I grew up in Springsteen territory
dreamed early that I was born to do something
somewhere else
but when it came time to leave
the highways were pretty empty
they weren’t
jammed with heroes
either broken or whole
because no one ever left my hometown so
I went on alone to the next town
just like it
and stayed there pretending
I was one of those aforementioned heroes
when in fact
I was
promise
unfulfilled and
in my boots and jacket I knew deep down
I had just posed and then posed and then
posed some more and now
I’m stuck in the pose
the bones ripped out of my back
my tender exterior hardened to a shell
I can’t move
but I look
like I used to
look good
standing still
Boss Land Blues
Sleeping
is better than waking.
This needs no proof
in these parts. When I sleep
the sink doesn’t leak and
the cat is no longer
destructive.
The mice
move to Florida and
the dim universe of the news
is silent. My wallet
holds everything I need
when I sleep — I’m most wealthy
when I’m unconscious.
If I dream at all
it will be only rarely,
only fleetingly, and
it will be in the language
native to those who shrug off
the unreality
one must plow through
when awake. In dreams I become
fluent in that tongue and
it’s easy to live
when that happens
but it happens rarely.
When sleeping I mostly
am nothing at all,
and that is best.
What, Exactly, Are The Bosses Doing?
Contemplating the distance
to their planned shining city on the hill.
Calculating what it would take to build
a broad road to it, broad enough
for all manner of comfortable vehicles
(and a very small amount
of super ambitious and lucky foot traffic
just to make it seem accessible to all);
trying to determine how much gas
will be needed, how much coal
will be required to power it once
all who will fit have arrived;
then,
once the numbers are firm,
putting all their plans into
the passive voice.
Roads will be built, walls will be built,
coal will be mined, oil refined;
order will be established and maintained
and if threatened will be defended and
enforced.
Not bothering to ask the unspoken question
behind those circumlocutions:
who will do all that?
Knowing the answer already.
Looking directly at you with a cold dare in their eyes.
Great Again
You thought
it could all be done
without bleeding,
and you were right,
of course; you never bled,
not once. You never once got
your hands red. With
a little effort you missed seeing
every story printed in red ink
and every color photo
of small rivers running
and pooling in the street.
When you did hear
of such dreadful things
you were able to
wring your hands
loudly enough
to drown them out.
Fortunately
it worked out
to your benefit.
Gladly, you turned
to friends and family
and said so
and no one spoke up
to contradict you because
benefits like these
rely on silence for their
existence, and that
was enough reason
not to speak up; that
and the faces outside the door
leaking blood and brain
into the gutters, the faces
that stare mutely into your window,
having forgotten how to scream.
A Gift
Sitting with
a gift-glass of excellent
Scotch, a Glenmorangie
Nectar D’Or aged in
Sauternes casks…yes,
an indulgence, yes, expensive
and rare; that’s the point of it,
it was a sacrifice,
it was given in love
and I drink it with love on
my mind. Lemony
start, honey on the tongue
with dark burn, a finish
built on notes of
regret at its ending and
joy that it was here and I
had this chance to taste it:
I’m not going to be ashamed
at this, you see, not while
so much wrong needs righting,
not while there’s so much need
to assuage pain and trouble;
for a few minutes
I’m going into this glass
to understand it as a golden
taste of an expression of love,
a trace of what a pure future
might be once we get past
this dim moment.
Something You Made From Nothing
Glass bead bracelet
in left hand, bag of
black stones in
right hand, in mouth
spring water lightly salted.
Empty pockets.
Belt of cloth with
no metal.
At appointed time,
spit water into fire.
After it has ceased
sizzling, slip on bracelet;
kneel upon a cut log
to count out ten black
stones from that bag.
Line them up on
a hot stone.
Stand and
remove your clothes;
burn them while marching
counterclockwise around
and around flames
ten times. When done,
put stones back in bag
and walk away naked.
What appears behind you:
ashes:
you call them
ground of being,
source holy of holies.
There is also there
a meaning you didn’t have before,
a god running cover for your passage,
something you made from nothing.
Something as good
as any other ever made.
Then you realize
you are naked and cold
and when it starts to rain you
puzzle yourself into thinking
you missed something,
did something wrong
or backward. But —
a ritual done wrong
or backward that didn’t destroy
the world? Is it possible
that you have so little power?
The rain, as always,
comes straight down,
drenches you into
atheism.
They Are Coming
Maybe what we need is bells
on the front door,
the back door,
the windows.
Maybe
hang them in the trees
along the path leading here,
too.
Maybe a gate or seven
gates and bell them too. Build
rings of gates and bell them all:
signal bells on each, larger and louder
the farther away they are from
us.
Maybe build a beacon fire
on a far hill
and put a standing guard there
ready to set it ablaze
to let us know.
Then, of course, we’ll need
to be very quiet all the time.
Sit silently in the dead center
of the house, equidistant from
all the bells, with vigilance
for the near-certain fire
on the far hill;
have to stare
out the window at that,
constantly, waiting, guns
in our laps, in every corner,
a knife on every hip;
our children
in the soundproofed basement
hidden away,
learning defensive trades
at forges and anvils,
stabbing practice dummies,
shooting practice people;
growing up in the dark
for their own good
as out there offers only
the dangerous chiming of bells
in the rank wind coming
over the borders.
Westerns
The Westerns
always had us calling
the President
“The Great White Father.”
All my dreams tonight
have been Westerns
but nobody called anybody
great, or white, or father.
My early evening Western
was of a snowglobe
being shaken close to my face.
Milky background, inside
brown bits like clods of earth
swirling, irregular sizes;
perhaps these were oil clots,
or the rotted organs of the dead,
but they were just out of focus
and I was too afraid to squint
and make them clear.
My midnight Western:
nothing to see, my ears
filled with chanting:
broken, broken, broken…
Did this mean the snowglobe
had broken,
or did the fact that this was
a different dream
mean the earlier one
had never happened?
The next dream, I think,
will be another Western.
Fear of it is keeping me awake.
I expect a great White father
waits there, shards of glass
in his hands, ready to embrace me,
to open me from groin to throat,
to fill a snowglobe with my grease and guts,
to ride with my pieces into the sunset;
Can’t imagine what could follow that one.
I’m certain it will make sense to someone.
All Westerns run together into one long story,
after all; I don’t expect I’ll be in the next chapter,
or that any of us will, in fact — not as we are,
not as we ever were.
He was never our real father, you see.
Chase
That’s what it is now.
A chase.
Every day
begins with questions:
how soon before
they catch us,
how soon before
we break away
and get to safety
on the high ground?
They don’t understand
that in fact, we’re ahead.
That we’re far enough ahead
that their old dodges
to snare us into loss —
their dogs
and dog whistles,
their chains
and the chains of etiquette,
their ropes
and their bad rope-a-dope,
their bullets
and
those miles of policy strung out on
hollow point PowerPoints,
aren’t cutting it
any more.
They
can’t catch up so
they
keep running like
we’ll get tired
before we win. Like
we’re behind them and
we’re not.
We will win. We
haven’t got a choice,
really. Safety’s
ahead, not behind.
How soon before they catch us?
That’s not the right question: try,
instead:
how soon before we turn
to meet them? How soon before
we catch them with these
very hands? What then?
The One About Calling On God
MY GOD
there are things
I care about
that seem far beyond the reach
any breath of mine might have
once I’ve pushed it out into
our great global sea of air
No word of mine
will ever go far enough
to pierce into every ear
and carry my concern with it
to every person
I love or could potentially love
if only I knew them
(if only I knew them
for I can’t know every person
and MY GOD that seems
tragic on this planet that seems
more and more tuned to
a lonely note
a hateful note of discord)
so let it be known
when I call out
MY GOD
as I am now
let it be known
all I am doing
is saying that
if there is some Amplification
to be had by saying that
let me have it
for the words that I speak
are never enough
the actions I take
are never enough
and my concern seems
at once so huge and so small
that even if there is no God
I cannot refuse
to add whatever charge
that may carry
to the effort to make any small thing I might do count
A Few Things
In memory
are a few things
worth preserving:
deep sunshine taste
of a particular Key West mango;
scent of eucalyptus trees
through the windows
of a hotel
in Rancho Santa Fe;
one sharp pang of disappointment
at gray night skies
on the hills above Albuquerque
on the night of
the Perseid shower;
voices of friends, lovers, and
random phrases
overheard from strangers;
cannon hum
of an old Gibson
against my chest;
a slip of the tongue
that eventually made
for one magnificent line
in a mediocre bit of poetry;
a song in my head
that I never learned to play
or sing, but which gave me hope
every day I picked
at my strings
or my paper and pen.
In memory are things
worth preserving,
and none of them
will be found
in my bones
when I pass;
so on that day
or soon after
when they set me
on fire
may my ashes
signal no sadness
at the release of
my spirit
from my matter
but instead
flag its flight
as it is dragged
and lifted
on the kindness
of wind;
let it settle
wherever it wants,
in one or in many,
in new life
or aged lungs,
upon stone
or soft ground;
let it be true
that I didn’t matter
in life as much
as I do in what
I carried within,
what little
I leave behind:
song, flavor,
sense, breath.
Country Of Sick Men
Originally posted 8/28/2013.
The men of that country are sick.
We don’t know why they are sick
or how long they’ve been sick.
Call it a country of sick men
erupting everywhere
there’s a crack to spurt from,
burning their surroundings
when they open their mouths.
The sick men appear mostly mindless
from their sickness. How else to explain
comb-overs,
wars,
long nosed cars,
long reach guns,
filibusters,
weaponized God,
hangings,
unfortunate colognes,
blood feasts,
the casual seizing of women and children,
of other men,
willed ignorance
of lack of consent,
leveraged buyouts,
wolf pelts,
blessing of radioactive oceans,
balls of old oil
in the bellies of seals,
blank-eyed drooling over vintage guitars and game balls,
blackout drunks,
hard-engine bikes:
all their exquisite arts of suicide and genocide?
The men of that country are sick.
I was born there, live there mostly,
certainly will die there.
There are women in that country too.
Some of them are sick
but mostly, I think,
they are sick of the sick men.
They have stories to tell.
If you want to hear those don’t ask me to tell them.
My tongue’s a man’s tongue and I’ve got a touch
of the sickness myself.
Get away from me,
go to them,
and listen.
It will seem
like a different country.
If Wishes Were Fishes
Wouldn’t it be nice to be
as inert as a stone right now?
Shiny with minerals and perhaps
a semi-precious crystal or two
in your surface, insensate
and immune to the world’s
barrage of little needles?
Wouldn’t it be nice to be
as brilliant and short-lived
as a trout or even minnow right now?
Flashing through water
in the sunlight filtering down
as you crossed the bed of the
last clean stream on earth?
Wouldn’t it be nice to be
utterly unable to understand
human speech right now?
To be able to stand mute and
unknowing as orders were read
and as the bullets came tearing
across the air into your chest?
Wouldn’t it be nice
not to be here as ourselves
at all, prone to all the danger and ache
that comes from knowing
where we are and who we are
and what we are capable of feeling
as we triumph or fail?
Wouldn’t it be nice
to have the time
to pretend
these things
could possibly be true?
Wouldn’t we all love
this moment to be without torches
or a need for them except
to light a path into
the beauty of a night
we could enter without fear
of a nightmare coming alive?
What we would give for that.
What we will have to give
for that
is a promise to never be
dead as stone, dumb as fish;
silent, unknowing victims
of terror. A promise to see
and be our full selves
as the torches illuminate
that which squats ominously
in the dark beyond.
His Type
He’s a
shitty video,
bad zine,
faded heavy knit,
square bottomed
necktie
of a man.
He is a
wrong turn onto
a short dock and
an unwillingness to
brake before he goes off
the end into water
too shallow to allow a
dramatic, tragic
denouement.
He is a
bankroll fat with
singles and
not even a twenty
on top to
cover.
He’s a pool shark
with a warped stick,
big talk small walk,
too quick to back off
when rocked back by
one well-chalked bank shot —
no game for the long haul,
no words for the laugh
from the watchers lounging
against the far wall —
you know the type
and you know how they all
fall, after a while. Later
we’ll make jokes about him
but while he’s here
you steam and stew and
think about how sweet a single
slap behind his neck
might be, even though you know
that’s not worth all the trouble
likely to come from
all that whining
and tattle tale talk
afterward.
Weapon
I must demand a certain level
of willingness for war
from myself.
If I am to call myself
alive, I must be game
to fight for life,
to strike and cut as needed,
not only for myself
but for those uncertain
as to their worthiness
for life, for those reduced
from full to half or less.
I do not ask this
of all. I do not even ask this
of myself at all times;
there are moments when
I sit in darkness, afraid,
thinking only of pain,
of being carved
or shot or beaten; not so much
of death, as I am long ago
resigned to that and just wise enough
not to believe I am destined to be
the first immortal. There are moments
when even a shrunken freedom
seems too precious
to lose, and I sit
and hoard my selfish life;
then comes clarity
that spites my fear:
I was born a weapon,
there are wars
worth fighting,
and the drum I hear
isn’t my heart,
is not even inside me.
Dark Matter 