Everyone on this show is
LOUD

from the insistently
neutral host

to the mother
screaming indignantly
at being accused of sleeping
with her eighteen year old stepson
calling the accuser
A DOG

to the stepson who is proclaiming that
it’s not true
that the four year old is not his
he would have been fourteen
and that’s
NASTY

to the aggrieved father
of said eighteen year old
who is making the accusation
and is himself accused
of not

MANNING UP

to the crowd cheering on their favorites

and the only moment of hush comes
with the ripping of the envelope
and the announcement that
NO ONE HERE
is the father

at which point there’s more yelling than ever

and everyone running around
to thunderous applause

All we ever see of the four year old
is a still picture
his eyes wary
his head thrust forward just a little
leading with his chin

In the final turn
of the long road
you find a recently dead
dinosaur.

No one’s gonna believe it!

It’s too big to carry back
to town, so you cut off
a large section of its skin
and wave it like a flag
as you scurry home
to tell everyone.

"Oh, that?
That could be anything," they say,
when you tell them what you’ve found.
And they go about their business.

They’re right.
It could be anything…

but it isn’t.  It’s
the skin of a dinosaur!

You should have kept it to yourself.
No one would have been the wiser
about your desperate need to be
singular and outstanding, and no one
would be laughing right now.

Next time you run across one of those things
that no one will believe,
you’ll just have to believe in it
all by yourself.

So you eat the dinosaur skin
and fall into a dream…imagine that,
you almost came upon it
still alive.  You could have died
out there and been found half eaten…

shit, if you’d gotten there
just two hours earlier,
they’d have had no choice but to believe in it,

and you’d have been famous.

If you are the artist
you say you are
you’ll drop dead right now
and let everyone wonder
what the last word
would have been.

But you’re not, of course.

You’ll finish what you started
and after that,

you’ll look into the mirror and sing
"Is That All There Is?"
like a cut-rate Peggy Lee — remember her?
She died old, after a lifetime of honors…

Yeah.
I thought not.

I once knew a kid
named David Cocaine
and the knot of friends I traveled with
made him miserable
for two and years of junior high
because of that name, only letting up
when the Gatos brothers arrived’
with their bizarre gaits and scraggly curls
and their constant sniveling about their dad.
Christ, those were good times.

But in junior year I changed schools
and I had to find my own targets.  My favorite punching bag
was sophomore genius Andrew Duncan, who made me crazy
because he had a smarter mouth than me
and wouldn’t shut up about not being afraid.

One day in the lobby
Carl Sjogren egged me on into a full assault
one day when Duncan wouldn’t give him
ten bucks.  He told me
something I can’t remember now
about something Duncan said about me
but it was huge in my head, a red egg,
so I picked up Duncan and threw him down
the granite steps. 

Sjogren plucked the wallet
from Duncan’s pants as he tried to get up
and said, "I wouldn’t get up right now
if I were you.  Brown’s
kinda crazy."

We both got away with it

until this afternoon,  when I saw Andrew Duncan
in line at the pet store.  He’s bald now
and fat but I’m sure it was him,
and he was sure it was me. 

There’s a scar on his forehead,
a gully from his eyebrow to his fossil hairline.

And I’ve still got a red egg inside,
thirty three years later, except now
I know a little more about what to do with it…

so I turned away and turned my eyes
to the floor.  Couldn’t tell you
what he was buying

for that pitbull standing to heel beside him,
waiting for a word to set him off.

I know just how that dog feels.
I’ve been there myself.

Coming out of the Target store
you find it’s finally pouring

after a day of threat overhead.
People are pissed and cursing the sky,

but don’t bother running to the car,
although you’re in a T-shirt.

Take a moment
to get loose

right in front of your neighbors.
Walk slowly enough to soak down

your big broad belly
and let yourself shiver.

We’re all shoppers at some point.
Forget the things you didn’t find in there:

the perfect jacket, your hair gel
of choice, answers to your prayers

for satisfaction and peace…
get wet as a seal, wet as a duck,

wet as the parking lot.
You’ll never find a thing anywhere

as free as not being
afraid to look stupid

in front of a herd of sheep,
even if you’re mostly a sheep yourself.

Slipper cat,
bed cat,
blotch-coated beast;

He’s been sleeping in corners
I’ve provided for him
ever since the day he was born.

The wimpiest cry
for a big tom
I’ve ever heard,

opening his mouth
in a poignant whimper
any time he’s got a whim to be satisfied.

And stick him in a crate
to go somewhere — whew,
you’d think a change of pace

was a death sentence!  He doesn’t quit
yowling until he’s released, then hides
bitter and sad for hours after he’s free.

Makes me wonder
how much he’s taking in
as he lies there, one eye open,

ear cocked to the atmosphere
all around.  Learning is a lifelong process
after all.

The scholar says,
"Chop wood, carry water,"
because he didn’t have indoor plumbing
and central heat.  Work
has become remote: the job
leads to a note that cash, slippery
cash, is present for a moment,
and thus the heat and water
will follow. 

So, I reach, as always,
for a guitar.  Chop chords,
carry melody.  Direct and
immediate. Builds
calluses like nothing else:
small, precise pads of evidence
that I know how to use my hands.

I hold the old instrument
with its wear patterns that speak
of other hands, other toilers
who stole time to do this.  I’ll
pass it on someday,
sure of my own minute legacy
that will remain, even if the songs
have vanished, never to be found.

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