Five days a week most weeks,
I hear a radio

playing out front
around seven AM.

Last notes of a current hit drain
away; another one starts.

A car horn insists from the curb
that someone is late

meeting someone. Hard footsteps
down the back stairs from

the third floor. A soft exchange of
Spanish. A van door

slides open, closes 
quickly with a deep 

chunk. The motor pitch
rises, the tires hiss, and then

all of it fades away
till tomorrow, same time.

It is torture on some days,
comfort on others, depending

on how the day before felt,
how my bed treated me last night,

what I expect from the rest
of this day and the day to follow.

On any day I do not hear it,
I awake as if I had. That is

torture some on days,
comfort on others.

Now and then I only hear
the radio and then fall asleep

again, or wake to the van
pulling away. I wonder then

if I have missed
a variation

that might have
changed my life,

then
I stop wondering

and my life
goes on unchanged.

tired. tired of animals,
their smells and wants. 
tired of the anguish of feeling
I have failed them.
tired of feeling like 
I have failed and failed
at satisfying any need.
tired of sobbing when
I can’t find the remote.
tired of anger at myself 
when I find it
where it should be,
where I thought I’d looked.
tired of my reliance
on this petty wordplay
to hold me together.
tired of white perfume
screaming in my head
every minute of every day
covering the scent
of a brown world.
tired of the shame
of knowing
my very existence
was the end result 
of a genocide
when they lifted babies
from their mothers’ arms
and sent them to their 
erasure factories.
tired of headlines 
and comments. 
tired of feeling.
tired of waking 
then spending the day waiting
until it is safe to become
unconscious again without
anyone thinking me odd.
tired of having to talk
to anyone who would think me odd.
tired of suspecting
that everyone thinks I’m odd.

the belief that
I am a tendril of something
growing all the time
into a new being
is all that keeps me
from succumbing to
fatigue and its mastery
but the stretching and 
cracking of old shells 
and cages is excruciating
in spite of its necessity.

tired of how obvious
and weary the house feels.
tired of my weak garden
and the way it fails under my care.
tired of my body’s vast
and prolific history of mistakes.
tired of animals
and their scents and wants
and how I bury my face
in their fur to weep over 
the lost control I never really had
in spite of all the illusions
I did not see as illusions
until I was one with them
and as dangerous
as any other deep ache
felt by those 
who somehow manage
to get by
while remaining awake.

Dead fish float
on the surface of dead waters.
I wake up suffocating.

There’s a presence
in the room. 

Is this what it’s like
to die? To be alive
as the world dies?

Whatever is in the room with me
won’t explain.  Won’t say why here,
why now. 

I roll over to try and sleep
on my side.  I’ve been told
it’s better for me. I don’t recall
who told me.  It may be a lie.

The One in my room lifts its arms.
All that has died blazes back to life.
Fish swarming silver across
a pulsing sea. Vanished birds

overhead. My grandparents,
their grandparents.

All that has
vanished — or is this also a lie?
Once gone, always gone.

Forget languages,
customs. Viewpoint,
the taste of smoked salmon, 
love-touch.

The Presence tells me

I’m dishonest,
mercury-souled, foul as sodden cashmere
neglected in an unemptied washer.

Is this also a lie? The world is
ending, to be fair. Truth seems to be
going with it, to return at some point
when it matters again.

I roll over
on my side as I’ve been told to do
and try to get back to sleep

in a room filled with
the fragrance of lilies
without a lily in sight.

Here is
where I was born,

and there is where
I’ll be soon enough.

The space between them
is called by some “waiting to die,”

by others, “learning to live.” All of them say
that how you name the space

is an orientation and
a choice. They argue;

I try to cover my ears.
One day I heard someone else

call the path between them “the Work”
and I opened my arms. 

Couldn’t wait for that embrace.
Into the Work I fell,

landing hard upon it,
sinking in after a few minutes,

learning to breathe 
what I wrote, learning to

write from my breathing, 
all while on my knees

in gratitude for a space
between waiting to die

and learning to live,
for the path called the Work

that has kept me for years,
breathing poetry 

as I learned
how to navigate between

where I was born
and where I will be soon enough.

A fire from the center of the earth
breaks out now and then
to remind us of what is possible
and beyond our own capacity.

Flaming, streaming rock
turned plastic, slippery, and red
comes to the surface
through generations of old stone 
and when it catches anything
it burns everything and our weakness
is made clear.

We stare into it, 
offer it fear and faith. 
Name it for a goddess or god,
curse it as an evil, 
flee it and photograph it
and tell stories of its potency,
its devastation,
its swift re-creation
of the land it seizes
or the ocean it boils.

On the horizon,
a glow announces the coming
of the central fire. The world
made new, in ways we cannot
replicate. No wonder

we fear it.  No wonder
we gave it a god’s name,
a goddess’s name, a divinity
all its own.

Everclear in the air: “Daddy 
gave me a name,
then he 
walked away.”

I think hard enough, decide
this is my song.
I drink hard enough, then
I know it’s not.

If there’s a song for me
in the air already,
I’ve forgotten how to find it.
It’s like Everclear’s song-daddy:

left a mark and 
vanished.

My daddy didn’t drink.
Quit before I was born.
Sometimes it felt like
he should have kept at it.

Like it didn’t matter
that he wasn’t drunk.

I’m sure there’s a mom song
out there for me too.
Once again,
I can’t find it. 

Ozzy, Danzig, 
Pink Floyd, 
maybe some older bit
of nonsense.

None of this
does the trick.

I think I’ll find my songs
on a Soviet-era radio.
Something with tubes,
something drab and static-full.

There are too many songs
in the American air.
Can’t believe any of them.
Can’t buy any of them as mine.

Daddy gave me a name
then he stuck around.
Mom gave me a birth
then she stuck around.

I wore out my welcome early.
Don’t need a song to tell me that.