Everything ought to be
making you sick
from honor killings
and stray bullets
to open resistance
against easy corrections
of past mistakes
and ancient injustice

Everything ought to be
crushing your faith
from the way they swing God
like a scythe at our heads
to the faces of stone stupid
ignorant men
staring into the eyes
of simple folk brandishing
facts for the taking
and calling them lies
and calling them liars
or worse than that
turning away

But everything also
can help make you better
If you go out looking 
you are bound to feel better
From touching your hand 
to the lips of a lover
to being amazed
by sunset revelations
From charging the line
they’ve put up to stop you
to striking the tent
after sleeping on mountains
From being the One
for a swift-dying man
To standing alone
where no one else can

And it isn’t like everything 
changes when noticed
Or that nothing worth seeing
is ever forever
It’s all in a balance
between warring and resting
Between screaming and sleeping
Between storming and laughing
It’s all the rage somewhere
to be enraged always
All the rage somewhere else
to leave all rage outside
I say it’s a privilege 
to feel anything anytime
The ones who cannot
are soon enough buried
and all of the living 
we have left to do
is only a living
if we live on both sides
So sicken and heal 
and chatter and humble
What we’re here to see
is everything clearly
What we’re here to do
is everything always

Cold morning
putting out the trash — there’s 
a dead mouse on the porch

that apparently died
in the act of creeping along
the siding toward warmth,

or was perhaps killed by 
something but left
unconsumed:

perhaps as a warning
to others not to pass
this way?  

No matter:
I lift it from the spot
where it passed

and hurl it
into the yard
where it will become

a different kind of message
of how every death absorbed into 
its environment

vanishes.
Will I even remember
next year that I did this?

Was that why
this was written?  Was a mouse
born and killed to give me a poem?

I think this once and snort at my ego
that doesn’t even know 
why I’m here — maybe

I’m just here
to take out
the trash

and will some day die and be found
with the yellow bags in my hands
and others will nod sagely

and agree that I was good at that
as they wrap me up
and hurl me out of their minds.

The crisis passes,
leaves you

broken open, interior exposed,
egg-slick-sticky.

Gold and white
and black opal shimmer

that cannot
be put away

once it’s out —
it can so easily be soiled

and spoiled.  You have
no shell, no protection

for yourself
anymore.

Untrustworthy gods
delight to see you struggle — 

that’s the point, they insist.
You’ll always lose,

but to struggle
is to move on.

And, they promise,
there will be more gold,

more white, more 
opalescent shine

but this time, you’ll 
put the shine on —

it won’t be what you were
born with, but it will gleam.

I never expected to hear
anyone say

“Step away from that,
slowly; that’s
a grown man’s
pogo stick,
son;”

or

“Sixty years ago
married a big
fat fat fat fat fat
wife, we had
six kids
and I don’t recall
her name or any of
theirs;”

or

“I been robbed
five times, that’s why
when I get paid
I take all my money
and put it into
the liquor store;”

or

“Lover, the duration
of how good it feels
is directly proportional
to the heaviness of
the night in which
it’s happening.”

But I’ve heard them all
and even when
I didn’t understand,
I was glad to have heard
evidence of a wave among people
of heart and thought
and pain and quirk;

made me feel
there was a point
even if I was never to know that point;
a point

to living weirdly,
to have been in the right places
at the right times
to have heard such things.

In the name of peace
we kill.  And in the name of God
we do as well.  And in honor of the sun,
the moon, the waves and wind —
slaying, tearing of flesh, drinking of blood.
We did those things, have always
done those things, we still do those things.

Then we bend to pick up our children,
tickle their chins, speak of freedom
and love to them. Touch them with
our bloody hands. Sing to them
with gore on our jaws.  
What are we?  

We are the ones
who refuse to understand
what we are, who think
and have thought
for forty thousand years
that this is the era in which 
we will evolve, that this scheme
or this evocation of God
will make it real at last.

We are beyond
the reach of that,
of course.  We are 
in stasis, envious of the predators
who know how
to stop killing once they
are filled.

At the foot of the bed
there is Cat

unless she is in the closet

or on the dresser
or on top of the 

refrigerator

Her predictability is 
unpredictable
We know her spots but not
her schedule

But the first place to look
is always the foot of the bed

Careful not to kick her
while we sleep
while she sleeps
for she will cut anyone
who forgets her
or takes her for granted

She’s like nearly everything else
in this life right now
A dark and warm presence
that is capable of wounding
and comforting
without giving warning
that either is about to happen

At the foot of the bed
a small warrior
a soft troublemaker
best little metaphor
for this freefall life

I love to hear her purr

Kids these days
are refusing to answer the phone and
thus they are dragging
the rest of us with them into
an effortless, non-verbal future
through signs and signals,
through texts and flash mobs,
through dilution and over-brief
sloganeering.

They aren’t taking “no” for an answer
when I suggest some of us
prefer to speak, use breath,
bathe each other in unique voice —
they say we’re just old dogs
and maybe they are right
but discussion is futile
so we’ll never know for sure;

they aren’t taking “no” for an answer
to any question whatsoever,
so for this and other reasons
linked to how we’re all
not getting along

I decide that it has to be,
at last,
time for
the end of the world.

I remove all doubt
about where I stand on the moment
by hurling myself to the ground
and tearing into it
to make a cave
or bunker there, a home
in the land,
not on it,
telling myself: 

if you refuse to lose
you become the “no”
they refuse to hear,
so I refuse to let go
of any chance to touch people
directly,

or at least I won’t go
without a fight.

Yes, this is what I say to myself
as I declare it’s time
for the end of times,

although to the Others
it must look for all the world
as though what I am digging
in an act of silly resignation
is my own grave,

so they kick the dirt over me
and move on.

I don’t mind that this mind of mine
takes the word “mouse”
and transforms it to “rocket” or “dagger”
or “fishing shack,”

so that the sound of their vermin feet
in my walls becomes a space race,
a war, a life on the sea.  Hear mouse,
realize everything.  I’ve learned

to live with this.  I call it blessing
and not curse, though when I thought 
the word “blessing” at first I heard
“California redwoods” and then “magma,”

and “blessing” became a vision
of forests jumping into blaze along rivers
and roads of liquid fire.  Blessing is fire
here within me.

Everything’s always in the process
of being connected to all else.
Any one word leads to another
as fire leads to ash, as flash flood

leads to canyon, as mouse
leads to dagger rocket fishing shack
or blessing leads to volcano-sparked trees
lit like candles along the coast.  

Shh, says the Universe, by which I mean
the dying willow in the backyard.  Don’t spill
all the secrets of the tangle, little mouse;
there will be blessings upon you if you do.

The more I think about how things are,
the more I wish I could stop thinking entirely —

but then I’d have to feel
and I couldn’t take that for long.

Take the case of that dog yelping
in the next yard.  Is he in pain,

hungry, lonely?  I try to discern that
from the quality of his cries.

I stop analyzing, start to empathize, and learn
it’s all three at once. I know this at once

as i can feel the howls coalescing
in the hollow at the base of throat.

Exist on the largest scale:
swallow the moon with each inhale,
change space when you breathe out.
Can a word from you change anything?  Speak it

and learn.  In particular time
this moment — your moment —
ought to shake the basalt
below your feet, though you’re standing still.

No more the tiny life, no more the exceptional
detail.  Stretch for something greater.  Thrill
to fail.  Thrill without success.  Leave behind your
dinosaur bones.  Erase the shrunken you.

you must have knocked or otherwise
fooled me into letting you in

there is no way I escaped from you
only to have you arrive and be welcomed

into my terrified arms
to embrace or wrestle for an interval 

so long since we kiss-bit
shed blood then soothed wounds

what was I thinking to let you arrive thus
included and forbidden to me but present

as no one’s ever been present for me —
full on possession down to spewing and fear

bright demon in my waist 
my center of leaden gravity drawing me to drown

holding my breath as long as I can 
only to release it at last into your own last gasp

what a pair of pistols we have become
opening fire simultaneously

without any need of a word between us
it is just exactly what we always knew would happen

On the morning I died
I was listening to…Miles…

Not to Miles in fact
but to Lee Konitz.
I suspect you don’t know
Lee Konitz, so I’ll default
to Miles and give you
some peace,
a picture to hang on to,
a soundtrack
you don’t have to think about
for the first time.

On the morning I died
I was writing.

What I was writing
of course remains
unfinished.  I’d prefer it
to be discarded.
It was just getting to a boil.
It wasn’t ready.
It wasn’t ready.

At the moment I began to die
I looked out the window.

Must I explain everything?
Will I be explaining everything
to each of you forever?
I looked out the window.
There was a shadow crossing the yard.
A large bird, a dog I just missed seeing.
It doesn’t have to mean a thing:
just a man about to die
noticed something outside
and did not recognize
what it was.

As I began to die I came up
with the next line I should write.

I came back just to tell you
that all of us end with our last line
appearing in our heads, but it feels like
just the next line.
It has no portent or finality,
just feels like a line
you should have done something with years ago
but you never had the right
place to put it.

And then…I died.

That’s it.  I died,
some stuff done,
some undone.
I got the perfect line.
I have the place for it now.
The best words.
The best order.
You’ll do the same someday.

Until then consider me
the incinerated
in the distance,
on a breeze,
vanishing.

Don’t ask for more.

More tapping,
more soft fall and landing,
more speech of dripping leaves
after rain.

More howl
to our midnight wind.
More window spatter
to our gale gusts.

More eyes that won’t
look away.
More hands making
first contact.

More rough music that makes us
terrified, exhilarated, 
dance-filled, then exhausted
and ready for silence.

More, more…
more gratitude for how painful
this world can be
but often isn’t; 

more holding, more embracing,
more firestoking, more
handing over of our coats
to those who need them more.

More long hours
of side by side play,
more destroyed beds,
more windows fogged.  

It isn’t easy
to explain this desire to suck up
all of existence
into oneself.

Enough to say
a hollow man seeks 
to be full, but
never feels that way.

In a younger time
I did my work
in late darkness,
in after hours,
fighting sleep;

at my best
in a room
with lights off,
door closed behind me
to leave
what had happened in daylight
outside.

Now,
my work unfolds
at night’s end,
before dawn;

after sleep, still
in darkness, still
in a black room
with door closed.

I once was glad
for that darkness
which pulled a shroud
over what had been;

I may be more glad
for this darkness,
a stage curtain
which when pulled back
frames and shapes
what’s yet to come.