lying there underneath it all.

It was our violations of their different ways of being
that brought them together here,
their roles reversed now, making themselves useful
just for me.  I am quiet before them,
respectful of the changes they’ve been through
to end up here. 

What will I become next? 

I think about that,
nursing pain, imagining a path
not of my choosing, one that may take me
into service to something unimaginable now.

It’s the single most fascinating fact
I can imagine
that each person on this planet
has been so sensitized to some singular thing
that its occurrence can drive them to ecstasy,

and that some unknown fraction
of the world’s population
is doomed to be unaware
of it.

This is not a statement of urgency
for finding a soul mate, for
the ecstasy may not be related to
another person’s doing; rather,

my excitement comes from knowing
that their searching cannot be directed,
and that they may stumble upon their Grails
without ever realizing that they
searching, or indeed
that we were created to search. 

This is a cause for optimism.

That the fraction
may be greater than one half
is a cause for pessimism.

But you know,
I’m still glad for the search.  If nothing else,
it keeps me thinking about the gaps
among us as we nose around,

wondering what the hell we’re doing.