There is
a prescription of sorts from the doctor:
sit and think on life and enjoy what you
have left of it…
basically, just think.

Here I sit in my chair: a comfortable chair
though it’s a wee bit ratty; one that
extends, although I never do,
into the center of the room. So I
sit still and think, casually, about life.

I am also, of course, a wee bit ratty;
I suppose we match or are at least
complementary. When I think about life
my rattiness extends and falls over the side
of the chair onto the floor. I don’t bother

to pick it up when it happens.
Basically, I sit and think, and think some more
about alligators and dying and what it would
be like to go that way…a subject for a gator’s meal;
nothing more, nothing less.

Then again, I’m in Worcester, in New England,
and it’s the day after Thanksgiving and damn, it’s cold;
the chance of falling into a gator’s maw is very, very slim.
I sit and think some more about how I’d like to go
five years, ten years from now — oh, it won’t be long,

I know that, and my casual thinking gets black
and serious and downright evil when I let myself
realize it. I’m going to pass sooner, rather than later.
It won’t be via alligator. I know that. Instead
I’ll go with some little fuss in a hospital bed

or with a quiet fall to a polished floor at home.
What will it matter, then? Either way I will
fall and go, slipping off into the ether, and I suspect
it will not matter to me which way I go, as long as
I’m gone. I will slip into a new world,

one nobody really knows; despite mythology,
in denial of old traditions, rejecting orthodoxy,
I will be in it and either it will be blank space
or something else and I will say ooh and ahh
and be amazed or shrug it off and say eh...

but I suspect I’ll still have this ratty old chair, and
I trust I will have my jealous alligators
circling endlessly about, waiting for my hand
to stretch down, an afterthought, a token
of my love for this life that led me here,

that led me to the end of my silly, silly days.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Stepping on the scale
I’m amazed at what I’ve lost

In addition to
more than a few pounds

There is disbelief
at how I have changed

since I first
let myself look down

at those numbers
tracking me and my digital thought

Surprising me with
a measure of my knowledge

of how pants stopped fitting
how I had to cut down a belt to make it work

how I felt less heavy
on the earth

Though I can’t excuse
myself from this

I am surprised by
the lift granted by the numbers

thus confirmed by
modern science

although I knew it
long before

And though I know
it means little to the world

that I tread less heavily
upon it

still I will be lifted
by the revelation

for now and until
something comes to set me back

as it
always does

I will walk lighter
upon the shocked planet

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

I am having one of those 
disconnected morning thoughts
that come when I wake up
half an hour before I need to rise
and I stumble around the kitchen
mixing up a glass of cold brew
trying to decide whether I could do
another job in which I might have to
be up this early — say
for the sake of argument

as a reporter
at a crime scene
or a weird scene
where I’d be interviewing a victim
of partial spontaneous combustion
whose arm kept smoldering

She’d casually pat the skin down
to extinguish the flame
now and then as we talked 
saying that this sort of thing
used to happen
to her cousin Davey
but he eventually outgrew it

In my vision she’s damned cute
if you dig Paris Hilton
and surrealism
so maybe I’d break
all the sacred vows of journalism
and ask her out
even though I’m pretty certain 
any relationship would be doomed
from the start

because even though there might in fact be
some kind of spark between us
I’m not sure I’d ever feel comfortable
making love to her
Maybe that fear would just add to
the experience but
when it came around at last
to fuck around and find out
I’d be not pleased to find out

It’s too late to go back to sleep now

Finish the damn coffee dumbass
I tell myself every time 

I’m thankful for real work
Nothing exciting ever happens there
It’s just enough work to keep me awake
It’s just enough work to keep me warm

Young men, don’t speak to old men
if you don’t want to know
all the things you are doing wrong.

Don’t even look at us 
if you don’t want to know
what it looks like

after fear’s been washed out
of skin and clothes and
eyes. It’s going to look

a little different from one to
the other of course: maybe
we will look noble

or maybe empty,
or still look
as we always did,

but don’t risk the glimpse
of what may be coming soon
to a body and soul like yours. 

Sit back and let us be,
Trust me, in general
you don’t want to know

what we know —
and trust me, we will
tell you. 

Don’t write a poem when you’re high.
The words might be marked with hard labor.
You might forget how to make it look easy
and the struggle will be real for the reader,
not just for you. 

Don’t write a poem when you’re high.
It might sound like you put in work
and any instructions you followed from within
will be written on your hand for easy reference
and anyone who wants to look can look.

Don’t write a poem when you’re high —
if it happens by accident, don’t show it around.
Keep that one to yourself until you can erase
all the signs of how hard it was to get it on paper
without coughing up everything you’d been holding in. 

You manage to wring
a mystical message
out of mishearing 
the lyrics of a Kid Rock song
and then expect me
to nod in agreement when
you present the mistake
as evidence of God’s finger
in all things. I point out
that all it shows is that somehow
we make things work 
even when they don’t because
we long for there to be an Order
to this mess so we cobble one up
from any weak leather and scrap nails
we are given.  “Isn’t that
the same thing, really?” you ask,
and while it’s hard, perhaps
impossible, to entirely reject
your defense of such 
accidental revelations? Dude.
In the name of all
that’s potentially holy,
try to remember:

we’re talking about Kid Rock.

My partner tells me
she came home 
to a coyote in the front yard
last night.

There is no need
to ask if she’s sure.
They’ve been around for years
and we’ve both seen them before — 
though never here, never this deep
into a dense city neighborhood.

Between us, we have now officially seen 
more coyotes here on this street
than we’ve seen guns
on anyone 
except cops,
gang signs
from anyone except on
Facebook,
and muggings except
on TV.

Remind me again 
how this city is a shit hole
and we’re all crazy for living here,
sneer again that it’s all going to hell.

That laughter you’ll hear
will not be the laughter of
the Trickster.