grime on my bumper, and so what.  
it’s not like it hides a beautiful body.  

enough rust and holes
to make next inspection a worry.

enough grunts and clicks and creaks
to make driving anywhere a symphony.

it still runs well enough
to make me mostly unafraid to go anywhere.

it’s got lots of room and red sass to spare.
above all it’s got a banging sound system.

sometimes I joke and say I’m going out 
to drive the stereo around my city.

it’s no joke to do it the way I do it, though.
they hear me coming long before they see me.

in dead of winter I crack a window
to let the big noise out for passers-by.

in height of summer I open it all up
and let it rip for everyone to hear.

there’s an occasional strange glance
from a car or a walker when I pass.

it’s not pretty, and neither am I.
gray on my head, grime on my bumper,

holes where no holes should be;
two hundred and forty thousand miles

of rattle, squeak, bomb-bay bass and 
shouting along to blood passion songs.

it’s not like I can hide in a beautiful body
so I might as well turn up and show up,

for as long as I can, for as long
as the rust holds together.

Six PM.
Darkness not far off.
A neighbor’s cat
loafing on the front wall.
Doing the afternoon thing —
TV, a glass of water,
a wish for enough ambition
to practice the guitar,
a self-loathing raised
from the soil of knowing
how much I could be doing.
It’s a lost day, again, one that goes
by the formal name of
Monday through Sunday.

I’m jealous of that cat
for such willing public laziness.  
I’m jealous of the dead
for never having to move,
for never being expected
to move.

Six PM
and you shouldn’t look at me.
If you look at me, 
don’t be jealous of a damn thing
about me. Move along.
Do something I won’t or can’t do —

look alive.

we are natural
as we are

natural as plague
as fire ants

skyscrapers and letter bombs
animal products

ash wind blowing over burnt land
animal flavor

natural as rat packs
as ticks in spring

toxic bloom brownfields
a natural spoor of animals

stripped rights of devoured bodies
a natural prey of animals

natural as locusts
as red tide

slander and disgust with others
a natural call of animals

genocidal anthem barking
a natural mating behavior of animals

natural as whales beaching
as fish kills

to say we are not 
to say all things human are not natural

is natural

to use our surroundings till they no longer surround us
to then lament how evilly we shall starve 

is natural

to starve 
to become extinct

will be as natural as anything else we’ve been and done
has ever been

Rain has stopped
after all night dropping
on us and ground and roof,
falling into gutters, clattering down
to puddle the sunken end of the driveway.
It’s going to madly green out there
once it warms two more daily degrees
or so.  We call this Spring —

or, more often, “mud season,” 
the season when we notice
how filthy our cars are.

Spring here is a half-minute of breathing room 
between ways to suffer,
a half-second to knock crap off your boots
and your life — 
a half inch deep undrinkable lake 
in the scant soil 
of the backyard.

Season of slop — 
our city’s not pretty,
not clean, not bright.
Our roads are holy and pitted
like the path to Heaven, even as
we’ve been dreaming
of Hell’s heat
all cold season long,

and now it’s coming.  

It’s coming
in faster bloom than last year.
It’s coming
in smaller snow piles than ever before.
It’s coming
in our unease at how easy
winter was, how little mud
there is to mud season
this year.

It’s coming
as we get around to washing off
toxic grime from our wheel wells,
scrubbing at caked,
kicked up road salt
that’s tearing hell
out of metal. 

A warmer world
is coming,
perhaps the warmest one ever;

it’s coming, and
no one’s ready for the heat;

though we all say,
as always,
that we can’t wait,
soon enough

we’ll be staring at that depression
in the backyard,
marveling at the memory of it
full of water, wondering
if  we will ever see mud season again.

You drifted into this
as a boat unmoored
might drift:

predictably, 
based on past unmoored boats’
behavior
in an ocean with such well-known currents.

We suspect you’ll say now that
you were surprised
to end there of all places.
We have to call you out.

This was so obviously
going to happen. We shook
our heads about it
right in front of you.
We said it
right to your face
so often, we’re a little surprised
you didn’t dream about it
every night. It’s as if

you never heard us —
or maybe you did,
and then did everything you could
to be what you shouldn’t have been;

it’s almost as if you were determined
to end up there on that far shore
starving and broke and broken
with no way to come back, almost
as if you were determined to be
as far away from our good sense
as possible, and we’ll be damned

if we know how
or have the wherewithal
to rescue you now — look at you

sitting there, staring into the sun
as if you’d never been told
not to do that.

Studies have shown that
we are swiftly evolving,
losing obsolete traits; soon,
perhaps, none of us will have
an easily identified face
or name as the great
mass of us has no need 
of such things in the larger
System. This may be why
we are fighting so hard for them
right now — the last grasp
of those things slipping away,
sinking into a hole called 
the species, the course of
history, the past. Imagine
that — living without
any of the markers
we’ve relied on
to decide what to say to
one another.
Imagine the freedom
of not having to live up
to your own name;
imagine the joy
of perpetual first encounters;
try to imagine whether or not 
we could even care
for such things then —
imagine
how the definitions of joy, love,
and care will have to evolve
in order to survive, if indeed
they survive at all.

season of cold and 
crocus — purple chalices set
against mud-specked white

lit in the backyard
by headlights upon
late homecoming after work

exhausted, hungry
for shower, supper,
undirected talk, good touch

later, before sleep,
the making of a to-do list
that starts with raking the yard

once (of course) the crocuses
are done with their blooming
and their season is done

then it will be our time
to see to our garden —
but until then

we shall leave it to
the crocuses
to remind us that winter

will come to an end
will be marked
and announced

regardless
of us
spring will come

We don’t matter, 
you know.

As much as we’d like
to be important, 

that is how much
we are not.

Thank God for that
as God made us in

God’s self-important image
and that’s all we truly share:

the ego of Being as We Are
and no more.  According to

the Bible we were born to,
we named shit and then 

screwed up from there and now
we’re in the dark groping toward

a way back.  We’re a damn cliche
and are not even individuals within it —

there we are,
exemplars and not people — 

trying, desperately,
to make a mark amid

well-deserved skepticism:
we don’t matter, and isn’t it

a relief to not matter
in these times that might

give you a chance
to escape.