I’d rather be
a horn 
in a great
player’s hands, or

a stout pocketknife
sitting on a woodcarver’s 
bench waiting
to whittle; 

I imagine there’s a master’s 
breath pouring through me
with some great song, or
a master’s hand wielding me

to pull a dragon from
a block of rosewood.
Channel, not channeler;
vessel to be emptied

of what has filled me
from a source, the Source.
I am nothing here but
glad to be of service,

seeing myself
as what rests in the Hand
of the Maker and what will be
laid aside when all is done.

My old left hand
feels so strange today
with its new little bend
that limits
how well it holds
and hangs on

but with it I cradle the stone
I raised years ago
from the bed
of a pond
where I swam
daily for a summer
when I was twelve,

a white stone chased 
with black smears, laced
with mica stars, lifted
from the rich stew
at the bottom in 
the deepest part
of that pond the first time
I touched bottom, swimming
straight down to snatch it
and bring it back with me

to where I burst
through the surface into
late morning sun, holding it
tighter than I can now
with this weakened paw:
bursting up to the air back then
from the silted water,
taking a great breath
as I breached;
a browned, slim boy
coming into my own
so many years ago
that I cannot recall if I
was as alone then
as I am now:

neither slim nor browned,
not wholly alone in life
but solo in this moment,
hanging on
to what hard treasure
I may find 
in deep, unfamiliar
places. 

My left hand 
soaked in oil:

those are the first words
I heard this morning,
if you can call 
how they came to me
“hearing.”

It’s not
a true descriptor, but
as close as I can get 
to how the words come
so I call that hearing 
and hearing it is,

much as my left hand
feels dry with no apparent
oil upon it yet I trust
what I’ve heard about this,
I don’t argue when I hear
words this way: clearly,

my left hand’s soaked
in oil.  Up to me

to figure out if perhaps
it is magic oil
I can’t see or feel
that shines in darkness,  
or maybe a social oil that
gets on me from others
and later ignites
when I try to reach out,
or in some way a deep soul oil
that seeps out of me and
covers me wrist to fingertips
and it’s only on my left hand
to reveal to me once again
what I forget and forget:
how hard it is to hold fast
to what is closest to my heart.

My left hand soaked in oil,
shining at dawn. Perhaps
all it means is that oil

is a decoration, a highlight
reminding me to celebrate
my weakest parts, even as
I write this all down 
with my right hand.

If you are a bear for truth
and have read this far, tell me 
what you think it means 

for it seems that all I know
has become slippery,
falling again and again
out of my grasp

no matter how many times
and how tenderly
I listen to the words
I hear upon waking,

no matter how faithful I am
to the words.

1.
In these sullen days
a half smile has become
a badge of subversion.
In these enraged times
any peaceful face has become
enraging.

In the white fingered
company of the ones
who dance confidently,
well-gloved
and bespoke-booted,
at their self-congratulatory
banquets, to be barefoot
and casual 
invites punishment
and raises alarm.
Being at odds kills you
here.

Taking a side 
kills you too but
you’ll have company 
when you die,

while those
left out of all sides might die but
might be left standing as
either proof of or contradiction
of dialectic,
but they will be
as alone afterward
as they were 
beforehand. 

2.
Today I am
in a process of dying
no matter how
you look at me:
dressed down,
worn down, well over
halfway along, staring at
this side of the long hill
I’ve crested,
looking down,
picking up speed.

3.
Ah well, I tell myself
as I start to roll,
I prefer not dancing.
I prefer not wearing
such damned clothing.
Soon I’ll feel such a wind on
my poverty skin, in my
blood-sugared hair, that
I might forget that I never
figured out
who I was or where
I belonged. 

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?