everything is an effort
the results seem
too thin
too spindly

work
seems stretched
as if it might fall over
from being so tired

except
on one half-shell
of an egg left over
from a full breakfast

lies a poem
or really a piece of a poem
ready to be inside
heart and brain

a yolk or part of a yolk
could with tremendous work
become a world
a thought could become whole

so with fat frozen fingers
and tottering will
I begin to work
as if I were not a child

but a sun rising over a landscape
I’d not seen before this
marveling before
its tiny beauty

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

What you show me
is, according to you,
the way to heaven. A stairway
to God; a path as difficult
as any I’ve known, one without
milestones or markers
to let you know how close
you came — but
it’s not heaven, anyway.

I take another road
that you warn me against:
a road to hell or something
like hell, a stairway past God
through a deep wood of old trees,
virgin forest; the milestones here
laugh at you until their sides ache
and you never get away from them,
you will never escape — this is not hell
anyway; it’s just another road.

You surrender to the fact
that you don’t know where you are going
and you never will until
you close your eyes and ears to what
people like me tell you. Maybe
it’s heaven, maybe it’s hell;
you won’t know until you get close.
You won’t know until you see the skyline
beyond. You won’t know till
laughter stops and the trees
thin out and all you can see
is stars, fading from view
as you close your ruined, blessed eyes.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

I did not know
the fact, simple as toast
or indeed a slice of bread
uncooked — I did not know
that a pitch headed for the head
could possibly maim or kill
but more likely could simply cause
a headache more or less severe —
which, if given a chance,
would gradually, eventually bring about
bleeding that might cause a death
suddenly unbidden:
a piece of toast or bread
of one sort or another
that would someday do
itself proud —
a slice of gentle food
rendered poisonous which started
innocently like a casual ball
tossed, one that started its progress
years ago and made all watching
shake their heads and wonder
at the long grinding spectacle
of dying at the end
of a shortened life.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Go to sleep thinking
I have more to read before,
before…more to write before,
before…
wake up to read Holderlin,
to read Novalis…
listen to “”Pure and Easy”
by Townsend…

I can’t sleep yet, not before
I do my part but what is it?
Today it’s nothing,
it’s just sitting with my failings.
Today I am made aware
of all the feelings, complex
and simple, that I feel.
I can’t think, can’t eat but for
simple things with no flavor,
can’t write or read for any money
or fame or nearly ineffable
sense of understanding.

A child
passes me, riding on a star;
man is the sun; all fruit cooked
turns to snakes…
I don’t know
a word to make this all work
as it should. As it should
if I am whole and intact.

My head is full of islands
and the water between them
to swim; I sit like a vegetable…
before my time comes
I want life to connect them again…
but the chance is fat, is gross,
is unimaginable.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward?
T

As if there is enough time
to waste and fritter on small things
I am watching a bug, an indefinite bug,
crawling down the wall.
I’ve been at it for an hour now.
It seems to know where it’s going.
Perhaps I should
get up and follow it
except this chair is so comfortable
and in the long sport of things
I shouldn’t move much, if at all.
I think this is where I should be found
when I am found. As if in that moment
I will know, or even care,
how far I’ve fallen from the need
to do things, feel things, see things
other that this bug and its path
to everywhere. Maybe
it will be different when I go;
maybe it will be
as if I will have started a new life,
a quiet sort of existence in a quieter place
so like this one, yet utterly unlike this place
where the hiss of the pipes is enough
to seem like uiellann pipes,
held beneath the arm,
sweeter and more haunted
as if they were the perfect song for a bug,
an indiscriminate bug wandering
and catching all
my vanishing attention.
“““““““““““““““““““““““““`

onward,
T

Don’t. Just don’t.
That is all
that needs saying.

Let the music of the oak bark soothe you;
let the sound of you stroking it, as rough as it is,
come in and ease your mind;

just don’t fret at all.
Don’t worry about the past, or wring your hands
about the future.

You were born into the mistake
of trying to mold the present
into what you wanted it to be.

Stop now; listen up.
The oak and its denizens know better than you.
They whisper incessantly of what is here

now, under your ear to begin, then
inside you. A universe comes to life
when you listen for it.

Stop with the nonsense, the quarreling
over the heads of pins, the nagging
of the viewpoints aiming to succeed,

the long war-arc of your mindless chatter
trying to interpret the meaning of you
as you flit between interpretations.

Stop, stop
and hear the business inside the oak.
Do little. Do nothing. Do it all, do enough.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

On an abandoned field
decrepit stock cars sit —
their painted numbers peeling,
their tires rotting to ground level,
children warned away as if from bees,
adults standing far, far back — fearful
of the fever again, afraid
of noise and hot wind.

You don’t understand
how it was for them, how it would have been
for you — the flow of cars
ratcheting by you so fast you
couldn’t catch up to them — not thinking
about anything except going fast
and holding your own fear in abeyance
long enough to relax when it was over.

Instead — you are an adult now, almost
an old man — you feel it all at once.
The pedal, the steering wheel, the sound
of tires on dirt. These kids don’t know.
You long to show them but it’s getting
late. Come on, you growl — it’s time
to get out of here. Above their protests
you indeed hear the faint roar of engines,
but you shake it off as if it were poison.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Today is the day
when the President wakes up
bubbling at the corners of his mouth
and a shark takes issue
with his face
for having no sharp teeth.

Today is the day
when the President’s honorable adversary
dines upon shark for breakfast and feels strong
as an ape munching on Gaza
who claims the office upon knowing the President
has no stomach has for the war beyond winning it.

Today is the day
no one cares about the war, the President,
his adversaries, his allies,
Gaza, the great state of Texas;
today is a calm day indeed when
it comes to the conduct of the war because

today is the day
when the earth warms up one more degree
and some of us grow terrified but
the bulk of us relax in the comfort provided
by the hope of two more degrees
and two strong arms to rock us;

today is the day
when the light grows behind the shades
and the blinds illuminate by degrees
and we grow to dread the sunrise for coming up
this slowly, as if the sunrise was not inexorable
and the buds on the trees could grow more swiftly.

Today is the day
no one cares here in the suburbs
or in the calm milquetoast of a small city
where in the twilight before the day begins
we start the car radio on the way to work
and shake our fat heads at the noises;

today is the day
you pace the living room seeking comfort,
a quick end, a surprise of violence
instead of the shrug you normally feel.
You are going to make it. You aren’t going
to make it. You care or you don’t.

Today is the day
you sing along with the President,
the Vice President, and all the members
of Congress. You have a fine voice,
strong lungs, a penchant for singing.
You aren’t a shark or an ape, thanks to some dark god.

In the blue before dawn
you think of the Gaza kids before pulling away;
in the blue before dawn you think of other kids
the world — kids in Moscow, in Nagadoches.
You shake them off, like the song says on the radio.
Warmer and warmer. Sun’s coming. Shake it off.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

You don’t even stop
to think about it.
You breeze through
as if it were nothing
worth considering —
maybe it is, of course;
maybe it means nothing
all these years later, when

all kinds of flowers bloom
by the front door, all kinds of bees
roll around the flowers, all kinds
of danger and crisis are out here
and maybe it means nothing,
nothing at all.  Outside it’s easy

to believe in nothing,
after all; you came up
believing in things that turned out
to be of no value to the world
and you turned from them into
a trust in the artificial values
they gave you to trust; now
you are punished by them, the crosscut
of saws over your back, the whine
of lying voices in your ears
stung by the hornets, bitten
by the long snouts of the weasels
elected since the days turned corroded
and false.

What happened to us? Eh,
what happened to the rest of them?

You correct the message. You are all set
with the message, after all. You’re fine —
after all, nothing will touch you,
you are magic, you are nothing
but smoke to them, scheming,
figuring, calculating the end —
and you don’t even figure, and

the bees don’t care.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Upstairs one of the women
is walking around. Around
and around…she’s got hard shoes
on, clickety-clack; she stops
and starts, starts and stops.
The dog is doing nothing,
the roommate is doing nothing,
all of them do nothing until
she comes downstairs and leaves.
Sun is just coming up and I
ought to be satisfied that no one
cares what I was doing at the same time,
but I’m crushed for a split second
because I don’t matter in the slightest
to the affairs of the neighborhood.
The poetry, the music, the trenchant
observations, even the struggles —
all of that becomes a shrug to them,
or it will when I’m gone. Even after
I’m gone it will be ignored and no one
will know. The dog upstairs, for instance,
won’t care in the slightest. In some ways
he’s the one I think about the most.
He never would have cared in the first place.
He might have woofed once or twice,
seen me going in or out, but
he wouldn’t care after that — not that
he cared at all. He’s the one
I love the most of all. He cares
not a jot what I do, or did,
or care about as I wring my hands
and fret about the state of things
without me and my earthshaking.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

At first a cat
sleeps, then wakes, sees you,
goes back to sleep.

Then there is
an explosion in your head,
and you do the same.

It is dark and
not yet close to
alarm time, wake up time.

You watch light changing,
growing behind
worn blinds in the bedroom.

A wolf, somewhere,
eats a sheep, licks his
hungry jowls afterward.

The cat sleeps. You
try. The wolf sleeps.
You try. The explosion

you try to cover sleeps.
Did it ever happen or was it
a mistake, you wonder. Maybe

it was nothing. All
in your head and it’s
the same in the imagined

aftermath. The wolf
didn’t exist either. Did
the explosion, the cat?

Aren’t you a fool
for being alive and not
quite awake?

The light inexorably
continues to increase.
A cat jumps up, gets down,

goes on its way
and when you open
your eyes it’s all you have.

Morning
isn’t enough. It
diminishes you.

You are a fool,
but no more than a normal man
first thing in the morning.

Crestfallen. Still
asleep. Wide awake.
Lost in the cat’s cry.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T