He began by admitting
its appeal, admitting
that the mere whiff of it
would so often shank
his more outlandish
fantasies,
and that he was kind of
in love
with the sight
of all that green blood.

He invited in
and gave it a bath
in salt water.  Dumped
a whole shaker into
a pan and slipped it in.

The next time
he imagined a rogue elephant
trampling his nemesis,
he let it in to the room,
set it up
on a little stand, a lap desk
perhaps, and listened
as it advised him
how to really get over
on all that bother.

He’d plod by the closet
where he kept 
the ritual vestments
and resolved to hit up Goodwill
for some worn Dickies
and green workshirts
before the next service.

It took a little while, 
but he got a real job.
Gave up the fire harvesting
and the raising of gryphons
for their talon dust.
Started
punching in and measuring time
in clicks and increments,
rather than in depth and flow.

Once he was stable,
he’d get home from work every day
and coo all night to the little one.
C’mere, my baby, my spreadsheet,
my Reddenbacher bag, he’d say.
C’mere and flue me, grue me, do me,
backbend screw me till I don’t want
the weird ever again.

You think: hey, I’d never be happy like that.
If you say that to him, now, he’ll say:

don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.
Try it first and then knock it: I recommend that.
It’ll open up like a door
to another door, exactly the same
as the previous one.  
I haven’t gone through that one yet,
but I anticipate pretty much
the same thing will happen,
and you wouldn’t think so,
but it’s kind of a relief.
I’m kind of in love with it. 

I am climbing to enter the forbidden cave,
to see the paintings, the ochre, the sienna.

I see my mixture of fear and ecstasy
on the rocks before me.

Later, I think of the painters,
how they’d chosen colors and layered pigments,
chewed stems of thistle to make their brushes.  

Did they eat wild melon, sip ice water
when they were done —

as I do,
now that I am done with wrangling
the wild beasts of my own art?

Omnipotence
reveals itself
in shadow.

Anything
could be there.
Is there.

I want to diminish
what power I’ve lent to it,
so I light a fire.

Losing nearly everything
to the flame —
wondering, now,

who or what that was
in the dark; where
it has gone; why

I can’t see myself
in the darkened, savaged mirror
I save from the ruins. 

Startling me awake,
the starling striking
the front room window.

I go out to see the body
but he’s alive, if dazed.
Bend over to pick him up

and he’s gone, flying away
straight, landing in the neighbor’s
lilacs.   Miracle, resurrection —

what must he have thought
of the figure
bending over him?  I would speculate

but then, I’d have to check myself —
who knows what theology starlings
have created already to explain us?

And what self-important god
would want to be the reason for
a crisis of faith? 

Ready now
for red or gray dawn,
warm or cold day,
rain or sun, dark or
lit night.

I’m holding my face
forward.  What’s behind
stays behind — recalled
but unwatched.  I’ve seen
enough of it.

Fly by me, all you
winged things; crawl by,
all manner of snakes and
creatures; swim by, eels
and carp and bottom feeders.

The path behind me’s
closed, and just ahead
this one’s impenetrable.
I will be scarred, and scratched,
and die up there in the thickets.

That’s the glory of the passage —
that it is forged and cut
by those who know it leads
to an ending and an unknowable home.
Homeward bound: tied tight

to the need to reach it,
I will step out not looking
to either side.  Not seeing,
in fact.  Not hearing or speaking.
All I’ll be doing is walking home.

Stack your hardest imaginings
into a forest.  Let go of the illusion
that they may become something
you intend.  They’ll grow and change
until you will not know them
as your own.  You’ll be lost in them.

Stack your electronics into a wall.
Stand behind it.  Live
behind it.  Here’s the coal to run it,
hear it firing its synapses into
your own.  Long arcs
carry half-formed dreams
through the smoking air.
You toss fuel into the blaze.

Stack your clothes neatly
on the bed.  Don’t ever put them
away.  Leave them in piles
where you can see them because
the closets and drawers are so full
they may as well be empty, you don’t
go there much.  Naked’s a wardrobe
too, though not one you’ll recognize.

Stack yourself on top
of others into an orgy.  You’ll 
shuffle often enough to stay
comfortable and fulfilled
until you catch yourself kissing
your own arm, thinking it belongs
to another.  You’ll say, did I not do this
to avoid this happening?

Stack, stack, stack.
Pile up what you have.
See how high you build,
no mind to stability.  This is
so America, so World,
so much a Global heap,
see words disappearing
in there, words like
solitude, fringe of sea pearls,
oysters, eagles, vision quest,
unencumbered.  You mute
in it. 

Made clear:
you see a box with a check mark in it
on my face
whenever you look at me.

I run my hand
over my forehead —
it feels as it always does.
When did I get this?

I don’t see it, myself,
when I look in the mirror.
Perhaps I’m
selectively blind?

Or perhaps the check box
is so large I can’t feel it
because all of me is inside?
That may be.

Maybe I made the check
in the box with every word
and deed, and all you’re doing
is reading it.  Or perhaps

there’s no box on me at all
and the image is burned
into your eyes and brain
so that when you look at anything

you see it and judge accordingly?
It’s not hard to want to believe that.
It certainly would take the pressure off of me
to believe that,

which is why I’m doubly pressured
to scrub myself as hard as I can
until I bleed before I go out
into the world,

and why I am still uncertain,
and cowardly. I may not see it,
but I can feel that I’ve turned myself
into a scab just for you. 

He started young and early on he’d sold a few
to postcard shoppers or doctors
decorating their offices;
those impressed by neatness
and purity rendered without soul.

He kept painting right up
to the beginning of the war.
Small works — church walls,
ruins, architecture, cheap furniture,
humble homes and shops and such.

One curious fact: all those houses,
all those chimneys, and only now and then
a puff of smoke visible
in any scene, as if he was saving
his best renderings of it for his masterpiece.

Sometimes, the question’s raised:
would he, would the world have been different
had he had more talent or been more
validated as a genius or a true artist?  It doesn’t matter
if there’s an answer to that.  He painted

and failed at it,
then died in the dark
with critical bombs falling around him,
in the way that all monsters die;
most artists die that way as well.

We gawk at his work still.  We seek its provenance
and authenticity, preserve and hawk
its curious value, tell ourselves stories
about his lack of merit, how much a rankless
amateur he was — and yet, the works still sell.

This egg hates the color blue, 
this one smells of television innards.  
This one honors all equally,
this one is resolutely green.
This one is a rant of disabling fervor… 

What to make of this?
They say if you want an omelette,
then you must break eggs;
I must want an omelette. 

I’m so proud of the eggs I’ve broken so far!
The egg full of the love of music, that enjoys the guitar;
the egg that can’t love as well as it wants, that yearns for more;
the egg that falls on ice skates, the egg that kneels to pray;
the egg dumbfounded before the coast of Maine;
the egg on the floor that I will have to clean up;
the egg that proved to be fertilized, which I’m mourning now.

All of it goes
into the big blue chipped ceramic bowl
that’s my hand me down mama’s boy
only relic.  Big soup of yellow
and clear bits and spheres.  
Sticky stringy,
but everything’s there…
now, if I only had herbs, fine cheeses,
a stove, a pan, fire, utensils,
a plate, silverware, 
napkins, and an appetite,
I’d be ready to begin.

I’m a big blue messy bowl
and I’m cracked through.  I can feel
me leaking.  All those broken eggs
all over the last clean surface in the house,
and not a stove in sight,

but I still want my omelette,
I still want to make something
of all these shattered embryos
before I break from the frenzied beating,
before they spill, and spoil, and are lost.

Triangulating
among two cities
and a desert:  where I have lived,
where I want to live.

The city by the sea;
the city in the central hills;
the desert far away
which I cannot deny still pulls.

I stay where I am,
trisected.  Here is where
I make my stand: not 
whole but contained,

feeling the parts straining
under the tug of all my possible
homes.  I won’t ever really belong
anywhere, I think.

They tell you it’s good
to put down roots, but
some roots work best ungrounded,
constantly sensing what’s on

the wind.  That’s me, I guess:
the air plant.  The one that grows
even with a tenuous hold on place.
The one that got away.

They’re killing poets in Bahrain,
cutting out their tongues in Yemen.
Things like that are always happening.

It’s not the first time it’s happened,
won’t be the last.  It seems a habit
in some places,

while here in the good old USA,
we are ignored, on occasion vilified —
or just as often, commodified.

Those dead remain poets after their deaths.
When we suffer what we suffer here,
can we say the same?

Box full of red paper
in a pile in the spare room.
It held a good gift once
and now it’s a paper box holding

red paper and nothing else.
Maybe it’s waiting for a new gift.
Maybe it remembers when it held
a promise of joy.

I put the box full of red paper out on the floor
and let the ferret attack it, climbing in and out,
shredding the paper,
delighting in the mild destruction.  

After I return her to her cage
to sleep and twitch in her dreams, 
I do not think I am imagining
that I can see the box still quivering.

an older man bought a mustang, a horse,
hoping it might bring him
a recalled wildness.  he owned fine
tack, rode well, but one day fell off, gladly
breaking himself.  did not ride again
but kept the horse and the tack.
did not regret his wheelchair
much. sat and spoke softly to the horse
through the fence of the paddock.
stroked the saddle and ran the bridle
through his hands when no one was looking,
was always smiling.

another older man
bought a mustang, a car.
he sought the spirit of
the high school backseat
he never had.  looked
like a fool driving it carefully
between the lines. died
with no one to leave it to.
it was sold to a child
who drove it dumbly thinking
he was all grown up now.

the mustang: the horse,
the car, the symbol. sexy
as fast can be.  potent
as only that which can be
controlled with some effort
can appear. its name
is an artifact.  its chromed
profile on a medallion
is an artifact as is the car
upon which the medallion
appears, as are

its riders, its drivers
who bear its power
like a badge
until they become the badge
themselves. 

Lonely
is bootless
in late spring snow.

Happy
is bootless on asphalt
in highest August. 

Chagrinned:
where are the boots
I left here?

Angry:
bootless but charging
the armed line leveling
their weapons. 

Sad is bootless
on a city street, guarding
against the heavy tread
of blindly walking hordes. 

Bootless
is human.  Bootless
is how we begin, how
we end 

awed by the universe:
falling down bootless
under the stars in any season,
careless of mood.