I am walking to a far country
with stones in both shoes.

People say I’m an emigrant or an immigrant, 
depending on where they are standing.
There are those among them who wish to know
why I don’t stop and remove the stones,
and others who don’t care if I ever do.

As everything I’ve described is imaginary
but real as well, I’m told I should turn my attention
to the answers.

The country I am leaving? What name should it be called?
The destination?  Should it be revealed at all?
The stones? Does it matter if they are large or small? 
Should I stop and take them out or learn to suffer well?

See?
The journey’s now thoroughly interrupted
with this over-fastidious attention.

If you expect every traveler
to know these things,
how will travel ever again
be worthy of our time?

when asked

“how are you doing”

she realizes
that certain phrases
poke and prod at a tenderness
similar to that found around
any other wound 

now
she’s lying in the half-empty bed and
she can’t stop touching it herself 

it is hot to the finger tip
feels ready to explode 
sobbing seems to soothe it for a few minutes
or hours until

something else — junk mail perhaps
stamped with a once familiar name
or the slant of light on the vacant end
of the old couch
stabs it again

“how are you doing”
“how are you doing”
“how are you doing”

tenderly spoken
apparently taken well 
even as they rasp across 
what remains unhealed

we say she seems to be 
doing as well as can be
expected
but then again
we say a lot of things
we never bother to examine

Human, offer your big dumb love
for all stones:
the ones we climb, the ones we carve,
the ones we throw.

Keep your mouth shut, novice.  Don’t speak
if you want to know what to do here.
Listen to the gray whisper of stone
and follow directions.  

Maybe you are meant
to climb the largest ones, freestyling up
past ever-present death
without making a mark upon them. 

Maybe you’re destined to build
garden walls, fortress walls, paved roads;
prisons, temples, or something
that serves as both?

Maybe you are supposed to cut them
until they represent another thing
in its heaviest incarnation.  Maybe
you are fated to release the deities inside.

Or maybe you’re supposed
to hurl the small ones at perceived danger,
perceived food, perceived enemies.
Maybe you will turn them into sharp weapons

with well placed blows, one against another.
Will you recreate all the millions of years
we’ve already spent learning these things?  
Human, it’s hard to avoid — the big dumb love

we have for stone carries us there.  For now
put your face on the boulder in the path, 
cheek to its cool black nubble.  Pick up
a piece from the ground and slip it 

into your pocket.  Carry it around with you,
worry it with your thumb and maybe
after a long time it’ll be smoother 
than when you started — and still 

it will look not much different
than when you started, and if you lose it
or toss it it will wait, or not, for the next pocket,
the next slingshot, the next place it is needed.

Trust me when I say it will tell the next human
who finds it nothing about you
you would recognize as being your story,
but it will be your story nonetheless.  

My face
has been spanked by
a child today,

as gently as
a kitten might do,
simply for suggesting

said child needed
more years on the ground
before contesting certain things;

I took it well, I think,
which is to say
that after allowing said kitten

to bat and paw,
I set the argument aside
and walked away…

believe me, though,
when I say 
it left me staring 

at a tiger’s big bad claws
retracting into my fingers,
a fantasy of blood on my teeth.

I need not mention
the oil-rainbow sheen
of the rock dove’s
feathers.

I have no obligation
to praise the sea
as it needs no praise 
to continue carving the earth
at its margins.

If I were forbidden
to speak of them
the abandoned strawberries
in the broken pot
would thrive or not
anyway.

I say these things
as a way
to keep myself 
here.  I am 
profoundly unnecessary
to all of these
and to so much more:

to almost all, in fact.

What surprising joy there is
in admitting it!

It skitters past
quickly enough
to make me wonder
if I saw it.  

I have always trusted
my senses.
If I think I saw something,
I probably did.

I tear into the dark corner
to find it.
There’s nothing there —
time to stop trusting my senses?

Or is it my execution
that’s lacking?  
Did I miss it?
Was I too slow?  

Did I see
something
that can disappear
at will,

and I’m
just behind
the sensory
learning curve?

Did I —
against all odds —
imagine it?  
Or perhaps

I possess
newly broken eyes,
and what I saw
crossed my retina 

from within.  
Anything’s possible, now
that I have come
to this age.

On the floor
I rock on my knees,
thinking about how much
getting up is going to hurt —

it does, always,
lately.  Maybe I’ll lie down
right here and see if
I can see that mouse.

If I catch him,
if he comes sniffing around me,
I’ll be here.  Waiting. 
What I do best, now. 

1.
the gun
the picture of the gun
the movie of the gun
the theater of the gun
the toy gun
the gun as toy
the toying with the gun
the gun toying
the gun’s toy
the toy discarded
the toy weeping
the toy guarding and guarded
the toy erupting
the toy deceased

2.
hair along the arms rising tingling
who brushing who with air and scent
hides coming alive

this thing needs a name
so they call the new life love
love in the hair along the arms
love on their hides

but really
eventually 
same old
same old
same old
lives 

3.
that weed’s gonna kill ya

when it doesn’t — AH
what roads open

4.
God
or a sandwich
offered at the right moment
and 
BANG

zealot

5.
I had to do this, didn’t I?
 
 

Didi stutters.

I knew her
when she didn’t.

I know 
who made her stutter,
made her shy.
I know what he did.

I didn’t do
what I should have done
when I found out,

so I guess
I helped
to start her stuttering too.

I guess I wasn’t a man then,
or maybe I was.  

Maybe I 
still am not one, or maybe
I still am.  Maybe

“being a man”
means
brooding about 
being a man,

instead of just
being a man 
differently.

Don’t judge me
by Didi, stuttering
and shy — 
it’s hard to be a man.

That’s what i said, it’s hard
to be a man these days
when men are so not good at
being men —

I said it, yeah.
You heard me —

did I stutter? 

A confident, satisfied,
perfectly still man with his lover’s head
on his chest while they sleep — 
really, how many houses around here
look like that inside?  How many
truly happy beds are nearby?

Don’t ask.  You’ll tear yourself that way.

Think instead
about the moonlight 
on this night 
after the beaver moon.
Think about how
bright color inevitably 
went a little gray
under the beaver moon, 
but it’s still there.  

Think about red, and yellow,
and how they are still there. 

At me, looking.  Say, did I
muscles have, ever?
Was there anything
uneaten? Did I mother
a thing, father a thing
worth any damn?
Hardly a damn at all.
Sat me down instead and wrote
poems of fat and second hand
and not me and here we go tomorrow,
not now.

It shows.

Now, pear-man,
pale freak I am.  Rager,
sadder, so complete in some
potato sack way (empty, sag,
writing on the walls).  Open
to the lies of stardom yet
nearby, all I gotta do is
reach.  No, untold is how
reach doesn’t spell grip —
see how the cramp fingers
bend only enough to claw at,
not hold?  And I’m poor, not broke.  Broke
is today, poor is tomorrow, is all tomorrows.
Make broke often, turns to poor.  

And still, can belief
happen for anyone
who sees this?
It’s a poem gets writ,
not a plan.  It’s words, damn
them — hot little breaths all
done as all I can.  All I can,
what with no muscles and straight fingers
and no plan and all poor and all that —

You say, do something, please,
we all sick of you.  I am,
me too.  Maybe a little
more than you?  I keep
at it, do it like a job
I can’t retire away from,  
grouch water cooler or no.

Used to add value, though —
at me, look, please. 
Give me proof it meant a little more
than a pear in a mirror, fermenting,
spilling, going. 

She is thinking again
about how not to die, ever. 
(As it was yesterday, as it will be
tomorrow.)

Who isn’t?
she wants to know.  Who’s not
figuring it out or at least fretting
about it?  Maybe that 
Goddamn Dalai Lama?  
I hate that guy, y’know,
because he might get there
without trying.  

Peace,
she says,
folds herself into 
a lotus pose 
with a snarl.  

How not to die,
ever.  Have to get that right,
and soon.