Tony stops, just like that.

He sits for two hours
and forty five minutes
without moving.
His knife twitching like
a muse in his pocket. 
But he doesn’t reach,
he doesn’t

acknowledge.

He wishes he had a tail to show.
He’d show an angry snap of that thing
but

he’s stopped now, 

his winding’s run out.

If he’d been born animal
things could have been so different
but humans being what they are
it’s remarkable that Tony

can be so still when he’s always been
such a loud little twitch of a man

and so dumb, dumb
to how he was supposed to come
correct, dumb to how
he was meant for success

and nothing like this 
was ever supposed to happen

but don’t weep
whatever you do.

That shit’s contagious.
Tell folks he just stopped.
Tell them,
Tony stops like that from time to time.

Tony says so, it must be true.

Asking yourself
who you are
when you wake up, 
any time you wake up,
every time you wake up,
gets old. It’s a habit
you want to break for good

so you take any hammer you can
to that habit. You take
a drink hammer, a smoke hammer,
a book hammer, a lot of book hammers
in fact. Maybe there’s a church hammer
that will work. Maybe someone comes by
and hands you a sword and it feels

better than a hammer. You swing it
at the habit of asking yourself
who you are
and marvel at how
its poor crystal bits shimmer
as they fly cuttingly
across all your horizons. 

It’s a good sword.

You hang your questions
about who you are 
on the same peg
you hang the sword on
while you sleep.

Once in a while you wake up
and ask yourself who you are
but it’s not a habit any more;
more like groping for a weapon
in the dark when you are startled
by a noise and wonder
if you are under attack.

At some point you may wake up
and ask yourself who you are
and reach for the weapon
while thinking about how
you never got an answer
in all those years of asking

and instead leave the bed
without your sword
to see if in fact
someone has broken in.

Starved frame of a figure
cornered by the stove,
away from windows and doors.
Thin rags covering all, it seems,
as far as you can tell in this light.
No face you recognize;
no face of any kind showing, 
in fact,
as it begins to move
toward you,

you standing there
without
a thing to throw,
a blade to raise.

Flies covered the driveway, 
my car, the walls of the house.

A puddle on the ground 
in front of the car, and that was all:

no sign of anything else beyond
the buzzing and my instinct to pull away.

I waded into that cloud
and took the hose and washed

pavement, car, and house.
Noted a pink tinge to the water

as it ran down into the concrete apron
next to the foundation, and the flies 

rose and dispersed. What happened here?
Do I need to know, or is their departure

and the fact that they did not return
enough to allow me the comfort

of turning my back on the once-wet asphalt
and forgetting yet another small red mystery

that comes with living
in this small red city?

This is how
I hope it will be
from here:

underneath this fire,
as required,
ash that when

I cool down
you may take
and scatter.

It is not cremation,
not accidental, not
visible flame I speak of

but a steady life of immolation
only seen upon
its dying away and 

revelation of what
is left behind. I will not
glow as I burn, there will be

no smoke. Life
will continue as normal
and when it is over

there will be ash to whiten
bare ground that will
turn green next year

with savory herbs and
when you feed you will
remember me. 

What a true
religious experience
it would be 
were we to learn that
some known star,
some common
twinkle, some blip
whose true influence
has long been hidden from us behind
astrologers’ misunderstanding
for millennia,

was in fact what we call God
and has been sentient 
and laughing out there
in space, thinking of
what it has done
for us and to us,
and all the time we thought
it was all because
of Sirius or Betelgeuse
or some epic cluster
we’d configured
into an image of grand myth
or metaphor when in fact
it was a small yellow sun 
not terribly far away 
that had taken on the role
of our celestial deus ex machina
without us even knowing 

and done it all for fun, on whims
and fancies, just to watch
what was happening here
for entertainment; imagine us learning
that it has invited other stars
to watch as well, that we are considered
interstellar appointment watching,
longest running show in this sector,

although it must be said that
the plots are getting
a little stale and whispers
are growing about
what, if anything, can be done
to erase the slide.

Did you mean
to drop

your entire meaning
for us before us

in our
quiet moments

as if they were held
in a holy sphinx

carved
from hard sugar

into such clear water
that we could not help

seeing it dissolve
so swiftly

that we ended up
with a permanent ghost

unsettled
in our memory

as if we’d seen 
your face in that pale shadow

of deity and from that
understood

how all things 
work in tandem

and now we 
have forgotten

all but the fact 
that we once knew

and sit bitter in
the aftermath

of that lost, melted
truth

because if you did it
knowing how we

would fail
and despair

it becomes hard for me
at least

to credit any effort
toward art or

relationship or
society at all if it you

are to be
part of it

Tonight you recognize that
you are best described 
by a series of parenthetical phrases
each of which modifies your self-awareness
so profoundly that they cannot be
understood as separate thoughts
without having comprehended all the others first
which leaves the dilemma of where to begin
reading and parsing them all to you and it 
will take as many years as you have left
to get through them all and sort the priorities
from each other into neat packaged bursts
of knowledge and frankly it seems like
pulling those parentheses apart to get at
the nutmeats within might not be worth
the flavor each would offer to the palate
called life and learning and inner peace 
by those who want to quantify and define
that process of internal inquiry
that you have seen till now as a waste of time 
since you got all the way here without it
and that’s a hell of a long way to have travelled
without having done it and yet if there was
something to be gained you might feel cheated
if you began now with so little hope of finishing
so instead you shut everything off and go outside
into the rain-washed night and imagine 
it is perfectly fine to draw a line under all that
and say that what remains of your time
will be held in a single simple sentence
you will write tomorrow.

I was not
entirely there
so cannot say
for sure
but it feels like
something I put
into the world overnight
has been consumed
by a Bear, THE Bear,
the archetype
who has pulled it apart
and already digested
and spit and shit it out

and here I am staring
into a pile on the side
of the road, saying,
“that was mine” with a mix
of pride and anger

that anything at all
of what was once uniquely mine
was visible, had been deemed worthy
of consumption by an Immortal,
had nourished the Bear and
been passed back
to nourish the Earth itself.

after the first page:
lower the cover upon
the opening paragraph

as you might carefully 
reset bait in a trap,
in the hope
that another will take it
since you will not…

after the halfway point:
rest the book upon its spine
and clap the halves together

with a clean sound of 
finality and rejection, as if
you must let
all around you know
you can stand this tale no more…

upon completion:
lay the volume on its back
and close it

as if something
has changed in you
because of what you are
sealing back into the book
for the next reader,

or for the next time you open it.