This decade
you adore?
I wasn’t around for it.

I was born in time to see it,
was here for all ten of its years,
but I missed it completely.

Where I was, 
we were living 
differently.  

We didn’t have
the luxury of it.
Didn’t know

the slang of it.
Didn’t wear
the style of it.

Whatever
you loved of it
washed right past us

while we were staying
up late with 
occupying forces

and famines.
We made do,
got by.

We were not
part of
the fabulousness.

So I don’t know
your markers,
your symbols,

your retro chic.
When you say
what I’m wearing

is some geeked out
cool, ghetto
fabulous, hipster

sacred — well,
this is what I brought 
with me to this place.  

I had no idea
that this was
worthy of note;

it’s just some
of the little I saved.
So be it, then.  Well and good.

But I cannot help
but think that 
had you been present 

in my decade
instead of yours,
these words you use

to explain old clothes
would not be part
of your vocabulary now.

Ending now
a pursuit of knowledge
I once demanded,
I light up with the smile
of an idea: maybe
I know enough
to carry me forward
from here. Perhaps
there’s no need to sample
further, perhaps there’s no 
reason to inspect and codify
each speck and moment.
There are so many birds
and songs in the world,
so many people to know
that perhaps I should stop
and assume I’ve had enough
of them all, that any new experience
can be understood through applying
what I already know.  
This is perfect: I’ve grown tired
of unrelenting.  

Exhausted,
I lay me down on a cool bed
in this well ordered place,
and cease dreaming, comfortable
at last.

Don’t you fear
that the battle we’re waging
is lost already?  
Already the sky’s red
with our cities burning,
with tearing rockets unstitching the night.  
Already the sea is lost
and the earth is awash
in spilled oil and blood;
already we’ve all lost good sense,
can’t explain why we’re still fighting,
other than to say we must
if only to keep
from slaying ourselves
in despair.  

And yet we stand
armed and ready,
armed to the teeth
on behalf of what will not return;

and yet we are here,
frontline desperate,
rear guard
desperate,
hands slippery,
feet horned and howling,
guts open to the fire.  

Here we are.  We still
fight, fall in love, fight,
bear children, fight, fight,
sling our fists balled up against
the incoming, sing, fight,
keep a bulletproof coat of colors
on the back door for going out,
wear it out to fight, say
we look good, look like warriors,
the cause is lost but now we’re found
in the war, the war, we’re here
for the war, we’re here,
here in certain harm’s way,
here, regardless of the urge
to give up, raising children 
not to give up even though
the war’s lost
and we have nowhere
now to be.  

this drink’s
cold enough
for the thirst I have now

but in an hour?
will it be cold enough
for the thirst I know will grow
the more I drink?

it’s like my hunger
that gets quiet on crackers
now 
but will holler like a stevedore
in the night
awakening me
demanding entire cows — 

the more easily I’m satisfied now
the less satisfiable
I’ll be
later

Explosions outside —
Fourth of July weekend
but that’s nothing new,
there’s always a big bang
at least once a night — the signal
of a new universe,
perhaps?  Makes sense —
who’s not looking for a new one
these days?   I know that after
each sharp report
I wait in vain for a fresh planet
to soar past my window, and
blowing something up
to get one seems
more and more attractive. 

The dangerous people
stare out of doorways
at the safe people

on the streets
the safe people
call their own.

In some streets
they switch places. That’s how
we keep everything running:

call it a safety valve. Call it
the social order.  The dangerous ones
get to be the source of safety

in their own neighborhoods.
The safe ones get
everything else.

Sometimes
a safe one will love
a dangerous one.  They

keep this to themselves;
it softens things.  It makes
the streets sodden

and uncomfortable.  That’s
how we re-allocate the streets
from time to time: when a street

gets too sodden, it changes hands.
Another is chosen
to replace it, everything goes back

to normal, with the dangerous ones
in their doorways staring out
at the safe ones

until
someone in love with the Other
cracks it and the flooding starts.

There’s a nice small house
unfinished on the beach. There’s this

one last board to be held in place,
one last half driven nail.

There’s this hammer
on the shore, and a wave

coming in — in fact, there are
a lot of waves. Big strong

waves.  The wave
won’t pick up the hammer,

but you keep trying, though.
You keep putting the hammer

into the waves expecting one of them
to drive that nail for you.  

I say, you could just turn around
next time you’re holding the hammer

and finish this up,
drive that nail, you know.

Yes, you say,
but how will the world ever learn

to bend to my will if I do 
everything myself?  This is

the right thing to do, you’ll see,
and you go back to 

trying to float a hammer on the ocean
while your little house leans into the sand

behind you.  I walk away before
the tide starts to come in.

Big mistake,
entering the store late
and walking around not certain
of what I want —

I pick up the store detective
almost at once, hovering
one aisle over, his own certainty
about my larcenous desires
a tangible fragrance.

I lead him on.  Lean into
racks of shirts and swivel
my head around.  Duck down
where he can’t see me
and preserve the elements of proof —

dude, I used to do that job.
Not here, but elsewhere, and damn well.
I know you’re cursing yourself; been there,
done that.

I’ll take pity on you tonight.
Catch your eye, smile, shrug.
You look so angry! Isn’t it good
to know I’m not stealing anything?
Isn’t it good to be wrong about

another human being
who is not living up
to your worst expectations?
Are we both this far gone
that this is our Saturday night?

Here’s to you,
wake and bakers,
joint over coffee suckers,
hiders of whiskey
in “World’s Greatest Dad” mugs;

hail, hail,
pills at daybreak takers,
Marley rocking pajama stoners;

here’s a toast to you carpool dodgers
passing the buck in favor of lifting
the mood, here’s to your health
and the health of the children
you didn’t drive to soccer practice
on a Saturday morning
because the clouds were so…
cloudy;

raise a glass to you, 
shower tomorrow people,
maybe tomorrow people,
call it a day before 9:00 AM people;

here’s to you.

May you live long,
the liquor firing a thunderstorm
in your gullets, your eyes
red as sunrise flashing back into the dawn;

may you dance clumsily behind the blinds
and tell yourself, again and again,
it’s just this one time
as you slip into the folds of the comforter
and fall into a stupor.  

Once you’re past the morning
the day has always tended to crumble;
may you instead open the party and close the bar
before the rest of us even know you’re wrecked,
and may the sleep you enter
be dead, and may the death
be temporary.  

May you open your eyes
upon a new life
where you can swallow the morning straight
and never have to answer for these lost days.

May you find yourself drunk at last
on nothing but the good light
of the good day you believed, always,
would someday come
without having to coax it into being.

Reaching into my clay
and gripping.
What I’ve seized upon forms
a ball, then a tube ridged
from where my fingers have dug in,
then it squirts away into nothing
because I’m strong enough,

but that leaves me with
an empty hand
and nothing with which
to work.

I wanted to make a bowl,
something to drink from;

the trick, I guess, is knowing how
to hold on enough
to shape the desired form
but not so tightly
that it disappears
from the effort.

It’s a trick
I’ve never learned.
I won’t learn it perfectly,
ever.  Too attached
to being right to know
better, even when I can
put knowing better
into words.

When you’re forever gripping your own clay
so tightly that you come up
with nothing but dregs on you palms, though,
yet claim that the air before you is now
a masterpiece,

I begin to see how to proceed,
and I let go…because

while there’s nothing I can make of myself
you’ll be unable to break,
nothing you’ll make of yourself
will actually hold the water
each of us needs to survive.

I start
by drawing a line around
the things I will address.

I stare a long time
into the nest of concerns
I’ve created.

When one leaps across the line
into what I’ve forbidden myself to consider,
I know what I must do,

and there I am in mid-air
dreading the landing
and hoping I will be brave enough

to follow it wherever it leads me.
It may be a slog through
filths and scums.  It may be

an orgy with undesirables.
It may be a red road of killing
and stench of fresh flesh torn open.

It may be a quiet road
with a fence and a family 
and a good dog at the end,

with a deadening blanket to lay upon
the very desire to be there at all.
It may simply kill me at first step,

candle me in a breath,
filet me at once.  Whatever it delivers
I shall accept, though not without

a longing look
back across the line
to the place I thought I should be

and a baleful glance ahead
at what I followed
to the place I actually belonged.

When fed by darkness,
seek the tiny lights within it;

when fed by light,
seek the small darkness therein.

No one lives on one or the other
alone, at least not well:

muscles are built from striation
and stress; 

lungs must learn to breathe
both hard and softly.

The jewels in this living
that is sober as often as it is drunk

are always there to be found
as long as you know how to look

no matter the sorrow or the ecstasy
that can blind you to them.  

When Cat killed Mouse
we rejoiced and were appalled:

rejoiced at old Cat
and his obvious pride,

his swatting at Mouse
after the fact, that look on his face

that said, “You never expected
this of me, didja?”

Appalled at the mere presence
of Mouse, his laid out body

a testament to just how much
we’d learned not to expect,

how easily we’d forgotten how old
and full of holes this house is,

how obvious it was that it was not proof
against the normal incursions —

and more appalled than that, perhaps,
at the idea that old Cat (who mostly

sleeps and eats and begs for scraps
and steals those scraps then sleeps again)

is so much more on the ball than we
at what goes on around here.