For the past forty-five minutes
you’ve been hearing
a birdsong.

That listening has been
like rolling silk
across your fingers.

You wouldn’t know that bird
if it flew up to bite you,
though.

Two of them show up
at the window feeder.
Which one’s been singing,

or were they both
going at it and you never knew
there were two?

You grew up with a woman
who knew individual birds
by song, face and feather.

She would not have been confused
by any of this.  She would have told you
who sang what, would have shaken her head

at how obvious it was,
at how you couldn’t be bothered
to learn something as simple

as your neighbors’ names.
She lived one street
over, and she was OK.

The morning’s finally
sinking into daylight and the bird’s
farther away than when you woke.

Maybe tomorrow
you’ll sit outside and call to them,
your voice nothing like rolling silk,

but it’s the effort
that counts,
at least at first.

Spring night: the music’s
a far cry from frogs. Wait, though;
it’s not that far off.
In fact, it’s the same:
“Here we are. And you?”

Sprung from that croaking,
all manner of beats and rhymes.
All manner of noise
and always the same:
“Here we are.  And you?”

Spring nights, musicians
do their best frog-talk for us,
tell the tales we need,
always the same line:
“Here we are. And you?”

 — w / thanks to Amy Weaver

Come fuck me till I become
elemental, tabled, bedded,
unstable, rare, noble, 
and inert after as I rest.

Come fuck me till I become
Greek pottery,
amphora so well-curved
my age means nothing.

Come fuck me till I become
not human,  I don’t want that;
I’ve been that and I need other,
I need the old and the unimagined instead, so

come fuck me till I become
the newest element to be revealed,
the old bottle holding new wine.
Fuck me from science to art and back. 

smell that love rising,
a plant coming up from the dirty dirt
breaking into sun and struggle.

it’s the medium of explosion,
the go too far,
the split a foundation,
the crack a fundamental.

it’s a whip wrench cracking
and then turning a nut
on the juggernaut wheel.

it’s a crack of narwhal horn handle
on the parasol raised
for a forgotten brilliant day.

when a god finally exists
that god is going to want this
for sacred groving.
that god is going
to go full-on backslide ape for spring fever.  
that god is going
to want love in a box for burning
on the sterling light altar
of get around.

that god will get someone to start something
and the something is going to get bigger
and the dirty dirt is going to get paved and 
struggle’s going to be big, bigger than last year.

No
resurrection! Dead,
stay dead!  Don’t the living
do enough for you
already — follow your rules,
teach your stories,
bury and burn you good
when you’re allegedly done —
no!

No
resurrection — we don’t need you,
dead ones.  
We had enough of you
the first time, you’re dead,
and life’s truly for the living.  It’s
a glow, a ripe scent, a bright flow.
Our grief blinds us to it but
it is there — it is there, and it’s not
yours.

No to the resurrection!  

If you’re so certain
of your need to stay drunk on life
that you won’t accept death,
at least do us the favor
of starting over as something else;
don’t simply come back.  We don’t need you.
You’re becoming a bit of a bore
and it’s not too much a stretch
to say you ought to be ashamed —

someone new
could have breathed that air.

early news,
lead story:
there’s been a murder
in town.

pretty woman says
these words:

carrion,
underground dance club — 

oh,

Carrion

is the suspect’s name,
not the victim’s? it’s not a description
of the aftermath?

somehow disappointed —
wanted the story to say
something about names and  
destiny,  something hard:

an underground dance club
a stabbed dead body 
a knife found
in a killer’s possession
and carrion, carrion everywhere

somehow disappointed —

where is this underground dance club?
i have a right to know 
if it’s nearby. 
a right to know
how I’ve been missing out.
i have a knife in my possession
but it didn’t kill anyone and
i would gladly trade it for a cowbell
and go dancing after hours
among the dead —

somehow disappointed — 

shit,
i wanted the news to be a poem
and instead it’s just the news.
dead meat in the dirt
outside the club.  
someone under
arrest. nothing else to say
about that.  i’m no poet,
not this early.

the perfect dive barroom
is the one without conversation
I don’t initiate

except when it gets me
beer, beer nuts, chips
or another beer

it’s not the kind of social place
I go to get social
I’m not looking to get picked up

unless that by chance happens
and frankly
it’s not gonna happen here

in the perfect dive barroom
in my hometown
where all my relatives drank 

if I see one of them here
I’ll freak out a little cause
they’re mostly all dead

tonight I’m apparently safe
from angels or scolders
I didn’t bring with me

tonight I’m apparently safe
in the dive bar, the submarine bar,
the bell helmet bar, SCUBA bar

drunk
deep underwater
and flooded with cold 

A party’s breaking up nearby,
you can tell by the cadence of the voices; 
people talking on the steps,
one group headed for the car,
the others dying to go in and go to sleep.

I’m here listening
from my nightly awake
with the nightly heartburn,
the nightly insomnia,
the nightly no soild sleep.

I don’t want to talk to my heartburn,
coax it halfheartedly to stay
in order to get it to see how badly it wants to leave
because it won’t leave, who are we kidding?
It lives to rouse me from sleep.

I don’t want to talk to insomnia,
we don’t speak the same language,
doesn’t understand why it’s unwelcome
and I get nowhere when I explain —
by nature and nurture, it has no desire to sleep.

I wish I knew my neighbors well enough
to go to their parties, to drink enough while I’m there
to make the passing out once I’m home
at least understandable, if not socially acceptable.
If I were socially acceptable, I maybe could sleep.

Half a century ago,
a fugitive miracle
of shared pleasure
brought me here.

Two strangers joined briefly in joy,
then stayed a long time together in guilt
or shared and dreaded sense of duty to have me,
though they did not want me.

Brought up to be
a good deal more ignored than wanted,
forcing myself (through a mix of overreach
and misadventure) into as many faces as I could,

I have lived a hot life of sweat and discomfort
trying to run from the accident of my birth
that they made me feel, one way or another,
each moment of each day.

Here I am, half a century later,
asking questions I was born with
with only slight changes
to accommodate the changing times:

If I am formed, how is it that
I should I not be formally acknowledged?
If I am perpetually streaming live
is that not enough to say that I by definition flow?

No matter how I affirm for myself that I matter,
I still flatter myself that one day others will agree.
That day I will try to forget
that the two who made me

never chose to see me
as little more than the regretted pleasure
that ended up meaning nothing at all
and that would not fade away.

you have the coolest winged thumbs I’ve ever seen  
you express your delight
at experiences, flavors, people, birds
by raising your hands high above your head 

you sit there thumbs erect and digits trembling
until the wings unfold and slowly flap
slowly they raise your entire weight
into the formerly gray and now lemony sky

I do not imagine the Romans
would have been thrilled to have you in the Coliseum 
hovering high above them affirming life 
as the blood steamed below

but then again how beloved is your optimism now
no one likes the overly enthusiastic anymore
we fear you are the rebuke to those ironic lives
we are prone to live 

in spite of that or because of that
I dig your winged thumbs proudly lifitng you
above the merely mild and affectless 
if i thought you could lift us both I’d hang onto your ankles

instead I’m jumping here in place
two thumbs up and jumping in place
hoping to sprout wings like yours
practicing like mad for take off

Listening to Jaco a long time
Long time is how he played
stretching time in between notes
Long Time
And all the notes took up the same space
at the same time!

How he did it — was Crzy, was Md
how some of us 
have to be
and that’s how he ended
drunk a little
and Crzy Md enough
to get himself killed

Listening to Jaco is easier
when I am not Crzy
When I am not Md
it is easier to let Jaco be it for me
But the times when I most understand
how to hang on Jaco
and limber growl lines and bark notes that yell Showtime
and skein along on the lines
and oh the notes all at the same space
so I bump into myself in the moment

those times I get why I am so loving
of the idea of a death in a nightclub
so none call it what it was

if I never get to the streets
I can still be an artist can’t I
Crzy and Md are all that it takes
then time will stretch and notes will hang
the skeins will be obvious
in the daze is the loss of boundary
required here listening to Jaco
chasing Jaco
into the unyielding night

In the warrior
a dislike of war,
a disdain for the love of killing,
a disgust with the killer self.

Yet, also,
a skill at all the art of death,
a willingness to be Death
if Death is who is needed.

I knew a poet once
who disdained the art, who disliked rhyme
but was good at both, too good in fact
not to be famous in spite of herself.

Once, the poet
met the warrior
and they sat and talked
a long time

of comparison and metaphor
and sniper’s range and lyric’s force.
They spoke of throw weight and arc
and how slippery a battlefield can be

after a war has passed, of how slippery
the world is to a poet
who’s described it often enough
in stretched and violent ways.

They make me uneasy, sitting there
with hands full of liquor, heads tipped in close,
seeming to agree on everything.
I like my poets gentler, my warriors more taciturn.

I like to see them not love each other
as much as these two seem to love.
I like my world to have a place for each,
and for that place to be somewhere

out of earshot, sight, and reach.