“The other night”
will be amazing
two weeks
or a month from now,

but today it’s only
a blue thread on the pillow
and an ache for more.

Marvelous time
that will not move too quickly
for fear of gently substituting
a too-eagerly desired nostalgia
for this necessary,
melancholy present, for

without today’s blues
how much less sweet
“the other night” will be
two weeks or a month
from now.

Love the West
as it’s painted.

The wind off the prairie,
the wind off the face of Crazy Horse.

The long false memory of lone wolves
under quarter-sky moons.

Movie, movie, movie.
Pulp book footing at the ford of a shallow stream.

Dirt main streets and families
stoic as props.

Something to rely on
when the spirit’s down

and that howl is a wolf
at the door.

With this small pistol
I invite you to shoot me.
You are safe from repercussions.
I will press no charges.

Shoot me in the shoulder!

Is this art?

Some ask that art be gunless,
unarmed.  Well, I am asking you
to take an arm from me
and use it to take an arm from me,
so if this is your perspective
you can console yourself
by knowing that together,
we will be making art.

This is disturbing to you?
You don’t wish to help?

Or, it does not disturb you at all
because I sound like an artist talking,
speaking figuratively?

I assure you that I’m an artist
but I will not say if I am speaking figuratively,
or rather, I leave that up to you
and your decision as to what to do
with the pistol.

I could shoot myself on stage
but then, you’d bear no part
of the performance. Or a small part only
if you felt pain or fear for me,
or for yourself as I fired.

When is pain performance?
At what point does a grimace demand applause?
These are the questions of art we face tonight.

Here is the small pistol I promised.
Perhaps you have your own to use?
Please, take mine; it’s not traceable.
I built it myself.  Learned gunsmithing
just for tonight’s show.

At what point does this become insanity,
or some form of illness? I assure you
I was sane enough to learn the new craft
with great care.  The gun will not go off
in your hand by error.  It will require
your attention to go off at all.
It is not the finished product of an insane man;
my thinking is quite well-ordered.

“Shoot me” is also not my crazy thought
but a calm invitation, a willingness to take pain
for your educational and entertainment needs.
This is compassion and sacrifice.
How am I insane?

You may stand very close, if you wish,
if it will salve your fear that you may miss
and make a lethal error.  Press the barrel
against the meat…If you like,
we can clear the room so it’s just the two of us
here, intimates in shared creation.

At what point will my pain,
vicariously thrilling at one remove,
become worthy enough of your attention
that you will assist me?

No blame will attach to your choice
no matter what you choose to do.
But I have come this far for you;
how far will you come for me?

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

I’m going to try.
Laid out like that,
they look appetizing enough.

I try.
The clash of flavors is…
interesting.  Interesting texture,
too. 

I try again a little later.
Now they’re cold,
and the congealed fat
that once seemed to add so much
is just so much glop.

I’m still hungry
so I snack a little while later.
Junk food, strangely aromatic,
still unsatisfying.

I put myself and my hollow gut
to bed wishing I had taken
more time in preparation,
stocked up on better ingredients.

Can’t live like this — should have
just had something simple,
something I knew ahead of time
would fill me up.

But I will try again, I know.
Have to try a million recipes.
Something in me makes it
so I have to have a thousand pots going
at once and time everything to come out
at the same time perfectly delectable,
all the seasonings working together,
no gristle, no fat beyond what’s needed for savor,
a good meal at last, and one
I might be willing to share.

My dirty friends and I talk dirty in private and public.
We the dirty, sanctified profane, mud spitters.
We the dirty music of living bother.
We the basement orators licking mold.

When we say gun we mean penis.
When we say fire we mean the act of losing the gun to its purpose.
When we say target we mean the regret of the immediate afterward.
When we say empty clip we mean not again we have a communal headache.

“I have a dirty Bible written on lambskin.
I tear the pages out to wrap my gun in.
I pass the Bible around for my dirty friends to use.
I’m a dirty boy so precious you want me to talk dirty.”

Ooooooh, so the lovely, aren’t we the lovely?

Sometimes we use the dirty words to talk sense.
Sometimes we don’t want to but we do it because you want to.
Even if you’re not here when we do it we do it.
Thank us after, spank us, make us come hard again.

So little a word as the obvious four-letter verb all purpose is beyond us.
So we invent a new finger for it.
So we stick the new finger up in it.
So we are the dumbasses with our fingers in our love.

Don’t you love how we smell, we dirty talkers?
Sort of mushroom and the hot new grass after mowing.
We pastoral because talking dirty is impossible on a farm.
We farm so you can see us farm dirty, manure, guns, varmints, words.

Nothing you don’t say to yourselves.
Nothing you haven’t thought of all clean in a rec room.
We the dirty songbirds say that’s all right, little lambs.
Dirty songbirds off the bathtub rails not clean ourselves, just for you.

Every dirty word is a scapegoat bell tinkling running from tribe stones.
Every dirty talker knows this and keeps the clean mouth for some.
We and ugly, dirty friends of ours do the big talk you won’t.
Thank us, kiss us, make us a hard drink, admit one with coupon, let us be.

get a phone call
can I stop and pick up
kids after school
sure I say
pick em up then I say
gotta make a stop
gotta stop at the liquor store
gotta buy beer buy beer buy beer
here be a big boy be a big girl
hold this in your lap in your lap in your lap
like to have a beer when I get home
gotta have a beer have a beer
a beer beer beer
next day same thing
gotta pick em up
gotta make another stop
this time beer and a bottle and a bump
gotta have beer have beer beer and a bump
beer and a bump and a beer and a bump
and a beer and a beer and a beer beer beer
sometimes sometimes I get myself a bag
and a beer and a bump and a beer beer beer
when the kids are asleep I like to have a smoke
and a beer and a bump and a beer beer beer
don’t let the kids see it’s fine for me
if I have a smoke and a beer and a beer beer beer
but don’t let me catch you
coming home drunk
what’s in the bag on the seat between you
better not be beer
beer and a bump
or a bag and a beer and a beer beer beer
you’re a young man now
and a young woman now
and I better not catch you with a beer beer beer
and God forbid you come home pregnant
and don’t come home with your girl knocked up
cause you got into the car with a bag and a beer
and a bump and a bottle and a pipe and a beer
never mind we do it did it back when
never mind how you two got here
don’t come home in trouble or you’re out on the street
with your bag and your bottle and your beer beer beer
if it ever happens I swear I’ll lose my head
have to sit down have myself a beer beer beer
and a dip in the bag and a swig from the bottle
a bottle and a bump and a beer beer beer

Whiskey writing, twist of
sloppy anger.  Beer writing,
young as giggling at farts.
Weed writing, profound phrases
wrapped around themselves as big as a burrito.
Acid writing, a whine of bees
looking for atrophied
flowers.  Coke writing, swift angles.
Smack writing, looped and slow.
Wine writing, delayed and delayed.

Name a writing drug, I’ve tried it.
Supplemental addictions
to the main habit.

I have kicked them all
but for the first, the love of my life,
the cigarette writing, airy typewriter ribbon
soft twirl —
that, and the Big Horse
of naked writing,
no substance at all to back it,

no way to hide from it.
No excuses.
Just the vein open, full flow,
nodding into its rush.

A car radio
set to scan
in remote areas
far from stations
will crackle in bursts
interrupted by minute pauses
for hours as you drive:
small bastions of hope
appearing and disappearing
with every break in the aural snow.

You would gladly settle
for an evangelist out here
as you hurtle alone
through the dark
though you are no believer:
any voice would be welcome
no matter the message.

That, sometimes,
is how fanatics
are born.

At the foot
of a oak spar,
moss balls cover
the knees
of its exposed roots.

We don’t see this
in the city, often —
the soil won’t permit this,
not after years
of chemical insult from

household dumping
and heavy metal saturation.
Thin patches, perhaps,
but never these testicular
mounds, hairy with tan spore heads.

How is it possible
that with all these sheer stones
and surfaces, there’s no
graffiti at all?  That no one’s
tagged any of it as turf?

It’s not as if that urge to mark
doesn’t exist here:  even now
boys from a club from a local prep school
are cabled up and trust-falling
down the cliff,

carefully supervised
by their adviser, helmeted
and booted, voice and youth
roaring out of them as they
conquer their environment.

But it is still quiet here
in spite of them, quiet
in precisely the way
the city never is:
every sign or sound of us

sucked into a greater stillness
that will forget us as soon as we have gone back
to our poisons and our tribal wars.
The woods understand what can be possessed
and what cannot.

I stand at the edge.
I look straight out at the tops of trees
that have grown this tall from far below.
It is nothing to them if I fall or remain.
If I leap my blood will wash away

into the clean and potent soil
to nourish the balls of moss,
the upright oaks, the silence,
while the rocks will remain unchanged.
If I turn and walk away, it will be all the same.

In the left hand drawer
of the old desk, 
a huddled pack
of long-missing
stars.

In a box
at the back of the drawer,
a mussel shell clattering.

Inside the shell, a book.

In the book, lightning.

The book’s
pages have fused.
The lightning
has burned the box.
The shell is cracked, fragile
but sound.  The stars
cluster and shudder.

I don’t question
the homing instinct
of such things,
why they’ve found my drawer
to be such a hospitable place
to survive. 

This book
may explain it.

I’ll carefully work its pages apart
to see what can be read of its tales of exile
and closely watched wars, its stories
of unspoken vows, and the reason
the stars fled here.

It is a translation
from smoke, fracture, and fire.

This is just the work
the desk was made for.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

When you hear
a disembodied voice say
“yes,” it is best not to ask
who is speaking,

especially if you are in bed
after midnight and
the fatigue of your own questioning
is what sent you to bed;

if you awaken to
that “yes”
try to stay awake and think over
all the questions you were asking
earlier. 

Try to decide
where that affirmative belongs
before beginning to question
the source of the affirmation;

if you choose well,
you’ll know at once what to call
the Voice.

If you choose poorly
it will hardly matter
what you call it
as you curse it,
slander it, revile it;

you’ll never listen to it again
nor will you call to it
on those exhausted nights
full of inquiry,

so you will have no need
of its name.

Statistics have shown that the more brass you eat
the smaller the chance
that you will give birth to a moon

If you relegate the wildflowers to the backyard
you will be ten times more likely
to be cruel to family ghosts

If you seek meaning in dust
you will dust
incessantly

The more often you indulge
in wet thoughts at lonely midnight
the less often you’ll sing of conveyor belts

More people have a chance
of dying at the hands of a priest
than will love the pop music of twenty years in the future

Flake gold sprinkled on the cereal bowl
has been shown to enrich the soil
from which grows the tree of all triviality

and the leaves of that tree
stick to the skin and block daylight
seven out of ten times

Statistics have shown statistics
can serve as a gloomy blanket
on a perfectly shiny beach

In any set of numbers
there’s a fifty percent chance of finding juice
for the quenching of embers

A greater part of the darkness left behind
will be overweight children’s tears
pure as the moan of charmed snakes

The numbers want to strangle
the scent of lovemakers as clean
as new mown grass

When no one chooses to count
the mysteries separately
they are as ordinary as air

Statistics have shown
statistics
turn death black when applied too thickly

Ninety percent of all humans alive now
would rather be counted as one of the ripples
than be a Stone

that once launched
slices into water
that cannot be divided

and vanishes
to rest in the lake
with the others that have piled up

in infinite piles
Memories of singularity
and monuments to the rejection

of the laws of chance

The lie
emptied itself
with a hiss.
It lay between you
as snaky and harmless
as a shed skin,
though it reminded you both
of poison
hiding somewhere nearby.
Neither of you
wanted to speak of it
but that papery husk
was so obvious
it drew your eyes
away from each other
into corners
and under the bed.
You each spoke
a while longer, hoping
no sting would surprise you,
no venom would rise
into your lungs and surge
forth at the other,
and while you managed
to get through the fear
and move on
you knew you’d be listening
and watching for it
for long bitter days and weeks
to come.

He opens the scissors
and begins to cut

the details which matter to him
(the origin of the journey,
the car, the mirror loose
on the driver’s door)

from those he has no need for
(the way the air felt like fur
when she held her hand
out the window as they drove,
her need to stop and pee
every fifty miles or so)

then stitches the parts
into a cloak, a story
fitted to what he believes
and to hell with what really
took place (long periods
of absolutely nothing, no talk,
mutual simmering)

since now that he’s done
her perspective is just scraps
on the floor of the motel room

where
he ended up alone
with no one to tell him
that the cloak looks unfinished
and doesn’t fit all that well.