1.
Under the sign that says
"Personalized Hairdressing,"
the leafblower guy’s got a cigarette
hanging from his mouth
and his ear protectors
perched on his head,

and he looks like
a barfly Princess Leia
swinging his black cannon
back and forth,
wiping the winter trash
out into the gutter.

When he cuts the motor,
I can hear that he’s singing
"Seasons Of Love"
around the butt end of his smoke.

He stops as soon as he knows I can hear.

2.
Sister Rosa
lived here for eighty years
and volunteered for forty,
held the hands
of the dying when
their families couldn’t take it
anymore.

With her black hairnet
and black orthopedic shoes,
clumping along in the market,
smiling at our children, she had been
the trademark of small town care
around here,

until the day she passed and,
when asked at the penultimate moment
why she’d been so willing
to do what she’d done, to do
what was being done for her
right now by so many who had asked
to be there at her side,

she said:

"One day, far too late,
I discovered that I just liked
to watch people die."

3.
Just when you think
you know someone,
a rumor hits the wind
and you end up imagining
tornadoes sleeping
in the next room, ready to blow
your windows in on top of you.

Tough.

Suck it up like a soda pop
shared in a ’50s movie.
All those kids knew they were acting.
You don’t have to pretend anymore
that you didn’t know that.

Duty, the mare’s tail,
keeps the flies away
from the Big Warhorse’s Neck
so she can trample on merrily ahead.

Honor is a carpet bombing
bunker busting drillpointed beetle
always scuttling underfoot. 
Everyone knows he’s there,
everyone’s trying not to step on him,
he always gets stepped on and then,
watch out.

Country tries to stay out of trouble
but it’s a farm, dammit,
there’s always something needs doing.

Love flees to the city,
dreams of home,
worries about the folks she left behind.

But not enough to want
to go back.

Oh, sweetheart,
daughter,
my fresh-diapered baby
at home waiting
for me,

too young to understand the notion
of Mommy’s sudden gnawing fear,
the too-temporary heaviness
of my purse bearing
the severance check,

you’ll look up at me
when I come through the door
hours ahead of schedule
and laugh.

I’m going to get right down
on the floor with you
and roll around for a long time.

pile of dead badges
on the conference table.

pens left behind
with the company logo still visible on some,
while others have been rubbed to near illegibility
from constant use.

weary managers
going through checklists
of tools, computers, cellphones
to be returned.

the last paychecks handed over.

silence throughout the office area
as escorts return from the front door
one at a time.

outside, the sun
is weakening as the day grows old.

parking spaces go from gray to black
as the mist soaks into
what had been protected
for a little while.

Your attention please!

After much thought
I’ve decided to
start using
my real name

which is
"L’Wan"

which stands for
"Left Wing Assault Necktie"

and I will be touring immediately
with my partner
"R’Wan"
(aka  "Right Wing Assault Necktie")
as one half
of the greatest politically charged team of stealth folk assassins
on the planet

We will call ourselves
"The Accessories"
and return to our root cause
of changing the nature of your ears

with big acoustic guitars
that took years of wage slavery to acquire
and a sound system made entirely of
green tech lies

We’ll bake the bread of justice
in our shorts
and toss it to the hungry

We’ll make up a song
for every genocide
everywhere

We’ll rough up the Man
and teach him a thing or two

and make you cry for our convictions

You think I’m kidding you
about this plan
but I’m not

I’m a stealth dog
and R’Wan is a deadly cat
We’re the housepets your mother warned you about
who look all friendly and mild
then steal your breath when you’re asleep

using your acclaim to feed The Cause

Sniff us out at a theater near you
and save yourselves the trouble
of having us come into your homes

We’ll bug you
all the way to the food bank
and eat well while we’re doing it

angry little pooches
yapping at you to get real
yap yap
yap

The Accessories:
changing the world
one fashionably wrapped neck
at a time

if you want to understand
who that officious stranger
in the conference room is
with all those packets of papers

or the meaning of
the unfamiliar taut bodied man
in the usually empty cubicle
looking falsely bored
like a bouncer
just waiting for someone
to get out of line

or why all the human
resources staff
are refusing
to look you in the eye

then you should know
that it’s a special day

someone’s made a mess
and those folks are here
to help clean it up

or should I say
clean
you
out

Ceramic lamp on the walnut table —

clay never intended
to become a bearer of light,

but it did.  The tree
never intended to lend its strength
to the clay, but it does.

Once upon a time, the tree’s roots
threaded through a vein of clay
as they silently created its hold on the earth.
The clay had no reaction to that,
lying there underneath it all.

It was our violations of their different ways of being
that brought them together here,
their roles reversed now, making themselves useful
just for me.  I am quiet before them,
respectful of the changes they’ve been through
to end up here. 

What will I become next? 

I think about that,
nursing pain, imagining a path
not of my choosing, one that may take me
into service to something unimaginable now.

It’s the single most fascinating fact
I can imagine
that each person on this planet
has been so sensitized to some singular thing
that its occurrence can drive them to ecstasy,

and that some unknown fraction
of the world’s population
is doomed to be unaware
of it.

This is not a statement of urgency
for finding a soul mate, for
the ecstasy may not be related to
another person’s doing; rather,

my excitement comes from knowing
that their searching cannot be directed,
and that they may stumble upon their Grails
without ever realizing that they
searching, or indeed
that we were created to search. 

This is a cause for optimism.

That the fraction
may be greater than one half
is a cause for pessimism.

But you know,
I’m still glad for the search.  If nothing else,
it keeps me thinking about the gaps
among us as we nose around,

wondering what the hell we’re doing.

All you have to do
to be a poet

is to notice the way
a word slides into another,
or how it bumps against it.
Does it tickle your teeth
or break them?

Decide which you prefer.
Decide which makes for
a better picture
of what you mean to say,
or decide if what you just said
is something you meant to say.

If it isn’t, decide whether or not
saying that is what you need to say.
Decide what it is
that you say when you say it.
Get it on paper and then
decide what to do with it:
burn it? publish it? say it all again
with different bumps and glides next time
you say it?

It’s easy to be a poet.
All it takes is decision upon decision
reviewed through a clear lens
while chewing your words like lettuce,
like clams full of sand,
then choosing whether or not
to spit them out, and to decide
whether spitting them out is for your own good,
or for the good of someone you haven’t met
so they can pick them up
and chew them again.

there are mountains
under every sea
that dwarf what we can climb

we dive to their peaks
exploration there is a process
of descent

whether you choose to climb or dive
you will need to carry with you
something to breathe

whether you climb or dive
a mountain is going to hurt you
in your blood

inhale
do it
this is the way it works

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I’m trying to complete 30/30 in as few days as possible.  I think I’ll be done by tomorrow…seriously.  Certainly in a week.

the best advice
I ever received
was

"c’mon, dammit,
make yourself throw up"

ok,
the best advice
I ever took

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Everyone thinks this is funny.  In common with a lot of the poems I write that people think are funny, I didn’t conceive it to be…I was thinking of advice offered after a suicide attempt.

All of our beloved machines gathered at the old farm
and dumped all their waste lubricants
into a pit lined with plastic sheets.

Whee, they said.  The old swimming hole!

Our cars looked back at us
from where we’d parked them on the fire road
and sneaked off to join in the fun,
humming more lightly along
now that they didn’t have to carry us.

What do we do now, we said,
stuck up here on the hill
without our own pots to piss in?

We’re walking home to see what’s left.
If there is nothing, we tell each other,
maybe we can start over.

But — no machines this time!
Simple stuff only.  Not even a lever,
a wheel, an inclined plane. We’re suspicious
of our own joints now, afraid
that they may leave us when unattended.

There’s going to be a lot of lying around.
A lot of thinking.  A lot of looking
at the sky, at the unmanned planes
flitting among the bemused eagles.

Loam
carried into the yard
in burlap sacks.

The old brushy pile of fill
in the backyard
hidden
under the earth that’s being spread
over it.

In a moment
(perhaps a year or two)
all of us who know what’s under there
will be gone.

A new tenant
will plant a garden
there, where we never
would have considered
planting anything.

Flowers, herbs,
vegetables — something
useful, productive,
lovely.

Who will care, then,
about what we thought?

There’s a reason
the hilt of a good knife
feels like silk in your hand.

It’s made that way
so you’ll never want
to let it go,

no matter how much gore
it accumulates.
The makers of death

understand you too well.
Keep fighting, they say.
We’ll make it easy.

Paying attention
to what the cat sees in you
is better than worrying
that your failures have made you
into a werewolf.

No point
in wasting the whole day waiting
for nightfall and the heavy moon
to fool you into horror at your changed self,
into treating yourself to absolute guilt.

Look, he’s rubbing your leg,
asking for food or a thorough scratch.
You are his understanding of love and order,

and when you respond,
reaching down
from your desperate seat on the couch
to lift him up
and offer what he is asking for,

you are that. Trust him.  He knows
more of the truth about you
than you have allowed yourself to know.