The places 
that call most to me
I imagine as oceanographic treasures:

Moscow, undersea mountain,
pressed by the weight and cold
of the dim abyss;

Venice,  tangled in kelp
at the surface, its pieces joined
with sodden ribbons;

London, barnacled anchor,
its crust hiding
secrets, history, and good lies;

New York, that great sponge,
porous, soaking in the flowthrough
from all the world’s currents; 

Tikal, Angkor Wat,
Tiahuanaco, Rapa Nui; out there
in the misunderstood margins,

waiting for the time to be ripe
so they can rise and erase 
“Here Be Monsters” from the old charts.

Worcester, at first, didn’t seem like much to this old salt.
Arid, stoic, sticking up in the inland air.
At first glance, not even a bit of interesting flotsam.

It’s instead like visiting
a landlubber older brother
who pushes me roughly into the big chair

when I come through the door from a journey,
teaches me rudely but not without care
how quickly I can lose my sea-legs

once I sit for a while. “This is what it feels like
to be home,” he says. And it is that.  
A good place from which to watch the sea. Home.

For the remainder
of this well-lit day 
the night-light in a little girl’s room
will be whispering:
soon will come our time.

Black tire marks on the streets
will settle in, bake to gray,
resting assured that come the night
they’ll be invisible — no evidence
of near-disaster to be seen.

The child who was almost taken
by the Crazy will be safe inside her head
from moment to moment. She’ll almost forget
what happened, how the Crazy skidded up
to the sidewalk and then left as swiftly

when she began to scream.
Tonight in her pastel room
the nightlight will do its ambiguous work
of dispelling some shadow and amplifying
the rest, and she will not sleep.

As for the Crazy, dark and light
are of no matter to one who sees
the rainbow in his drink,
the wet red sickle beside his plate,
her hair in his knotted hand.

Light and dark are at play
for him, and he goes through the dark
to find sick light which leads him back again
to insomnia and the thought of the child
and her fair hair and face

just before she screamed,
just before he turned away
and did not do what he’d planned.
No matter; day follows night follows day.
It will happen — another girl, another way.

A patron saint of good circumstance
and found money
slipped off the earth into a ravine 
and was lost.

A patron saint of lost causes
went missing. 

A patron saint of pastry chefs,
coated in flour, stopped breathing.

Are you hungry? Are you broke?
Are you forever lamenting your luck?
A patron saint of the pure voice
pushed his earplugs deep into his head
the minute you started complaining.

God doesn’t love you.
God doesn’t see you, in fact.
God reserves holy oversight
for the largest:  play of planets
and stars, winds and climate
and sustainability.  You’re the mote
carried through the grand scale.

All right then:

are you ready now
to save yourself?  Isn’t this
bracing —

the cold 
we find ourselves out in
and how we have no choice
but to stay awake?

green bell pepper smell 
all through the house
and not a pepper to be found here

maybe my grandmother’s come
and is ready to roast them
on the plates of her old gas stove

her gone these ten years
and the stove’s been ripped out
and junked almost as long

but the house smells like bell peppers
turning black on the iron plates
almost ready to be peeled

my fingers are itching
to set to work under her cataract eyes
I see them not seeing me

it’s been a while
she always knew what I was doing
I don’t know what I’m doing

smelling bell peppers that aren’t here
peeling bell peppers that aren’t here
pleasing my grandmother who’s not here

Mistaken for a bird at the window. Caused a blood chill.
Appeared to the children from the closet.

Was associated with the scent of lilacs in December.
Opened a window; said opening was dismissed as a forgotten action.

Married the sister of the local midwife when she was asleep.
Grew into the lungs of a goat and bleated along with Miles Davis played through headphones in the dark morning.

Invited to leave, and stayed,
stayed past my welcome time and wilted the flowers in the front room.

Scribbled a song in the folds of the husband’s frontal lobe
that rang in his workshop when he’d quit for the day:

I am mechanical,
you are flesh.
I am eternal,
you are fresh.
I am the retort,
you are the calm,
you are the sermon
rationalizing harm.

Went to the kitchen and left the cupboards open for the rats.  
Became a deity to rats and whispering centipedes.

Called a ghost and was exorcised.
Went on vacation in Buffalo and returned in two weeks.

Called a demon and was cast.
Went on vacation in the china closet, cracking the antique cordial glasses.

Called a delusion and was medicated.
Lived with that pretending to be dull brass banging.

When they moved away I stayed behind
but planted a postcard in their luggage that said: I win.

I won.  I won and opened windows and carried lilacs
and lay down before the rats and taught them to sing

like small trumpets in mean mean mouths
while we waited for the next intrusion.

Long-nailed hand,
good for picking;
short nailed hand,
good for fretting.

The contrast between
is good for making people
used to symmetry uneasy.
I like that.

Double pierced ear
used to be good for
bothering people, now
means nothing.

Tattoos here and there,
all work-safe, all monochrome
and small:  see related reference
under “double pierced ear.”

What bothers people more maybe now
is my gut.  It bothers me.
It’s gonna kill me and
it gets in the way. Is it in the way

for you? How about
the gray in my beard or
head? Help me out here —
people call me now and then

to say we ought to get together
and talk. What gets in the way
that we never do?  Something
about me seems to…kill.

I won’t
hedge on that.  Friendship comes
to me to die and that’s before
I even speak. Is it the gut,

the hair, the ink, the rings,
the fingers, the finger nails,
the smoke, the face, the eyes,
the past, the future — what?

It was never this hard before.
We came, we spoke, we did
together well.  Not now.
I have to say it’s a little piece of hell.

When the button mums —
one plant huge enough to fill the car trunk,
covered in dark orange and simmering yelllow —
go on sale for the price of the pot

we’re close, very close to winter
because it means there’s not time enough
to get them into the ground and have them thrive
and so they will bloom and then die aboveground.

And when the Brooklyn Bridge —
its towers reminiscent of towers now gone —
fills again with bodies that this time
do not flee but resist, and sit, and wait

for the lowering arm of power to gather them in
and grind them slowly through the system,
its price soars and it won’t be sold
cheaply — we’re close, very close

to spring.  

Two crowds full of tiny faces seen from above
may mean different things —
one heralds an end, and one may herald
a beginning, but who will deny that each is beautiful?

You’re 
the best .50 caliber
megaphone ever to bark
a slogan

You’re the most fun
anyone ever had
at a Molotov cocktail party

You’ve forgotten more
about posterboard
than most will ever know

You adore Sisyphean tasks
the way a teenager
adores every orgasm

You come running for a riot
with a sharp sense of gas
and tears and when you slump
as they arrest you
it’s like the Pieta come alive

Oh you
pretty much define my cause
and straight up come correct
like a jaguar intent on the reason
you were made

If it’s wrong to love you
for the speed with which you rage
I guess I’m wrong
for the righteousness
and if it’s righteousness I’m wrong for
I’m wrong for you

for you are opinion
and reaction and knowing
and making a life out of decisions
and clearing a path
and if that’s not worth a look or two of love
then call me the blind
waiting for the blind
to lead

“they have the father wound”
says the handsome minister
speaking of gangbanging boys
not yet out of their teens

“they have the father wound”
he says again to the interviewer
“fathers take off
or are in prison”

“the father wound”
he says it so gently
candles in soft focus 
behind his graying voice

the father
seemingly not wound tight
despite this knowledge
despite the war outside his church

“the father wound”
cut so deeply
that a sense of wonder
that the minister thinks he can suture it

rises in the listener
upon hearing the phrase 
as if he did not distrust
that collar already 

as if the gangbangers
off-camera were infants
waiting to be picked up
by their fathers’ hands

and cuddled into health
as if assisting them into a dream
would be enough
as if a dream itself would be enough

Born incorrect,
unexpected,
accident of timing
and of shame.
Made his name out of spite,
out of a steel memory
and a vineyard tongue.
As the name grew
he loved everything
less and less, little
by little, until brief recall
was all that remained.  Cut
and drank and smoked into
himself.  Farther and farther
behind he fell,
a remnant of the blaze
he saw in the mirror
once.  Someone said
they loved him, but
he licked his bones
clean of the words.   
He liked alone
more than together,
silent more than aloud,
and still he talked too much
and knew he talked too much
and made insane connections
among prosaic things.  Harder
and harder for others
to bear, he longed for
a stamp that said
“Worthy” and when 
he could no longer see
a reason for it, he tramped
away and in the forest
where he once had said
“I will be…this,” he knelt and 
carved, instead, “I was never”
on his last clean artery,
and so he pitifully 
passed into that truth
and was thus proven 
completely correct.

Anywhere you go,
there’s a war.
Military presence
or no,
a war;
craters and
pus and rot or
sweet green fields,
a war;
occupation or 
liberation, ideology
or theology,
a war.  

All you need
for a war to exist
is someone
accepting the existence
of collateral damage —

and
dulling eyes
that no longer wonder
what to call
what just happened.

If you can,
let words
small you.  Let
a derangement of our language
bring you to folding
in.  Let wings
furl, legs curl,
the fetal charm
take hold.  If you can,
be born in this
again —

not as if you were in thrall
to that new God
made in books,
but free within loose embrace
of an older One
who dwells
between possibility
and its enactment,

that place where all
is always ready to be born
and never comes into
a defined life.

Born small and sweet,
turned bad apple
at maturity
after being fed

daily rage,
a gas that left me slimy
upon evaporation;
shame,
a ferilizer too strong for any soil;
guilt, 
that infected water.

I might have been a good fruit
in a different climate.
I might have been
nutritious.  Now,
I’m a flavoring, a bitter
bit to puzzle on: did that whisper
of ugly
add or detract from the otherwise
good meal?

Don’t think I deserved this,
but it’s not for me to say.
Perhaps I did.  
Perhaps I was born in the right orchard.
Perhaps I was meant to sicken another.

All I know is all I’ve ever known:
how I grew, how I turned,
how I might have otherwise grown.