Each night hours pass
with no reaction
from millions
lying in their beds,
where nothing
outside their heads
exists except as
dreamfuel.  

They refashion
what they know into
nonsense or
perfect sense
without once opening
their eyes to see
how what they’ve made
while asleep
fits into all
they did not make.

When they wake
they may or may not
recall all their hard creation
before falling back
into life as they knew it,

maybe or maybe not
regretting how it dissipates,
but not dwelling long upon it
before rising and moving on.

You see now,
don’t you,
how swiftly
all can vanish?

Go with that.

Pretend
you’re a figure
in someone’s dream
and it’s not long before
an alarm sounds.  

You have little time left
for outrageous stunts
and passions that barely
make sense as they happen.

Do them anyway,
pretending
it will all cohere
when it’s ended,
just before
it falls away forever.

We’re blowing up
a thing we’ve called God

Many will rejoice
at its demise

not the least of whom
will be the god
who has been hiding

unanthropomorphized

behind the mask
on the one
we demolished
for almost
as many years
as we have called 
upon God

FACT
A 9mm bullet
travels at roughly
820 mph

ACCURACY
A 9mm bullet
travels on average
800-826 mph
depending on
the specific
cartridge

TRUTH
A 9mm bullet
travels
swiftly but
its exact speed is 
irrelevant
to the body
in which it 
stops

and to those
who loved that
body and its 
Passenger
who is 
now departing
at the blinding
speed of
loss

Brownfields,
old factories:
this town has plenty,
like pockmarks.

I drive away from my house.
I won’t get out of the car. I just want to stare.
I want to imagine breaking in and beginning.
It wouldn’t take more than all my blood and treasure

to take an abandoned firehouse,
skin everything out, leave the pole.
Put a rebellion in the bays
where the trucks used to sit.

Charge anyone
who drives to see it,
but the walk-up traffic
gets in free.

Inspired,
clear at last,
I park the car in
a vacant lot.

Walking now with other
abandoned persons
who all walked away
from a house somewhere.

There’s
an ocean
in front of us,
a boat waiting. But

there’s so much to do
right here in our brownfields
that we don’t need to go
anywhere else.

Let’s all go back to bed
at once.  

Let’s not get up with an alarm
or with the sun.

Let’s stay in bed, alone or accompanied,
for a couple of days.

There will be time allotted for bathroom breaks
and trips to the fridge
but the only people allowed to be up and about
are the fomerly comatose
or otherwise ill.

Sex is not the point, but will no doubt
happen anyway
as it always does when forbidden
or when circumstances are
especially awkward.

Let’s make bed the new revolution
and protest against 
the status quo.
It’s been done before — witness John and Yoko —
can we get an amen?

Let’s prepare for a long time at rest
before we rise again.

Let’s put a bed under every roof
and a roof over every head.

Let’s put clean sheets on every bed,
just in case.

Let’s not argue over who is in which bed
and with whom.

Let’s go back to bed and not think too much
about not being in bed.

Let’s enjoy horizontal peace.

Overheard
early on 
a Saturday:
slow
breathing 
underground.

Animal stirring,
or a human, or

something older
than either of those.

The sages will want to call
what’s happening here
Spring, 
but it’s much larger
than that:

it wants
to be out and away
from explanations
and plantings and 
plowings and such
trivial scrabblings
as we provide.  

It wants
to breathe easy
and here we are,
stuck to its hide.

It’s ready
to scratch.

Inspired by this story:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/pope-reveals-late-confessors-cross-22796088

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Pope speaks
of how once he lifted a cross
from a corpse’s fingers,

left roses
in its place, and now
carries that theft

with him always
under his clothes.
Those innocent

severed roses
still rot in the dark of the tomb.
Mercy in any amount is nowhere to be found,

and there’s no redemption
or resurrection
to be had

when the crime is revealed.
No one is shocked.
Everything stays the same.

Traditions say
the use of fire
was given to us by
a coyote,
a wolf, 
a seabird, 
a mantis; they say 
that water fell for us
thanks to the word of
a butterfly,
a worm, 
a snake,
a maple tree; they say
we exist
because of
the will of mud,
stone shards,
spittle,
milkweed feathers.

I don’t know
if any of that is true.
I just know 
it’s what I’ve been told.

I know
for you
the answer is always
science
and maybe science is
more solid, maybe 
it’s truer
than what I know,

but 
don’t pretend
you know anything
about it all,
really;

you take it
all on faith
just as I do.

The only thing to do 
in certain situations
is to ask yourself:

“how
is it possible
for us to be
this stupid?”

Suggested uses:

upon seeing
a pipeline burst

when you find
a murdered eagle

after
a war

upon seeing evidence
of a bias based
in vaporware or
with God as an excuse

“how is it possible
for us to be
this stupid?”

say it
upon hearing the news
any news

yell it
when you feel it
itching at your lungs and tongue
in the presence of 
prime examples and

whisper it
loudly enough for the dead to hear
when wiping their blood
from your hands

This God 
the atheists
do not believe in
is nothing like
the Ones I know
who have always been
as numerous as leaves,
slippery
as free mercury,
devoid of faces,
disinclined
to interfere
even when implored
as they are yoked
to larger purposes
than we can know —
purposes
they serve as surely
as we do.  
Omnipotence,
they laugh,
is a child’s dream — 
what God
of Sound Mind
would desire it,
considering how much
needs doing in the 
universe? Having said that
they turn
back to their
appointed tasks,
not caring 
if we follow.

He says it,
she says it:
“if I die…”

As if 
it might not happen.
As if
an individual
could change
the definition
of a life:

that it inevitably
begins, 
progresses,
and ends.  That

it is not 
static.  That
we can see
a closure,
that no matter how blind
we can see

a closure.

“If I die…” There’s
failed magic
in those words.
Fingers crossed,
then broken.
A rabbit foot
that dances away.
A hope that something

blasphemous
will happen.
 

Stop calling it therapy.
I’ve written thousands of lines
and I’m as broken now
as when I started,
maybe more so.

Stop calling therapy
what exists
to spite disorder,
what persists after
breakdowns and
attempts.

Stop calling therapy
what I would do more of
if I were less a mess.
Stop calling therapy
what I call
breathing.
Stop calling therapy
what I call
myself spread out.

Stop calling
triggers on guns
material.  Stop calling
triggers on others’ lips
material. Stop calling
too-blunt knives and weak pills
and slender ropes
and bed restraints
and hours
of paying to talk
around agony

the dark timber of my art.

Stop calling.  Stop
insisting, stop speaking
of therapy.  Stop in fact
your fantasy of why
and what and how
and spout as pressure valve
and verse as surgery.

If it worked,
if it was as you say,
I’d be perfect.

On the day
after my birthday
we slept late
and it was fine
for once
for me
not to jump up
at the trill
of the alarm

as if the next year of my life
was meant to begin
with a symbolic nod
to keeping time safe
from others’ demands

and just
letting happen
what happens
in its own
time and at
its own pace

It is nothing to the radio
that you have wept upon it
whenever it played
a certain song,
that this went on for weeks
and the only reason you stopped
is that you were caught weeping
and then sent away to be healed.

It is nothing to the radio
that when you returned
you did not turn it on
for a long time.

The radio is neither
friend nor foe; 
it simply has
no feelings for you.
In this way it resembles
the One who you see
as the cause
of your weeping

and so one night
not long after
your return, 
you reach out and slay your radio
by hurling it against
the impassive wall;
you are then enveloped
in silence and 
while you want to weep
you hold back.  
You can hear a certain song
in the silence, and crying
would drown it.