You thought your life
was going to be deep,

imagined you’d have thoughts
as large as whales
moving sine-cosine through you
all night long, all day long,
from wake to sleep and after death.

You thought that at this age
bills would pay themselves, 

imagined you’d be soaring now
far above dirty and mundane,
that such small things would be beyond you
as you plunged and rose and plunged again
upon thermals, updrafts; flying upon the fullness
of cycles, the vast majesty of understanding All. 

You never doubted that by this age
throngs would look to you for wisdom,

imagined yourself in whale-speak 
sharing the meaning of tender, sharing the falcons’
long vision, imagined yourself
nodding at the seekers, shrugging when
needed to maintain mystery.

You thought this morning
about all that nonsense,

imagined yourself instead no longer hungry
and cold as you sat in your sad apartment.
The whales no longer passing through you
sine-cosine; you have no sky to fly,
nowhere to go. Deep thoughts
you once hoped for have left you adrift.

Instead you think about your empty shelves,
pretend you recall hearing songs in the ocean;
it seems so far from here
to the top of that last wave
but it’s really no farther now
than it has ever been: how simple it seems now:
shallow or deep, high or low, rich or poor,
hungry or sated:

sine, cosine;
cosine, sine…ah.

You live
between animals
in a studio apartment
pretending your daughter
is not so far away.

One side
of the room belongs to 
a dumb cat named Cat
who sleeps
for more hours in one day
than you usually muster
over two nights.

The other side of the room
belongs to an alarmingly smart dog
named Toby or Tsunami or
something else beginning
with a T you don’t care
to use or recall
as he never comes for it
which proves he’s smart
as there’s no need to answer
in a room this small. 

Your daughter
lives in New York
and neither calls nor
answers your calls.

You live
between animals
and look from time to time 
at the yellow wall phone
you can’t quite give up
for a mobile device. 

Feed the animals,
sit near the phone.
Don’t bother with the television.

If there’s ever a tsunami for real
they’ll never find you after.
The animals will survive
and go to shelters. 
Your daughter won’t bother 
trying to adopt either one.

You used to have a name,
but why bother with that now?
You were at last just
The Lady Between The Animals.
It’s not an easy one to forget,
but it will happen.

this body is fighting

i say die
it says no

keeps wanting

it says
no
eat instead
drink some water

it says
ask for 
kiss 
for fuck or

for the sake of argument
ask for life

for seeing it through
(aren’t you
curious?)

i say 
no

in the left side of my big dreams 
there was sunlit order.  in the right side
there was mist and if there was order
i couldn’t see it. why wait to find out 

if it in fact made sense in there? i did
well enough in the time i gave it to get
this far. i did well enough to put to rest
worry for the future: whatever is there

is beyond worry. in the left side
the steps up are straight and narrow
and i can turn around anytime i want.
in the right side i’m not sure if the previous

step remains intact. maybe i can’t go back
without falling into nothing. maybe that’s fine. 
and maybe the next step is missing. maybe
it’s all falling from here. maybe i’m falling now.

everything is a maybe 

to this body being asked
to die

except for one certainty

it keeps wanting

to spite the dreams 
it contains

my body
maintains left side order
maintains right side fog

all i do
between them

waiting 

there were three minutes 
in my twenty-second year
when I think I had a decent ass

that might have been
second glanced by anyone
half-seeking such a thing

or such a me
if they’d taken the time
to look past it and see me as me

and not consider my ass
which I did not think much about
back then and had forgotten until today

when the entirety
of my crumbling body 
overruns my thinking

if you ask me now
what I think about 
how others view me

I will shudder
fall to my agonized knees
and as if looking down upon myself

from the heights I reached 
in my twenty-second year
I will not be able to answer 

as this 
is nothing
I ever considered 

At this end of your life
you should take the cups 
you’ve been offered 
and pour a little out of each
for all your much regretted
lost relationships, all of
your ruptured lifelong
conversations, whether
they died untended or
were killed on purpose
as mercy killing or for spite,
whether they ended
with no explanation 
or were left to die quite
consciously; however they failed,
take the cups you have left
and spill a little for what 
those who vanished offered you
in your shared time.

Tomorrow it will be your cup
lifted to someone else’s lips,
and you would want
to be honored for whatever
you brought to the tables,
bars, and counters
you once shared with them.
As you slip from memory
you’ll hope
they too will savor
one last taste
of how it was when
you were together. 

I don’t feel that this
is how I should feel.

I feel like a weight bench
has appeared before me
in the street where I am standing 
in front of Philadelphia
City Hall.

I don’t feel that this
is how I should feel.

I feel like wind has blown open
a door and wherever I was
in solid life is now behind me
and this apparatus is trying
to tell me I can’t turn around. 

I don’t feel that this
is how I should feel.

I feel that feeling is unremarkable
and unimportant when you are pressed
to use what’s before you in a setting
you don’t know at all except
from pictures and maybe one trip long ago.

I don’t feel that this
is how I should feel.

I feel nothing beyond
the vague need to strip to the skin
and lie back and begin a workout
I’ve never done in my life and don’t think
I should be doing here. 

I don’t feel that this
is how I should feel.

I feel like denying this is Philadelphia
then wondering why it is Philadelphia
and why the weight bench is red
and who any of this was meant for
as it doesn’t feel like it’s meant for me.

I don’t feel that this
is how I should feel.

I feel like I should embrace
the feeling that this was meant
for someone else and perhaps
I am no longer the person I was
when I was on the other side of the door.

I feel I should change my name and move
to Philadelphia and forget my hometown
and my hometown love and my longing
for desert and mountain and a long
and fruitful life ending in a hometown bed.

I feel like a weight bench in Philadelphia
is all I’m good for now, that I’ve become
a sweaty old man struggling to lift 
things that get heavier and less
balanced as I go, a tin can beside me

with a scrawled sign
beside that that says, “Don’t you
love your brother, good 
people of Philadelphia? Toss me
a penny or two or more.”

I don’t feel like this 
is how I should feel,

but there is the bench and there is
Philadelphia City Hall surrounded by
heedless Philadelphians, 
and what difference does my unease make
when this is apparently all I have left?

back when
my summer days
started late

back when
in late morning
I’d leave the house
to go into fern-laden woods
on the other side
of the railroad tracks
sometimes (most times)
alone to write and maybe
(later on) smoke pot or perhaps
make out 
with one or more
neighbor girls
(that never happened
no matter how hard I try
to remember that it did)

back when 
summer was a friend
who had my back — 
cover of foliage
and the heat which kept
sensible and prying
adults inside with the AC
while I roamed between
the river and the tracks
thrilling myself
when I found junked cars
clandestine weed farms
(I never touched a leaf
I swear) and now and then hid
from other kids plinking cans
and squirrels with 
borrowed rifles

back when 
I had one beloved companion
the color of light filtered
through solitude
who had no face or known name
who nonetheless held me
as I’ve not been held since

back when I was
differently alone
than I am now

I didn’t know
how good I had it

In the street, 
small birds pick
at something left
from someone’s lunch.

There are 
similar birds on 
feeders here and 
in the neighbor’s yard.

I wish I had 
more solid ground
under me than this
couch provides. 

I wish I was less inclined
to be a spectator 
and had more of the ease
with which these birds

stay in the street,
rise when a vehicle
comes through, return
to their feeding at once.

I’ve become
just another coddled old man
hovering at the window
from behind old walls.

The world exhorts me
to get out,
be part of it,
be not afraid; but

I am afraid. 
I am afraid I’ll become too wild,
soon enough be like the birds
eating from right off the street;

I’m afraid I won’t rise
from feeding when
the car comes through
and will just let it take me.

This is the way of things today,
I tell myself. Either 
lose your mind stuck to the couch
or lose it along with

the rest of your life by
getting out there and being
dirty-sad in the dirty sadness 
of a city street. 

If I die out there
everyone will know at once
that I succumbed to the hell
within. If I die here,

sitting very still,
no one will know for sure
how the last days were for me
and maybe I will go so quietly

that the birds 
will chirp my story when I’m gone:
he watched us from the window.
He did a good job of sitting there

just watching. People 
will make up their own stories
about me, picking at me
as if were posthumous trash

in the street which holds 
something to nourish them.
He saw a lot from the window.
He must have seen something that killed him.

As a child,
I loved a star,
a particular star.
Did not know
its name, just
where it hung
in the sky all spring
and how it moved
over time and 
I would look for it
there, then
over there. Now
I cannot find it 
anywhere. Do not
even know where to
look. Forgot directions
and orientation
and when it
shows itself off
to best effect. 

I am old and live
in the city now
where there is
so much light at night
it is not worth trying
to find my star or
any other. Pollution,
light pollution,
they call it. My brain
is smogged 
night and day and 
if I could find that star
it might help
or it might not but
what I miss most
is seeking it across 
the sky, finding it
among the others.

Pointless now
to even try;
instead I sit by
looking to the flow
of myself into mess, hoping
to see something there
(glint of sunlight on a 
foul wave, tumbling bit
of trash caught
in an eddy)
to help me recall
how to find 
a star, a particular star.