Once, I walked around on fire.
Left no bridges for miles behind me.

Someone said
try writing it out,
it’s a good
healer, a good quencher,
you’ll be
at peace.

Safer now,
older now,
I sit up late
and spill into 
paper and ink 
the fuel that once
would have been held
under pressure
within.

The ink
never smolders,
the pen
never scratches out a spark,
the paper
never ignites.

Where did my fire go?

Standing on a high old bridge
in the dark, 
in a place I’ve stood before,
looking down into the white water,
feeling nothing.

Can you tell me why this is better
than burning?

When I end
I hope you, my friends,
will stop a second
and see my closed eyes
for what they are on that day — 

precious stones returned to their beds
under the thin cover of my eyelids
in order to keep the earth
in balance.  

I hope
no one weeps at not ever 
seeing them again — living
requires us to move on
from each moment regardless
of its importance — 

but if they must weep,
let it be the right kind of mourning,
the kind that doesn’t bog us dead down, 
leaving us soggy in the ground
before we get even a day to understand
where we are. 

Don’t weep.  Let me be;
do the right thing, 
at least at first.

Don’t wonder aloud, for my sake,
about what happened
or how I finally slipped aside
after that last unbearable moment
of storm —

enough.  
Enough.  

Let me pass and don’t worry
about what it means. When I end
it shouldn’t be a recipe for self-annihilation.

Grief, acceptance;  the push and pull
of a shoving match between brothers.
It’s barely news at this point 
to say it too will pass. When I end,
when you are grieving for me,
angry with me, sad for me and for yourself,

remember that this, too, shall pass.

dear me, mr brown,
how is it that 
you are that stupid —

this game of “being”
you thought you’d win, somehow? nope.
you’re feeling the big nope now,
of course — 

you won nothing.  
you win nothing. no one does; 
that’s the beauty of it, but

somewhere in your reptile brain
you bought what they sell about changing 
the world through poems — no.

it was never supposed to be about anything 
but good work. never supposed to be anything 
but art valuable for being itself — 

if any change was to occur
as a result it would be
in the poet — in you.

you knew this years ago
but have pretended to forget. faking for survival,
you forged God’s signature on a few poems
and called them “the truth as delivered –” 

please. dear me, mr brown — 
have you read your poems? 
have you changed at all 
by reading them, by writing them?
has anyone or anything? 

dear me, mr brown,
admit it —
you’re one of the bad guys.
always have been.
admit it —
you’re one of the sinners
spitting on the sand
outside the church, and though
you’d love to go in and feel the love
there’s a joy in spitting on the earth
before the church you can’t shake —

you know they won’t let you back in — 

you’re feeling that big nope now,
mr brown, dear me;

that game of being
you thought you’d win,
the one where everything worked out
and there was a horizon and you
could see it and knew one day you’d learn
to ride
and you would ride into it flinging 
magnificent words, a Magnificat, a 
Hallelujah chorus on the wind —

dear me, mr brown,
you stupid glory hound.
face it: your work
was a modest ripple at best,
and now what?

what does a dead man do now
when he doesn’t believe in the horizon
and can’t help but smell the decay 
and knows it for his own
and his hands are rotting off 
and his lungs can’t push a breath 
and he’s the big nope himself — 

dear me, mr brown,
you’re the big nope,
the dead poet
with no society to hold you.

no one at all, in fact,
will touch you
ever again.

sit back, ease a hand into
the cooler, snag a beer,
open it and take a long pull
with one eye on
the neighbors and how they
wash their cars, how they
garden. they’re doing it
all wrong. you are better 
and faster and more productive
with your time than they are
which is why you’ve got
beer time now and they don’t.
of course, they don’t know you’re
watching and judging, you
neighborhood ghost — as far as
they are concerned you’re just
the mystery crank in the old Camry
that no one talks to and that’s fine
with everyone. it sure suits you right down
to your pale toes. leaves more time
for beer time, for sitting and judging
and watching incompetence
while wondering how you got so old
and everyone else got so damn stupid.
ease back with another beer and think
a little more, for a little while longer —
how much longer, you wish you knew
how much longer it’s going to be.

In a crowd of those
laughing and pleased
with themselves and their words
for a minute or two

Been trying to write my own ticket
Spending my words
like subway tokens 
to get nowhere really

Realizing that my tokens
are anachronisms
for this crowd
I look around for

a faintly rumbling track
and get myself up
to the edge
to wait

thinking to disturb them
and make myself
a splatter of memory for them
for at least a minute or two

But of course I cannot jump
so I get on the train
with everyone else
Seeing how many of them

have the same clear
and hunted look I am wearing
Recalling how many of them had been
standing as close to the rails as I

In a minute or two
this train will stop
Some will file off
Others will get on

using their own versions
of tokens or transit cards
Many wearing the same clear
and hunted face

which may in fact be
the truest and most trusted ticket to ride
If you are born to ride this train
through these darkest tunnels

for anything longer than a minute or two
your certainty that you don’t belong
may be the surest proof that in fact
you do

Insistent mistakes
frame the debates
among the factions
righting wrongs
and dispensing justice;

insistent mistakes spilling
from mouths and documents,
trickling into the water supply,
chuckling as they embed themselves
wherever they can live longest;

insistent mistakes
disguising themselves,
and once disguised becoming
prayers, doctrines, orders, law;

clothed in what they claim 
is faux-leopard — don’t believe
it — can’t you smell the blood there?
Speaking in what they say
is God’s only tongue — how odd 
that it’s the one language
you understand.

Insistent mistakes become
conventional and eventually 
canonical, and then 
insistent mistake is piled upon 
insistent mistake;

the stack reaches the sky,
blocks the Sun,
confuses you into taking
Dark for Light — 

insisting upon it, in fact.

An inclination
of mine that sets me
rolling downhill
more often than not
is to begin each day
with a question
and then spend all day
not answering it. 

Not just not answering it,
but fleeing from the work
of answering it,

sometimes through pleasure,
sometimes through wallowing
in agony or what to me feels like
agony — it would likely
resemble simple irritation to you,

but then again, 
you’d probably just
answer the question
off the top of your head
when it first came up
and get on with living.

We are inclined differently — 
you toward the ascent, me
facing the other way. It’s not
a moral failing

but it is a failing, a hole
deep in my metal
that you can’t see, a hole 
that will crack open
and break me someday
when at last I collide
with the bottom of the drop.

On that day I will be unsurprised
and frankly disappointed
if you do anything beyond social tears
and a shrug to see me off;
if on that day you break
because of my breaking
and you don’t quickly heal,
that will mean I was wrong

about everything,
about all of it, it will mean
that I should have faced those questions
with the first answer
I could come up with
whether it was wrong or not,
and then gotten on with living
as if I was right.