It’s got a lot of pieces —

and it never looks like the picture on the box
when I’m done;

I build a lot of things
and sometimes am inordinately proud
of what I’ve created,

but more often,
I end up screeching my frustration
at the vague resemblance.

Lego my Ego!

is the battle cry
as I blame the Manufacturer
for my failure, or rather
for my creating what I could
from what I had;

it doesn’t look right.
And I swear someone gave me
those fucking Duplo blocks
instead of what I deserved
to work with.

Isn’t it nice
to pretend to have a spirit animal?
Aren’t you in love with your imagined
cougar, lion, wolf
or hawk? 

If you discovered
one day that your familiar
was a jellyfish,
would you be as jazzed?
Or would you start
to trail around spinelessly
with your stings
firing at random?

You’d have a whole colony
to relate to then, you realize —
they’re not so much animals
as collectives, you know;

imagine that —
no one identity to call on,
just a faith built upon
the mix and match of tens of thousands
of little pains in the ass.
Maybe even some serious poisoners,
maybe some killers.

How much would you love that?
Jellyfish need partners on our side too,
after all; they may not look as good
on a T-shirt,

but given the evidence,
it’s something you should consider
embracing.

Let there be no electricity.
Let there be no oil.
Let there be no dammed river,
let there be no steel.

Let there be berries,
no candies.
Let there be no light beer,
only mead and wine.

Let horses course the streets,
and dogs free to chase along.
Candles in every window,
no glass in any window.

May the houses themselves fall, the walls tumble,
may our crops suddenly spring from their rows
and run wild among our swift sprouting lawns,
tractors fall suddenly into rust,
cars flatten into heaps of ore and the insulation
on their wires flow liquid and nontoxic
back into the soil.

May every brand and sign vanish now —
no Nike except as victory winged over
the crumbling tar, no Arby’s, no Wendy’s,
may McDonald only be he who ran
the mythical farm, may everything we know
and televise be purified,
may we gang together and burn
all we have ever desired.

And then, what of ourselves
who know nothing of this new world?
What of the gods we discarded,
the teachings, the living script
of oracle and fable?

May they fail us as we failed them,
long ago. May we be unmothered
in this land we ruined as it is reborn,
and may we dance in fear as we learn
how much we were
what we once made and held dear.
It is foolish to think we could survive
without our artifice. May we shatter,
may we only be memorialized
as the Foolish Age that has passed
by the ones who figure out
that we had to perish,
if they were to survive,
that we had to perish
if anything
was to survive.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

God’s vaguely Amish.
He likes things plain,

except when he doesn’t.
Then he gets Catholic
or even Orthodox. 
On occasion loves
all that gilt
and those smoking
censers full of myrrh.

When he needs family
he is almost exclusively
Jewish.  These
are my people, he says,
and so are they, pointing
at the Baha’i in the corner.

When it’s quiet he is
completely Buddhist except
for the Taoist residue.  Will even
throw on a vagina
if Wiccans feel like dancing.

But mostly, he’s just God.
Or she is.  And God’s all right.
Vaguely Amish,
kinda simple tastes
except he’s forever asking,
“whatever shall I wear?”
while receiving prayer.

Still, sometimes,
even God says
fuck it.  Sometimes
he gets all up in your face and
insists,

“I don’t exist.
I’m an atheist.
There’s no one out there
for me to pray to. 

Dammit —
who built this half assed world
that they’d leave me out here
without a backup?”

Country song
in a power outage
on a radio that gets one station,
apparently. 

Some young woman sings
that there’s always gonna be another mountain
to climb.  Another uphill battle, another
trouble in the path, another snail underfoot
(yes, I might have that last part wrong,
but it seems to fit…another broken home,
another slowpoke crushed). 

But according to the song,
it’s all gonna be all right, someday. 

I wish I were a country singer,
sincere and hopeful
in the face of pain.

I bet it takes
a tour bus to get there,
gold tooling on my cowboy boots,
a tight butt in the right jeans.

Mostly,
I wish the TV would come back on.

It will be full, no room for air.
It will call out every offense I’ve suffered
as if all were equal.  It will offer
no image not in the public domain.
It will taste bitter until I spit it out
and then it will taste like triumph.
It will be loud as a windstorm
on an already-scoured plain.
It will connect invisible dots
wherever I can find them.  It will have
moments that make you swallow
other moments that are inedible.
It will be musical and disjointed
with leaps across ages and countries.
It will focus a floodlight on a broad area.
It will call up recognizable names.
It will follow sense with nonsense
and mix the two.  It will insist
and cajole and exhort and define
and coax and seduce and by the time
it’s complete it will deconstruct
and exhaust and reject
and stick with you for minutes and
you are going to love it in the moment
and never think about it again
but it will be printed on a T-shirt you can buy
and the letters will flake off early
so it ends up as a shadow in your wash
and you’ll give the shirt to Goodwill
and that’s my distribution network.
It is going to be something,
I promise you that.  It’ll be done soon
and you’ll see.  You’ll see.