You keep at it 
as if being a poet is special.
There’s nothing special about it —

you see a thing you need to survive,
chase it down, catch it, consume it,
spend hours after cleaning up after yourself
and the mess you’ve made of it, then
sleep until it’s time
to do it again.  Any cheetah can do it,
does it without a lot of thought.

Or you roam constantly foraging
and now and then break into a full run
zigging, zagging, leaping. Looks like fun
to the world watching but it’s complete 
terror on the hoof and maybe (eventually,
probably, certainly)
you die at the end; nothing to it,
any antelope could do it, does it
without a lot of thought.

Yet there you are, doing it
and straining to do it
and pouring angst about it
into a cup fashioned for blood, 
and you want
some kind of award
or some kind of book deal
or some kind of video ranking
or some kind of love for doing it —
God, look at yourself;
could you even survive
if you had to? Could you cheat death
multiple times, or even once?

You want fame for how hard
you’ve made this? You want joy
for being what you have no choice
in being?
Get running or
get gone.
Nothing to this
but that.

No axes,
no hammers
on the pegboards
in the basement.

No kitchen knives, no
rolling pins smoothed and
patina-clothed from meals
without number
in the drawer
next to the stove.

No guitars in the closet
with their necks so worn
in certain spots 
upon the back and
up against particular frets
along the front 
that the seasoned eye 
could tell you, swiftly,
what each instrument
had played — 

this old house has been cleansed.  
Someone’s gone through it.
It’s all new wood and
updates — empty basement
walls where the pegboards once 
hung, empty closets that once held
costumes from Halloweens past,
shoes forgotten in the corners,
those infernal guitars.

A delightful period Colonial
updated with all the modern conveniences
where it used to have inconveniences —

scarce wall plugs, shallow cabinets,
drafty windows, a peculiar rattle
on nights when the wind came from 
exactly the right direction to cause
the eaves to whistle and shake —

it used to be able to talk.
It used to be full of stories,

but now there’s all that new wood and
all those tight and noiseless floors
and doors and heating ducts.

It’s silent, longing to begin
its inevitable fall 
back into wear and want and 
clutter and disrepair, back 
into chatter and clamor
(through stain and splinter)
about those who live here;

it awaits 
restoration from
house
to home.

I twisted away
from the comfort my life
was supposed to hold

toward unknown territory
where this Work was all.
I chose Love over Ease.

I could have stayed the course.
Could have hung with the good people
at the money job and

kept my spare time
for the good people 
at the art job,

but I tried something else and
now it feels
like no one knows me

based on what I am in total
and on my not being willing
to move one way or the other

if it means negating all 
dichotomies within me.
Such a choice would leave

the best of me behind.
Leave me wanting, unwanted.
Leave me only my own bones

to pick,
seeking myself
among my scraps.

I ought to be whole.
I try to stay whole.
Whenever I am split

I try to stitch myself. Days like this
all I can see of myself
is seams ripped and rewrapped

and mended with a million
different threads, blood
dotting the edges, swollen 

from the constant repair
and so fragile I burst 
routinely. I hate this

patchwork me, this 
once-beloved stuffed
bear still cherished by a few

mostly because I’m here
and apparently known to them;
I could do without myself as I am.

Still, in looking back
I can say there were moments when
it all made sense. It was more than

just hard work. It was more than
just work, more than just hard.
I can recall the touch of

loved ones, the touching.
Can recall that there were answers 
to unvoiced questions, even if I 

cannot recall them now. I know
they were there and I had them
and I was satisfied

for a few solid seconds. 
I can recall the seams and blood
becoming invisible in the right light

that briefly illuminated all.
I recall and recall and recall.
A voice re-calling the past

is all I hear — was it enough,
were those moments
enough? The same voice

responds, they will have to be.
I sit with that a while, then realize
that voice is not my own,

and I feel the stitches pull.

On the first morning
I am content to 
step away from my daily practice
without context or pretext

(no illness,
no pressing engagement, no need
to flee a disaster natural or man-made
or handmade)

and feel absolutely no
guilt or tug back
toward the Work —

that morning, I will look up
and keep looking up
and rise until
there will be no up
left to see —

only Surroundings,
the Directionless, the place

I was meant to be — place
where the Work ends. The place
the Work describes
and explains to me,
patiently,
one morning at a time.

Turning that
random radio dial:

every third song,
a man killing 
his sweetheart;
every third song, 
a woman talked about
as if she were candy
or Satan;
every third song, 
no woman complete
without a completion
named man;
every third song,
no man complete
without callousness
or armament or
loner stride, 
no woman
to be seen;

every third
bluegrass
top 40 rock
folk rap jazz
standard
writes a man-woman 
prescription to be taken 
as directed and now

every third song
in my head
writes itself
the same.

After binging all our lives
upon celebrity,
we came to a day
when it began to retreat
beyond our reach.

Idols and
villains, icons and underbelly alike
fell from pedestals
into the murk of death
and sank away from view;

in response
we slandered the natural order
and claimed that all deaths
of those we claimed as our beacons
happened too soon, 

and like beachcombers
we swept the sand
where they’d just been walking
for tokens, shells they’d left behind
before falling.  

Now and then we’d find one
with a sharp edge, cut ourselves, 
bleed a bit.  We’d say, we never knew
this — how dare they fail us, or how dare we
be failed by them. Some of us promptly
tossed the shells far into the surf,
out to where the celebrities
had disappeared, and promptly forgot
the wounds
and how they came by them.

Some of us began
to wonder and rage
about pedestals;

some of us breathed easier, 
knowing we weren’t long for this
blood-taking world, offering thanks
for that relief from having 
to smash them,
to see them smashed.

We made them, we said;
that was our work. That 
was our deal with Death:

we’d make a place for immortals
in our lives, and Death would let us forget
about our own mortality
for a while, for a blazing,
unexamined while —

and now our work is done,
even if we are not quite ready for
the killing tide
that’s coming to make that true.

observe: a peach moon
above the iron-dark earth
that’s showing through from under
season’s first snow

shrouding those who sleep under
the overpass tonight in 
the camp we all know is there
but try to ignore

who are tending the small
surreptitious fire
which keeps them
probably alive

despite the highway
and the railway
roaring at intervals
into the dark of morning

somehow the quiet
of city hunkering down
to try and stay warm
in this wind and snow

clamors more loudly
than either one
smothers them under
the peachstone moon

Watching the aliens
ignore us from

their places on high
leaves us shaking a collective fist:

it’s not right!
We’re the compendium

of every bad impulse and shaky plan
every human ever had;

how do they not care enough
to even notice us?  Even their

hate or disdain
would at least be something.

Let’s work harder. Let’s
go up in a conflagration

they’ll see from Sirius
or beyond.  Let’s get something

going, let’s hate our way
to the stars. We’ll be damned

if we do or don’t get seen
either way, so let’s go big

and burn home.

In the dead letter office
are 14 billion tears, 35 million
expressions of love, 35 million 
expressions of hatred, enough

incorrect assumptions to choke
a moon-sized shark, eleventy-one
thousand dog barks translated from
the Sanskrit, a piece of Captain Hook’s
alligator, inconsequential amounts
of radium in the form of old watch dials, 

an anonymous promise of fidelity,
his promise never to drink again,
her promise of a willingness to try,
their promises to pay, form letter
threats of legal action, form letter regrets
to inform you of the death in action…

pomegranate seeds on a Christmas card,
the eye of the Hydra, the teeth of
the Cyclops, the face of Tecumseh
on a napkin, the hammer and nails
of Jesus Christ himself, and everything
you thought you had coming to you

for better, for worse, for your punk 
credibility, for your regard for  Broadway,
for your faith in the ruthless efficiency
of the Universe in delivering what’s deserved
to those who deserve it.  It’s a big room

you can’t fathom without sending yourself
to the only place you can’t possibly go 
and expect to come out of 

in one piece — once you’re in there
they open you up, look for where
you should be, send you there 
if it’s obvious and if not
they destroy all correspondences
and auction off the valuables,

which makes the dead letter office
exactly like anywhere else.