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.

If Eve had said

no thanks, Serpent,
I’m not hungry…but 
you intrigue me…let’s
talk again sometime…

God would have
gone to a neutral corner
and sulked at the thwarting.

If Abraham had said

are you nuts?  That
is my flesh and blood
and I’m not even going to
dignify that with a response…

God would have walked off
kicking the Biblical equivalent
of a can.

If Jesus had said

indeed I brought a sword, not a
figurative sword but a literal one,
these Romans
are killing us, let’s go…

what a world we’d have,
what paradigms would be different

if the right folks
had given God the right “no”
at the right time.

A door opens —
no, more than that: the door
to your solid home is blown open
as if in a scene from a movie

and he’s standing there, the Missing Returned:
perhaps Prodigal Son, perhaps absent Father,
perhaps Great Lost Love, the One
That Got Away, last missing link in the chain
tethering you to Who You Used To Be.

What are you going to say?
You are different, not at all 
the same person.  Drink different tea,
hold your head differently, your voice
lower, your body weaker.  Maybe you’re
a parent now, perhaps a widower or widow,
perhaps divorced or never partnered.

What do you say to the One
who defined you once
when you are no longer
who you were
back then?

You say,

welcome.  Welcome
to my solid home.  
Can I offer you
some tea? It’s what I have
these days.  
You are welcome to sit,
and certainly we’ll talk,
but close the door 
behind you first as
I don’t want anything
that might have followed you here
stumbling in bedraggled
from Beyond.

“Fill your hand, you son of a bitch.”  — John Wayne before a gunfight in True Grit

According to some
mine is
always full
and
every word of mine’s 
a pistol or grenade
and

while
they may be right
more often than not

they don’t see that 
the weapon and the atttude
are vastly 
self-directed;

that any damage to others
is incidental;

that the thought
that I’ve shed blood
with my words
on purpose

is as unfamiliar to me
as the Duke’s swagger,

which on me resembles
nothing more than
a drunken, stumbling tumble
to the rocks.

My old fingers say
a light bulb ought
to be hot when on,
but the twisted knob
in this bedside lamp
glows without.

My poor brain
can’t get behind
how the speed of
one person’s offhand thought
now shimmers through
a billion screens at once.

When I am gone
I’ll be at least
a bit relieved that
as my consciousness fades,
it will do so as it always has
from the savanna till now.

Also, I am thrilled
to state that my old heart
(as bloated and clogged as
it likely is) can still race
and rock me when I see
the eyes of one I love.

If it is the heart
that kills me it will do so
in the most ancient way:
through overexcitement.
Nothing obsolete about dying
for such a lovely thing.

Sing the way you do when abandon
has just pulled the bit from your mouth
and you’ve begun to dream without reins.

Sing the broken bell of the body
and of the careful hand that palms it,
attempting to shelter it from greater harm.

Sing the failing ring of its last note
and of the ear cupped to catch it 
before it’s gone forever.

Then sing the return, the rebirth,
the orbit swinging around. Sing the bloom
gone to seed, of the seed gone to fire.

Sing again the demise, sing again
the rebirth, sing the emblem of circularity,
the zero completing the round.

Sing the blue-throated love song,
dense jewel of the sun working
on behalf of misted concrete longing.

Sing this, this dark-tattooed work song,
faceted chant, revelation; sing this gospel
of opening, this echo of purest belonging.

If only the night would stop
arousing me —

if the dark was not so
filled with pinch and worry,
and the room was not so
armored and bristling —

if I could come back down to earth
and ignore how comfort is stolen
by the smallest sounds,

stop attempting to levitate
above this hard bed
to avoid the cycling through
bad sleep and horrid waking
that leads to living each day in haze —

if I could live each day in clarity and
vanish into dreams and sleep at night —

I might be considered normal,
I might feel less twitch and twinge,

I might be someone I could trust
and depend on to carry me through,

I might not need to do another odd thing
in pursuit of peace ever again,

I might not be this man,
might be another, or might not be at all,

and that keeps me up at night
wondering about how much of this
I am destined to take, supposed to take,
meant to take and was built to take
before not taking it
turns me something I am not,
robs me of the most pure bit of me.

Chewing
ancient hard taffy,
three meals a day.

Climbing the local
Dead Horse Hill
wherever I am.

Waking before dawn
to wrestle a fat
and angry angel.

These are the lives for me:

tough ones
where the easy stuff
takes forever to do
and the impossible presents itself
as regularly as church.

I’ve learned a trivium
fraught with weight 
and difficulty.
It’s all I know.

Some of us are meant
to be ground underfoot.
Some of us are meant
to wear out.
Only a few are bent
to loving that fate;
I bear that curvature
in my wasting frame
and don’t know why
but I trust the universe
to have it right,

and when the last of me
crumbles the remains
will serve some purpose,
I’m certain, for the fat
and angry angel
who will crush me
and then lift me 
with disdain
from where I’ve mingled
with dust.

I like this era
of quaint new words
that help me explain 

how I see each new day
as a hardened target
against which
I have weaponized
my smile

how I follow therefore
in my daily routine
all necessary
hazmat protocols
keeping a safe 
distance from others

how I live on such
a high alert level
prepared
for all threats

and how the occasional
preemptive strike
is necessary to preserve
my freedom

Admitting failure,
complete collapse,
Ernest “Fatman” DiCicco
spends his last days
hoping for a warm spell
before first snowfall.

He looks over 
all he’s done and 
gives away most
of his best things,
his favorite guitars, 
his pens, his knives.

Burns his letters, 
every book he’d ever 
made a note in, 
all the cheap jewelry
he’d loved, clothing
and caps and gloves.

When all is done,
Ernest begins to starve himself —
Fatman changing before our eyes,
such peace in his  — 
will not speak of what he’s thinking,
and for once we won’t ask.

When he’s gone, we won’t notice
the absence for more
than a moment.  Why be hypocrites?
We have always wished he would go away
and once he has, everything’s
fine, everything’s for the best.