Stop what you’re doing,
you say.  
Give us more
wordplay, more
rungs in
the poem ladder
to climb,
more attention
to rhythm and rhyme.

For the moment I’ll oblige,
but know this: I prefer
to concern myself mostly
with the music of
everyday, pull my beat
from speech
whose music
would otherwise be
left behind; 
no time
to pretty up
the daily yawp.
No passion
to smash it into
a mold.

If you call me
crazy or stubborn,
I’ll just stare you down.
Motherfucker,
what I am
is old.  

I’ve got good Goddamned underwear
more seasoned
than your notions of what
is good and valuable to speak
and write;
and if you offer me your whine,
your crap about not wanting poems
about poetry, I’ll spit indeed,
but it won’t be pretty
and it sure as fuck won’t rhyme.

Listen:  this is church to me,
my best self in spiritual action.
This is where I stack the deck 
in favor of drawing to ecstasy,
where I bring the mystery to inquiry,
where I find myself staring back 
at myself.  It’s the place I find
the most, the place I dig the most.
Sometimes, rarely,  I am seized 
by the need to honor that
and I write about that…

so.  Here’s the rat, 
and here’s the rat’s ass
that I do not give
for your objection.

You get to my age, maybe 
I’ll hand it over to you,
if you still think that way,
if you still want it.

“Good,” he said,
“is so non-specific.
Say more about why
you’re feeling good.”

She stretched a clean leg
out, arched her back, felt
the calf cramp rock her
like a blunt knife entering,
then withdrawing, subsiding,
fading.  When she opened her eyes

he was still there.  “I don’t have to
say anything about it at all,” she said.
“The point of feeling good is to feel it,
not describe it.”  And she wished him gone
while she still felt good. 

I will soon begin reading Borges again
and when I do I will wear dark clothes
and glasses, eat pork on rough bread,
smoke an unending series of bowls
of cheap tobacco from a cheap pipe.

I will soon resume reading Joyce 
but only in the spring and only upon
completion of the works of Borges.  
I shall wear a cloak, if I can locate
a store that sells cloaks.  A cloak and

a whiskeyflask cane.  A cloak and
thick soled shoes and a whiskeyflask
cane.  Yes.  I will soon resume reading
Borges, then Joyce.  And after that,
Djuna Barnes; then, Wallace Stevens,

and for Barnes and Stevens I will change
to a suit of seersucker, and I will not iron it
ever, even the shirt, even the hems; I will feed
on rumcakes and seedcakes and cupcakes
in public cafes, with my books tucked under my chair.

So: I will be done with reading
Borges and Joyce and Barnes and Stevens
soon enough. Then I will buy a home
and lie around naked and not read anything
I don’t want to read.  All those trappings

I affected while reading will be lost on me — I’ll admit
that I must have looked ridiculous. What the hell
were such books about, anyway?  If need be,
I will cleanse by dressing in sweats and reading John Grisham in French
while downing supermarket croissants till I pop. I won’t care who sees

my wide ass in the library when I am checking out
books on getting ahead in real estate and 
Stephen King and Patricia Cornwell — not their works, mind you;
books about their clothing and diet.  Clothes, it is said,
make the man, you are what you eat, and maybe

you are what you read.  Well, I don’t want to be anything anymore.
Want to be dumb, anonymous, devoid
of a reading list or its worsening symptoms.  Give up
the insistence on culture.  Gimme a burger, a roll in the hay,
a dead sleep on a dirty mattress.  Gimme an easy way to vanish.

Tonight, my lone trick or treater
was Death, a late teenage boy
out late after all the little kids were long in.

He rang my door bell and said “Thank you”
for the peanut butter cups, then returned
to his beat up Toyota and sputtered away.

I stood there and watched after him
for a whole minute.  I still
have a lot of candy left and I wish

Pestilence and Famine and War
would come by and have some
before I have to dress up

as Gluttony, and finish it off myself. 

When the local god
found his existence questioned
yet again by the atheist,
he swallowed him up
with a sweep of his
avalanche tongue.

The atheist was shocked
that the god had not disappeared
upon learning of the atheist’s 
disbelief.  “But
there is no God!”  

Calmly,
while licking him away,
the local god said, “Ah, yes,
that old monotheism thing…

that IS a crock of holy shit.”  And
he ate the little man whole,

saving nothing
for when the neighbor god
stopped by later.