Apparently,
I exploded
overnight.
My hands cling to
opposite walls
of the bedroom.
My eyes are so far apart,
everything’s in focus
at once on the back screen
of my far-flung brain
which I think is in
a neighbor’s kitchen.
My torso’s still
inert in my bed, though.
I’m afraid to try
my legs on the floor
when I can’t see or feel them —
they may be elsewhere
in the house or in
an adjacent yard,
out of range for the moment.
Strangely I feel no pain
and can’t recall a thing
of how this happened — 
last I knew I was sleeping
to music — qawaali or flamenco
or a Brooklyn based band
with delicate senses
cased in Marshall stacks —
I don’t know, some random mix
sent by stream-gods who
just put it on shuffle and left
for new pastures.
I’m coming awake now
parsing my luck,
trying to understand
how I’ve become at once piecemeal
and sanely whole
in a land that just wants
clean streets and no parts
strewn about 
to make the citizens uneasy
in their current orientation. 

You can find it
on album covers, gang-scare
TV shows, and woven into the pattern
of rugs from Central Asia.

It hovers in flocks, always,
over the heads
of media-blast images
of happy revolutionaries.

Shall we say someday — perhaps today —
that it appears to be
more ubiquitous than doves,
or as holy to some

as the tongues of
Pentecostal flames?
It’s
a gun, after all;

a deadly weapon.  A simple,
easy, nearly unjammable,
swiftly reproducible
weapon.  As common,

it seems, as any
means necessary;
as useful, it seems,
as any other work of our hands.

Ahroooo…
can you deny 
the wolf in you
speaks of car chases
and torn hair in the windshield glass?
That it longs for the  flavor
of heart-meat?

Grrr…
How lively to be
the ravening horde.  
How chastened
some dogs are in their pens
by the existence of wolves,
who howl as if to say 

this is at once what you were
and might have been.  

Woof…
Don’t shrink back from it —
is there no taste for blood in you?

Lapdogs remember, why don’t you?
American dogs, why don’t you?  In deserts
and old capitals, they bark wilder than you
and you’re not even ashamed…

ahrooooooo… 

That found key
argues
for a missing lock.

There is the whole
of knowledge:
that any one thing
leads to another.

When they are
put together, 
a secret is exposed
or at the least, 
something’s learned.

Put the key
in your pocket
and shut up about
whether’s it’s junk or
treasure: you may not know
which it is for a long time,
maybe not ever.  But

if you honor
the world, you’ll
hold on to it
and keep looking
until there’s nowhere
left to look,
or you are unable to continue —

and when you’re gone,
if you go without knowing,
some heir will pick up the key

and begin,
because it argues for
a lock, and the lock argues
for a door,
and the door argues
for passage. 

Linger for hours
in swelter and sweat.
Minute to minute,
how much can I stand?
I talk to myself nonstop.
Long drives bring
the cheerleader out in me:
Another hundred, fifty,
twenty-five. Ten, five,
rest stop. Stuck to the seat,
find myself

peeled.  Pisscall,
hot dog. Then,
two hundred,
hunnert-seventy-five…

end in sight? Not in sight:
in scent.  Ocean, oil,
bed in the mix. 

Driving’s about 
tension on a rope
pulled from home.
Love that burn
on my hands from the wheel.
Love that cooling off
once I get out.
Love how I long
for it to return
once I stop.

Insisting you’re a fish
when you stand here on two legs
not
breathing water: listen,
you’re no fish
just because
you jumped into the pool and
you can swim.

In the water
you’re smooth and
shiny.  Swim long ways
under and above.  
We might see that and say
“hey, she’s a fish!” because
we abhor speaking
without comparisons
to ease the talking —

but,
you’re still not a fish.
You don’t know how
to breathe underwater

without drowning.
You can’t swim all the time
surrounded by fishhooks
and harpoons and
fish-hazards we don’t even know.
Don’t know how lovely
gills feel against
your body.  Don’t know
self-fin care.  Don’t understand
milt,
or nests scooped in the bottom.

If you come up on shore
and say,
“I’m a fish, love me
as fish, take me as fish,”

what are we supposed to do —
toss worms? put in 
a line? get you a plastic castle
to live in? No.
Most of us are gonna turn around
and say,

“that’s not a fish.
I know a fish when I see one,”

until (maybe)
you start flopping on the ground
and start drowning in dry air.

Even then, we’ll more likely
say something
about the power
of self-delusion.  Say,

“something smells
fishy here —

no, wait, that’s not it.”

This damn job.
Swear sometimes,
I got a life
like a porno —

perfunctory talk
till the tired obvious
mechanical stuff
takes over. 

Bad soundtrack too,
most of the time.
It’s not like music
as much as it is like

cheap hotel wallpaper.
(And now we’re back
to the boom-chicka wow
action.)

It’s supposed to be 
ecstatic, but
it’s only a 
simulation —

look at us all,
golems hard
at work screwing
and getting screwed.

If I’d half a brain
or a whole heart,
I’d get out and take
a new job — maybe

delivering pizzas 
or cleaning pools.
Something like that.
An honest living

without expectations.
Something clean
for my hands to do.
Something

with a future
that promises
real things.  Yes.
(Boom chicka wow.)

“Every house is a missionary. I don’t build a house without seeing the end of the present social order.” — Frank Lloyd Wright

Each stone a prayer. 
Each beam a hymn.
All the windows, all the glass
stained and unstained
framing rebel scriptures. 

The table in the foyer
holds the tabernacle.
The doors, the moveable walls
of sacristy and nave.

When footsteps
echo in the long hall upstairs,
angels imagine their wings
have unfurled.  Then,

their wings do indeed open
as the kitchen rings with 
sounds of feast.

Outside
the world’s 
functional, 
barely —
inside, 
the palm of paradise
presses the carpets into place,
smooths the tablecloths,
makes straight the way.

If the world is to fail
before it reforms,
let it come through the door
as a beggar
and be reborn
on the warm wooden floors.

“There is no diet to reduce
the weight of judgment,”
said the very wise, very glib,
very fat man.  

He folded into his girth,
enrobed and swollen,
took up an entire bench,
nodded at the condemned
who shrank down,
tried to look as small
as they felt.

As he handed down sentences
he thought of porkchops, potatoes,
port, anything at all he could consume
once he got out of here.  What happened
to the small ones he crushed here
was unimportant.  What was important

was how full he wanted to feel
as soon as possible
upon completion
of his duties.  

The fur of air
on my forearm
reminds me of caves
and forests I think
I must have known.

Is it mink, or is it
bear or bison —
perhaps cougar or
tiger?

I have to admit
that perhaps
it’s a fat domestic cat
I’m recalling,

or a poodle
asleep on the cushion
of my big couch.

It’s animal presence,
that’s all I know.  Even Fido
and Fluffy were
wild once

and maybe feeling this
is the first step
back toward ferality
for all of us.

I know this family
of miserable dolls
who walk around wondering
if you can still get into heaven
when you’ve never believed in God.

These dolls like to walk around
wondering stuff.  They go all
fishy if they’re too certain
for too long, start smelling
the place up.  They gotta question,

gotta walk. Dolls
eat too much, stink, pray
vainly (they think) for salvation,
argue about who they’re praying to,
don’t care where they kneel

as long as everyone sees them
kneeling. Do you believe, they say to 
each other.  Do you believe?
I’ll get there first, they say to each other.
They don’t even notice me

standing there, my nose turned up
at the fishy smell, at how miserable
they seem on their knees pleading
and scrapping and praying.  Do you believe,
they ask each other.  And I’m standing right there

the whole time!  
It’s hysterical, ironic, you name it.
It’s a doll festival of cluelessness.
It’s not gonna get them anywhere.
And I’m not going to tip my hand.

I become
the bully,
the bully bull.
Horns for eyes.
When I observe,
I gore.
When I approach,
I trample.

I know why
the fenced bull bellows:
because he can.  He
must.

I’m generally mostly frozen now,
beef like a
stone.  Watch
friends turn aside.
Watch my own
steaming breath.
I did not, did not
want to be inside
the animal’s hide
completely — only
to wear a bit for show.

All the world’s
an apocryphal red flag.
Picadores
assemble.  All
my intimates seem
to be toreadores.
Which of them
will do for me?

The 24-hour store
has it all,
even
a 24-hour beggar 

on the curb outside
with a cup and a plea
for my spare change 
or butts or attention.

I always give
a little something — not a lot,
for I have my own
problems and needs;

whether he needs my money
for drugs or food,
it’s not my place to judge
his desire.

I might ask someone for a dollar
or a butt on one of these coming
hard days.  I might.  No one knows 
what they’d do when pressed that hard.  

Being in a 24-hour store
this time of night reminds me
that I’ve got my own wants and needs
that drive me to such hours — 

right now, for instance, this store
is within walking distance of the house,
sells smokes, has an ATM,
and everyone knows me here — 

it’s almost Paradise, as
the in-store music is reminding me,
and I almost resemble the angel
with the flaming sword

who won’t let sinners in,
as the beggar’s eyes
are reminding me;
it’s all too almost Biblical for words,

and 4:30 AM
is the wrong time of day
not to pay attention
when things get Biblical,

so before I go in
I hand him my last buck
and my last butts.  I light one 
for him, even,

my silver Zippo
blazing higher than normal,
threatening (for a second)
to burn all four of our hard-cupped hands.

Less than fifty miles from here,
nearly all of the people I love 
are waking up too early
or going to bed in daylight
and everyone’s talking,
talking, talking…about poetry.

In the back yard the big oak
is mute, showing alternate stripes
of wet mud-dark and dry sandy-light bark
to the world — evidence
of another thunderstorm
well-weathered…

this early,
this neighborhood’s 
damn near silent,

except for this poem.