Dark Matter

Here is
where I was born,

and there is where
I’ll be soon enough.

The space between them
is called by some “waiting to die,”

by others, “learning to live.” All of them say
that how you name the space

is an orientation and
a choice. They argue;

I try to cover my ears.
One day I heard someone else

call the path between them “the Work”
and I opened my arms. 

Couldn’t wait for that embrace.
Into the Work I fell,

landing hard upon it,
sinking in after a few minutes,

learning to breathe 
what I wrote, learning to

write from my breathing, 
all while on my knees

in gratitude for a space
between waiting to die

and learning to live,
for the path called the Work

that has kept me for years,
breathing poetry 

as I learned
how to navigate between

where I was born
and where I will be soon enough.

A fire from the center of the earth
breaks out now and then
to remind us of what is possible
and beyond our own capacity.

Flaming, streaming rock
turned plastic, slippery, and red
comes to the surface
through generations of old stone 
and when it catches anything
it burns everything and our weakness
is made clear.

We stare into it, 
offer it fear and faith. 
Name it for a goddess or god,
curse it as an evil, 
flee it and photograph it
and tell stories of its potency,
its devastation,
its swift re-creation
of the land it seizes
or the ocean it boils.

On the horizon,
a glow announces the coming
of the central fire. The world
made new, in ways we cannot
replicate. No wonder

we fear it.  No wonder
we gave it a god’s name,
a goddess’s name, a divinity
all its own.

Everclear in the air: “Daddy 
gave me a name,
then he 
walked away.”

I think hard enough, decide
this is my song.
I drink hard enough, then
I know it’s not.

If there’s a song for me
in the air already,
I’ve forgotten how to find it.
It’s like Everclear’s song-daddy:

left a mark and 
vanished.

My daddy didn’t drink.
Quit before I was born.
Sometimes it felt like
he should have kept at it.

Like it didn’t matter
that he wasn’t drunk.

I’m sure there’s a mom song
out there for me too.
Once again,
I can’t find it. 

Ozzy, Danzig, 
Pink Floyd, 
maybe some older bit
of nonsense.

None of this
does the trick.

I think I’ll find my songs
on a Soviet-era radio.
Something with tubes,
something drab and static-full.

There are too many songs
in the American air.
Can’t believe any of them.
Can’t buy any of them as mine.

Daddy gave me a name
then he stuck around.
Mom gave me a birth
then she stuck around.

I wore out my welcome early.
Don’t need a song to tell me that.

Stingy Night
takes its time
with me.  

If I had paid
more tribute to it
I’d be in it now,

that’s for damn certain.
This long day 
would be over

and I’d be enveloped
in warm, blanket deep
blue and black.

But last night I stayed up
till dawn, playing at
being one of those

who do that. I’m not
one of those who do that
though I recall

trying a few times.
The price was too high
and I’ve stopped paying.

I’m a physical dead head
mess. The whole system’s
gone bankrupt

as Miser Night
holds back its gifts.
I’m not asleep

when I need to be.
You call it
insomnia, I call it

the payback.
I don’t dream
like I should, I call it

the lost wages
of not sinning enough.
And when I do doze midday,

twitching in my lazy seat,
Night counts its coins
and laughs, that clicking keeping me

from falling away
completely.  Night
breaks me, leaves me broke.

The poems often start
with an anchor to time:
dusk, midnight,
eclipse twilight,
predawn. 

It’s never two fifteen PM,
you may note. 
Never suppertime,
never late morning
coffee break. 

Why do you suppose so many
of these poems begin
at liminal moments?

Asking for a friend.

Why do you suppose
there was never a full length manuscript
from this poet? Why do you think
they never got there? 

Asking for a friend,
a friend afraid to admit
that they want that answer.

Afraid to say that answers, 
whether given freely 
or puzzled through,

are often the graves 
of minute reasons to remain alive.
In those times when the quest
is more invigorating than the arrival,
accepting answers
feels like moving closer to death. 

Asking for
a friend, as always,
one seeking
to understand

thick, stagnant truths
like the one about how
no one wants to touch
this old body of mine,
not even me. The one
that pushes out
another question:
why is that? 

Asking for a friend, one
tired and purely
disappointed friend.

How is it that one can be
so terrified of uncertainty freezing solid
one trivial answer
at a time?

Asking, you know, as always, for a friend.
Asking for one curiously ignorant friend.

Asking for a friend,
one like a shadow
who won’t step out
and be seen as solid —

say at two fifteen PM
or late morning coffee break — 

one who prefers the blur
of in between moments.

A friend who ghosts away
into the surrounding dark
once they’ve heard the answer.