Lifted
without warning
from the place where I had been
for such a long time
that I had learned to disbelieve,

had forgotten that the sky
could be anything more
than a backdrop for the mold
of the dark floors and dusty ceilings
where I was living,

I looked up
at the direction I was heading
and saw clouds
moving, shaping themselves
as they raced across my trajectory.

I found soon enough
that once I entered one
I’d be wrapped in gray
and cold
and wet,

but also discovered
that even inside that brief misery
there was light, and because I kept rising
I could never lose my way
completely and fall back to where I had been.

Lifted this way, head and eyes
keeping watch, heart not far behind,
my hands calm at last, I rose
(and continue to rise) toward the day
when breathing will be unimportant

except as it stops, perhaps only for a short time,
when I first see the stars. I am unwilling now
to assume that moment will be my last,
for I have learned so much that I never believed
could be true since I first was raised up;

this is the school of levitation, and I am a student
of the breaking of gravity’s hold upon anything,
even upon one who had once been
intimate with filth and the scent of the grave.
I will rise, not fall, to be one with what I see.

The dog
is something: fur
like black moss hanging,
tongue ruddy as a wrist slashed,
bark like a gunshot,
breath foul as the inside
of a bottle of pills.

And,
he talks.

Says the same thing
every time I check the bank account,
stare at the inside frost on the window,
look into the rooms that sit empty
except for the clutter of half-hearted attempts
at creating order.

Says,

I really don’t need to bite you
to prove that I’m still here,
do I?

I like plain talk.
I’m not into
fancy vocabulary, or putting
more syllables into the air
than are strictly necessary,

so when I say
I do not care about
the deaths
of famous people I do not know,
I’m being dead honest.

I don’t care about them
in the sense that there’s nothing gained for me
in thinking of their ends.
I don’t believe any death
is untimely for the dead;

I think they’re fine with how they go,
at least after the fact, and after lives lived
in the light of everyone’s incessant concern,
I suspect there’s a measure of relief
in having something to call their own:

a private second, perhaps gone at once,
that allowed them to be completely themselves.
We can’t take that from them with our false grief.
It’s thief-proof.  It’s all some of them
have ever held all to themselves.

Even when a friend dies I know I weep for me,
not for them, no matter how they chose
to go. Whether by letting the end come at will,
or by reaching for a welcome gun or friendly pill,
it’s a thing worth having: the peace

of knowing you’re at last beyond
the speculation, the insane thought
that others have that you might be the one
who helps them live forever.  It’s perfect at last, this life,
now that it will soon be forgotten

and is no longer exposed to the prying fingers
of those who’d get inside it
hoping to find themselves there.
You were barely in it, yourself.
You were glad to see it go.

Hush,

it’s early.  Not too early to
be up and about for the working world,
but early enough.  There are no traces of night left
in any corner of the yard or home.  Sunlight’s
stripped away anything that would preserve
my desire to sleep longer. 

If a dolphin in labor were to leap through the window
right now, dripping salt water, spraying her damp breath
over everything and leaving the electronics
wasted and finally quiet, I’d be not the slightest bit surprised
because there’s an ocean moving out there. 

I’d wait for her to settle and give birth,
then watch, breathless
as they breathed together for the first time.

Something stirs.
Hush…
I am trying to hear it, trying to bring it forth.

get a load of lefty:

    pencil slim old athlete
    once well regarded love-barker
                        forever calling dates to his carnival
    no sense of love in his eyes with glint
        of his shark-grin heart showing through

but the chicks used to bite back anyway

now
alone   
    at balls’ sport bar
lefty shark-pants
    all alone

        with all these young things
        with the belly button rings
        trampstamped spines calling out
                "yes lefty" (or so he translates inside)

they don’t seem to hear
        his same old rusty call
        "hey
            baby
                comeoverhere…
lemmetellyaboutthetimeIpitchedfortheMets"

shit
no one cares about the Mets here
lefty

girls laugh at the skinny man
wearing the sharp antiques

la fleur’s been the bartender here
since lefty got home from new york
ages ago

he says to a newbie

            "lefty keeps trying
                you gotta give him credit
            but he puts the cart before the horse
                and still don’t got the change-up

never did"

lefty
    goes home alone
always

to a room over the little gym he started
        ten years ago
            with scraped together dollars
his trophies stabled in
        a dusty case

old men come here
punp and pull old muscles
and talk to lefty
        they remember
and care

but every saturday night
he sleeps alone
                drunk
                dreaming quizzically

When I was in school
we looked at maps of the US

and learned that north was up
and south was down.

Driving from Delaware to Worcester
I think of this again and again

as I see the exit for Mount Holly, NJ, where I lived
the entire first year of my life;

as I pass the exit for Fort Dix
where I was born;

as I toot the traditional horn
at the sign for Freehold,
home town of the Boss,
who kept me always breathing
and frequently ecstatic
through teenage years
that weighed on me like lead;

as I go over the George Washington Bridge
and through the Bronx
where my heart sings and snaps with recognition
at the signs and lights and profane noise
of the City that first broke me open;

as I cross the line into Connecticut
where I shift in my seat and tell myself
"not so far now"
as I ready myself for the tuners racing past me
even as I hit 90 miles an hour
on the empty width of Interstate 91
north of New Haven;

as I lean (never touching the brakes) into the long curve
that takes me from there
into the even greater voids
along Interstate 84 north of Hartford
where I shake myself again as I realize
I’m doing this all faster now than I ever did before;

as I shiver through the chill of the open window of the tollbooths
while getting on and off of the Mass Turnpike;

as I turn off the key
in the driveway
and rush into the house,
leaving my luggage in the car for now
because I know she’s waiting inside.

Those maps we memorized
tried to tell me
that going home would always be
about pushing uphill,

but I know now
that the place where I’m currently sleeping
is just one part of home:
the place where I stand
and look back on my travels from a height;
a warm place where I can easily see
that every place I have ever been
is home.

Ten years ago
when my colleague Barbara didn’t understand
a personal ad in which a prospective suitor
described himself as
"a splendid wreck of a man"

I had no problem explaining it to her,

all the while denying why
I understood the phrase,
that I had taken from it a presage of

my own salt gray ribs
battered by implacable seas
inherent within and invited in
from without,

how from a distance,
it would be attractive
in black and white tourist shot
fashion,

beautiful until
one got close and saw
the mortised joints had fallen apart,
the integrity of something that had once
sailed through storms
had become a sculpture of rot,

saw how function had failed
and form had become
a random ruin, good for nothing
except as a commentary
on the cost of reckless adventure.

Barbara, it should be noted,
passed on replying, proving that a prophet
is not always without honor
on his own shore.

I love my brain
more than I do my heart.
My heart is messed up.
It lives in a cage full of slop.
It keeps moving around
while my brain
just sits there and does its work
inside the rock on my neck.

I’m not interested in hearing
about how the stuff mythology
assigns to the heart
is really done in the brain. 
I’m not talking about that.
I’m talking about pumping blood
versus switching circuits on and off
and on again.  I’m saying
I dig electricity over hydraulics.

Don’t tell me it’s crazy
to have a preference for some organs
or that I couldn’t have one without the other.
I’m not saying I’d kick my heart out of bed.

I’m saying
that given a choice
between fluid and fire,
I choose the fire. 

I sold jeans for you,
sat around and drank wine
with you,
watched TV with you,
drove your car,
slept under your roof.

Why was it so surprising, then,
when I reached out one day
and took
the one thing
I lacked?

Read this at the Asylum last night; slight revisions afterward.  Bumped up for that reason.

““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““““`

Shock And Awe

Lunchtime.
No time to eat.
Outside having only my third cigarette
since 5:30 AM when I got here.
Two women come up to the door
bearing box lunches
and I tag along with them
to get through
the security entrance.

They ask me who I am.

"I’m one of the folks here
doing the reduction in force."

They laugh a little.

"Oh, you’re one of the bad guys."

I’m what you call
an "outplacement specialist."
In the war that is
the new American economy,
I’m a cross between
a medic and a black ops specialist.

I like the medic part:
buck ’em up, pat a shoulder, offer a tissue,
get them into the workshop next week
where I’ll show them
how to build a resume,
how to interview and network,
put them back into the field
until the next time I’m needed;
move on,
do it all again tomorrow
somewhere else.

It’s the black ops part that makes me suspect.
We work in teams:
a counselor, an HR rep, a security guard, and me.
Same drill every time: show up early, hide in an empty office
(there are so many places to hide these days),
go to the meeting where they announce the news,
watch them think about college funds, mortgages,
sick parents, sick kids, sick selves; watch them
not think.  Watch them feel. Try to decide what I’ll say

when the knock comes
a little while later
on my temporary office door.

She’s sad for everyone else.  It’s OK for her.
Gonna stay home for a while, help with her sister’s kids
while her brother in law’s in Iraq.
He’s staring into deportation if he doesn’t find something soon.
He’s shaking so hard I fill out the workshop enrollment for him.
This one looks like he’s relieved.
This one shrugs and says, "Let’s get this over with.
What do you have to tell me?"

More than you would imagine say nothing at all.
More than I could have imagined shake my hand when we’re done.

There are hours when no one knocks at all.
I wait for someone, anyone, to need me.

I don’t say any of this to the women letting me back into
their office, their workplace, their home away fromhome.

I just smile and say, "Well, I’m the guy
who helps them figure out what’s next."

And one laughs again, a very little,
and says, "Yeah, one of the bad guys."

I laugh too.

On the way home
there’s a pillar of smoke in the distance
over the city.  A tenement on Pleasant Street,
I learn later, has burned out, firefighters
taking people off the roof.  Everything on all six floors
is ruined.

Not everyone
wants to be forced to figure out
what’s next.  But

in the war that is
America
what follows shock and awe
is my business,

and business is good.

This is what the lack of pills does to me.

Swollen with useless potential
from my lips
straight through the top of my backbone,
I wake up hungry, wanting something,
something like whipped cream on a steak.

This is how it works.

Novels appear in sand
piled up in the gutters after a deadly winter.
The brass eagle on the flagpole can smell me,
mouselike, ready to roar at slights
not intended for me.  There’s a moon
in my waistband and wait for tides
to storm me erect.  I soften for seconds
at a time, then imagine the bread of past flesh.

This is the beginning of knowing.

The skull contains.  The mouth
releases.  The ears wash over with dimunition
of words important to speech, matterless truth,
illusory tinkling of breaking, reforming.
Nostrils, ultimately untwinned, pull in the idea
of opposites and return them damp and salty.

This, a full knowing.

There are required distances splintered into steps
that sink and fluff back once the feet are lifted.
There is an end in sight, scirocco mirage,
blend of stolen bones on grit wings.

There is night when moon is not enough.
A taste in the mouth that was never desired,
no matter how I once wished for it.