I’m just passing through.
I won’t live here again.
I can’t. I see too well
to dare to think it could be done.
Within weeks after moving back
I’d tear myself up, lay myself
in a hole in the ground, set myself in
cement for archaeologists to find
centuries from now. They’d say
I was typical of the townsfolk
of the era and they’d be so right,
but I wouldn’t care then because death
has always had a way of erasing truth
and replacing it with lessons.
If I am not already
a lesson about my hometown
and how to set things in cement
that were once alive, why would I care
about becoming one after I’m dead?
All I can do is strive to be alive now,
right now, while striving to stay
the hell away from you,
and let today become the past
when I won’t care about any of this
any longer. Today, though, I’m just
passing through. I will forever be
just passing through.
I Said To My Hometown,
The Tree
Every time someone
tells the story
of a routine atrocity or
an ongoing oppression
on a big enough
and well-lit stage,
someone watching or listening
will wring their hands
and fall to their knees in anguish,
crying out, “why is no one
talking about this?”
so loudly that it drowns out
the creaking
from the death-laden branch
of the well-maintained
and perfectly manicured tree
in their backyard,
the one that came with the house,
the one that sold them on the place
back when they were looking for
their forever home.
No Excuses
I wake up at last, sweaty and deadly.
All the specifics of my big bad dreaming
have been erased, but I know it was all focused
on what I will do or will not do for
my own satisfaction.
Ancient, Biblical, archetypal;
clothed in the flushed skin of my history,
choking on fragments of mythology’s
crude dictates: I don’t kid myself
into some sense of personal nobility.
Not after that. Not after the angry
and wanton night-swamp
I just waded through that has left me
drenched in stink and horrible to behold.
This is a shamefaced confession,
not a boast: if I had been an apple,
if I had been The Apple in The Garden,
I suspect I’d have fallen into her hand and left her
with no choice but to bite down and learn.
There would have been no coaxing,
only coercion. I know this because
as beastly as it is to say it,
there has never been any need
for demons to make it happen,
to turn a man toward Evil. A whole
order of civilization, a machine
of enforcement, has made this happen,
and this morning I rise and swear to do my best
to shower, cleanse myself of it as best as I can,
scrub off the long wet dream of domination,
and forget about looking for a snake
as an excuse for my being a serpent.
Unfamiliar
Never imagined
that my memory could
disappear, but it is. The letters of words
are themselves becoming new.
Definitions seem fresh again —
you ask me for a memory of you
that makes me smile — what is a smile?
Those letters are unfamiliar.
I’m not even sure how I’m writing this.
Muscle-habit, maybe; the gross framing
of my body doing a better job
of it than my brain can now.
My world that has depended
on my being certain of what I already know
is turning into smoke so much of the time.
It’s fine. I’ll slip into a sea of forgetting;
I’ll be fine there.
Talking With Steve, Panhandler On The Median
You know, at least half
of the people you see are not
people, he says. And it’s not
like you’ll ever understand
the difference — no glasses
can help with that, it’s not like
that movie which only got it
a little right, mostly wrong. I’m
never sure. Not even about you.
I work it out in my head and the clues
don’t add up to certainty. The guy
at the convenience store, he’s not
one of them. Lets me use the bathroom
if I need it. I have to do him now and then
in return, you know what I’m saying?
That makes me sure he’s a human.
A man’s man for a man, you know?
That old this for that, that old scratch
each other’s itch. I’m not sure
you’re real — you never ask for
anything, just hand over a dollar
when you have one to offer. It’s good
to see you here. God bless,
even if you are one of the ones.
I’m not sure about you. God bless.
On The Ingestion Of Cannabis
To ingest cannabis when life
is apparently free of obligation
is to examine the word “obligation”
as it it were a spear pointed at your time.
Some of us can stand there
in front of the spear,
see it coming clearly,
then duck away with little consequence.
Others simply
catch the spear in both hands
before it can wound,
and fulfill what’s been thrust upon them.
I am neither.
I am of a different group,
those who will automatically step
from the spear’s merely projected path
unless they fear that they can not
avoid it — and if
they can not avoid it,
they do not partake.
This may feel like
trivial information
to you. If so you do not see
in this one small fact
how much of a life
may be ruled by a sense of
obligation as
unavoidable danger
and of even
potential pleasure
as a place
of near-certain death.
big wind
big wind
coming through with
built in tilt
its source in impure lust for
knocking things down
it thinks are in its way
refuses
to call itself
a hard wind
instead calls itself
a nation of civility
with a civil society
its civil society is not civil
no matter what it says
it screams in the big wind’s favor
civility here means talk nice or
we will blow you over
talk nice or be unheard
either way no one
will hear you
as long as the big wind blows
civility is
no weapon
against such a storm as that
to be heard over
a tornado inside
a hurricane
you had better
be prepared
to scream
and to grab that big wind
by its throat
when it bears down
and to set your mouth
and teeth
upon its ear
T. S. B. (61)
If I am a temple, I’m tired enough
that the censers won’t light, broken enough
that the congregation fears a collapse,
soft enough that my gospels dissolve on delivery.
If I am a garden, I’m soft enough
to be tilled and planted, tired enough
not to care that it hurts, broken enough that
what is sown might not grow.
If I am a boat, I’m broken enough
to be an accidental submarine,
soft enough to sink slowly, tired enough
to lie on the welcome bottom until I’m gone.
Tired, soft, broken.
No one is supposed to wake up
this way — alive, awake, refreshed;
those are the preferred words.
Nonetheless, I use tired, soft,
and broken because this
is how I begin year 62.
A Note To The Author
Remember the first book
that ever turned you on
to how you wanted to live
forever after? Do you recall
the letdown when you learned
how wrong it was about how
a life should be lived?
That day when you learned
there are more things
in heaven and earth
than have been contained
in your literature,
when you saw the author
as a monster or worse,
a human; that day when you
put the book aside and said,
it’s my turn to step up and be
star-blessed with wisdom earned
through disappointment. My turn
to write the book that will disappoint
another one at some future time.
I’m reading it now
and I’m not disappointed as you were,
though I can feel how strongly
you reacted to that first devastation —
so much is contained in your literature
that I’ve just abandoned my faith
in my heaven and earth to live
in yours for the moment, turning pages,
fingers crossed, silently praying:
don’t screw it up.
“A Country of Laws”
I live in a garden of weather-ground statues.
No names left on any of
their rotted pedestals.
Someone not in the scene
tells me these are
my ancestors. My Founding Fathers.
I am not so sure. So many of them —
the list of their names
would be longer
than law firm-long. Then again, maybe
it is true. After all, they have given me
a law firm’s legacy:
a little blood money in my pockets,
linked to a demand that in every situation
I either win or settle.
Dream Grocery
Dream-shopping while odd music plays
in the backroom of the dream grocery store.
My foot tapping — wind droning, hand drum beat
and a strum — is that bandurria or
fado guitar? I should know this.
Should be able to differentiate. It’s
my dream after all. I don’t like my
instruments mixed. Give me purity,
not this wholesome mess of intentions,
though I admit to sustained grooving
as I try to pick out something for lunch
that will do more than just sustain me.
I want to eat something transformative.
I want to consume dream-flesh and become
all that suggests. The music keeps playing
and the counter clerk glares at my dawdling
and prodding about what each food can do.
“Try it and see,” is the refrain. “But I can’t
eat it all,” I cry out to the dream space.
I am beginning to love the music now
precisely because I do not understand it.
It’s evidently too much to ask that the food
be as simple as the music is not. If I am to be
transformed it will be on an empty stomach,
possessed by rhythm, longing for more.
I wake up, humming.
Where is my guitar?
So much to do before breakfast.
break
taking a few days off to recharge and rest up after some minor health issues.
read some poems from the past.
see you soon — I appreciate your attention.
Fragment 29
Double down,
proud of standing up,
getting around to it,
getting on with it.
If a tangle ensues, cutting through.
If a tumble arises, rolling with.
If crisis then double
down again
and address the matter at hand
with a letter to the editor.
Explain the nature of how this ends.
How it makes sense at least within
the circle of its sense
where if in crisis
all meaning moves
more than a little left.
Running Is A Lifestyle
You were there, seated on the low wall,
breathing hard after running. Recovering.
I was there too, though we did not speak.
Both of us had just finished running from
what had chased us. Were we done or just
taking a moment? We never spoke. Our eyes
never met. If we had taken a moment there
we might have learned something, gained
a little time, made a plan to fight back. Might
have stopped, been able to settle, been able
to put down actual roots. Instead we were
caught up in recovery, preparing for
more running and more attempts to escape
and live. This is how it works, how it was
always designed to work. This is how we’ve come
to call this living. It never lets up and
we never learn how many of us there are
running away from the same thing.
Land Mines
This work is not for the cowardly.
Everything in a room or yard could be
weaponized upon first glance;
if not, it could be a key to a room
where land mines are stored, left
carelessly armed and all over the floor
the last time you were in there.
You’ve lost limbs over this before.
It takes time to grow them back.
The growth hurts like hell itself.
Nonetheless you forget all this
the second you begin to write.
Dark Matter 