A story begun.

A miniaturized tap dancer.
A resting camel.
An unsteady carousel.
Fingers, shellfish, bored gardeners.
In the longhouse converted from dwelling to storage, many loose feathers.

A stopping point: try to determine where this is happening.
A map:  somewhere near Barrington, Rhode Island.

A small war initiated between the principal actors — a socialite, a meteor.
There’s that tap dancer, struggling to understand her fate, her sudden strange deficiency.

An overarching question:
if it all means nothing, why  are these images occurring to you in this order at this moment?

The real woman shakes her dark hair after coming in from the storm.
She looks at you and says, “Are you done playing?”

Are you done playing?
You set the dancer on the camel in the longhouse.
You close the computer lid.

Yes, you say.  Yes, I am done playing,
although this felt so serious while it was happening
and it may continue for a while without me.
I may come back to learn things and find murders, rapes, pleasant evenings, calm mornings;
or there may be nothing to see when I return.
Maybe a tableau standing stock still.
Maybe crushed legs.
Maybe all will be dead

but in real life the real woman beckons
and in real life reminds me that in real life,
such tragedies happen all the time.

Out in the old neighborhood
something has gotten loose 
that resembles a sun-headed god

It just ran behind Morelli’s Market
which has been closed for twenty years
The rotten old building’s shining like bonfire

There are a lot of indigent gods these days
many of whom live off the scraps of blood sacrifice
Morelli’s had the best meat anywhere

so maybe the renegade’s got a taste 
for decades-old clotted sawdust
or wants to suck the dry butcher’s block

A polytheist might tell you there’s a rebirth here
An acolyte of such a god might demand you bow your head
I’m going to say it’s only a modestly big deal

I think the god is indeed inside the buliding 
With that face he’s likely a sky god and therefore 
almost certainly a male and vandalous god

so we have to get him out of there
before he burns the place down
Sky gods always seem to screw things up

So in I go with a goat on a chain and a bag
to slip over Sunface when he bends to suck the goat
(It’s a myth promulgated by the gods

that a god cannot be easily subdued)
Once we’ve got him
we take him to the river and drown him

his head sizzling the pond almost dry
as it sputters out to a coal then an ember
then a memory relic or theological curiosity

We leave him there on the bank on display
It’s safer than trying to bury him
Someone eventually always digs them up 

and they come phoenix-quick back to bug us again

After we’re done I go back to where Morelli’s was
When I was young this was my bright Saturday morning
Up early with Mom to buy meat

I loved to watch the blood pool
in the sawdust behind the counter 
until Mike Morelli swept it away 

Now it’s a prime place for these old gods to hide 
in the wreckage of past age full of red memory
I chase one out of here at least once a week

shining like bonfire
faces smeared
I almost regret the deaths of all those goats

Did you know,
my dear, that I
am a realist?  
I have no
beliefs, only work
from what I know
is real —

so when you seem so
ghostly, slipping around
as much through me as 
near me,

I find it hard to hold on.
I know I should just
stepm back and believe
but instead

I’m floating here staggered
by the possibility
that I am the ghost
in our love, and therefore
unworthy of myself.

When it comes, it comes slowly.
God didn’t send it.  It wasn’t sent at all.
It just comes, and when it comes, it comes slowly
on its own wisdom path.  

If asked, it will say, “I came to be here
because this path that opened
inexorably before me
brought me here.”

Mountains at the edge of the scenery
will nod almost too slowly to notice, and
the long hair of meadows
shall wave its assent.  The earth

will agree with it at once, once it
has arrived.  Then, as it serenely kills us,
we will be forced to accept
that some expertise pushed for this,

that even Wisdom itself seems bent
on using catastrophe to instruct,
and that we seem unable to learn.

Respectfully, I must submit
that I like
the arc of a unicorn’s shank
as it breaks out of me, seeking 
a virgin to play with…

I like the smell of the new moon,
that I like that you do not know what it is,
that I could tell you anything about it
and it might as well be true…also

I like the hammerless revolvers of old,
and the many iterations of the Luger pistol,
and the romance of easy utility that attaches 
to such awkward little bundles of death.

I like you.  Really, I do.  Something
about the way your hair shines in barroom light.
Something about the floor under your shining head.

I like puppies and kittens with no backstory to them
except that they are puppies and kittens and 
they have hybrid vigor and no provenance.  I like them
to run and jump and bite and claw at me before sleeping.
That’s it.  I like to see them sleeping after such playful violence.

I like you, really I do.  As much as a derringer.
As much as a commando raid.  As much as sweeping 
hormones and such aside for a moment, for in truth
you make my balls feel bigger than supplements,

bigger than found poems, found money,
and found family.  (Not real family, though;
they keep shrinking me.)  I like how your voice
just went up in pitch and volume and anxiety

just for me.  I like just for me.
I like the way just for me feels.

A woman gave me her heart.
I found it bore a faint swastika,
and at once I tore that ball apart;
no one approach works across the board.

Hearts, flowers.
Symbols, metaphor;
also, muscles and genitalia.
No one approach works across the board.

Planet, I implore you,
tear off my head and stop this thinking.
Then shit down my open neck and fill me with decay —
no one approach works across the board.

Positive thought about negative progress,
negative thought about reaching the end.
Targets acquired, I inhale, release.
No one approach works across the board.

I am most comfortable upon the edge of death,
forgetting a vibrant life can also charm and stupefy.
But hand in hand is how they walk most of the time;
no one approach works across the board.

I keep forgetting it’s easier to smile than frown.
I work hard, much harder than the smilers do,
and where it gets me in the end is exactly where their sloth gets them.
No one approach works across the board.

Soft morning light falls
through dusty cream blinds
upon black cat sleeping
on cushioned window perch.

Twenty minutes into
her nap, she stirs,
raises her head, stares at me.

If she is to be believed,
I am responsible, somehow,
for waking her.  That’s how
I read the glare — green coals

glowing deep within
her silhouette.  It must have been the tapping
of my hands on the keys, or

how I observed her instead of pretending
not to notice her.  Did my eyes somehow
stir her fur from across the room, disrupting
sleep and purr?

She’s up now, headed for the kitchen.
Whatever woke her, her ever-empty gut
kept her up — and based on the cry

from the other room, her staying up
is going to be my fault if I don’t move
right now.  I’m apparently just a means to her end.
Maybe she woke first and simply wanted food

until I stared back.

did you, walls and all,
grow up here on your own?
none of you castles look built.
you seem more carved, or 
cultivated. natural part of the world.

maybe that’s a tell that we,
also, were grown to be 
the colonizers of war homes,
the warriors who make fortifications
live, symbiotes within the halls.

maybe this species is made,
irresistibly, to kill. 

I am not old
but I am older
It counts a bit 
(or it should)

I have been and done a thing
or two
you have either never been
done wrong or
have not yet been or done

I have some answers and
have decided to live within
some unanswered questions

I have some regrets and some success
(and some success I regret)

I am sometimes not at my best anymore
but in some things I am still
a good goddamn sight better
than other people are

all this to say
your ignoring me
and patronizing me
and laughing at me
and being cavalier with me

leads me to decide that your professed respect
for me
is of no value

Your application of
the elder statesman label to me
is your idea of a second childhood’s pacifier

I can tell you see a cartoon
and not a person
when you look at me

Please therefore remember this
for a time coming soon
You’ll need it
but then again
you will probably write it again yourself
and call it an original

Some people are changing
the world,
dropping their pens
to make a fist.

Some people are
writing poems to change the world,
poems
built around a fist.

Uncontained
in this fat block of words
is anything as wholesome
as a soul-solid righteous
punch in the jaw:

oh, I was clenching my fist
as I wrote it,
I could see that target jaw,
just one of so many…
but then I saw

that while I too have a fist and a pen
it’s an aimless fist
and an empty pen.

I wanted to punch this poem
for being
unconvicted!
For draining my pen
and opening my hand.  I told myself
coward,
has been…

but you know, it’s morning
and the warriors will be home soon.
Maybe this is exactly
what they will want
when they get here.

There are facts which are not known to be facts
except by some deep apprehension of their truth
long before they become true —

as in, for instance, there’s no evidence yet
for the truth of my conviction that I shall never
return to Venice, or that how it vanished, slowly,

as I stared back at it from the stern of the motoscafi 
that took me to the airport for the trip home
will be my permanent last memory of the city.

It’s not a fact yet that I will never see Venice again.
But I know it to be true as solidly as I know anything.
It’s as true as the scar in my foot from the time I stepped

on broken Murano glass.  As true as
the smell of the crematorium on San Michele.  As true
as the Albanian refugees begging wordlessly on bridges. 

Someday you will be able to say that I visited Venice just once in my life,
that it left a scar upon me I can feel whenever I walk.  Every step
I’ve taken since I left has carried me further away from Venice. 

This won’t be a fact for years yet, only blooming fully as such
on the day I die. But I know a fact when I conceal one,
and daily I do my best to conceal this,

a thing I know to be unalterably true. 

A mirror for a battle map.
A diary page for orders.

WAR upon
WAR among
the gang of love
the gang of snoot
the gang of overburden
the gang of falling. 

All in all a free for all,
all in all hands on hilts and handles.  
All inside within
and contained.

How much
expected blood is lacking —
nowhere to run,
no gutter showing
but a gutter is there
and it is full,
making 
drowning
equivalent to
draining.