hey canvas,
I’m gonna make a sail
outta you. or a painting,
or a pair of pants.

canvas, you say
you’re material.  I say
I love you more than
the material.  spirit says

god made you bleachy-pale
for the writing upon, tough
stitchability, force a curved needle
to do that and it’ll punch my hand,

don’t care.  god’s impersonal enough
not to care about you if it’s better
for me to make you creation-ground.
I’ll get my blood on you, canvas,

and no backtalk, no ticktock
or ripsnap when the wind gets at
your back.  mine, canvas, you’re mine
and I’ll sail you wear you cover you

in vision and oils maybe all at once.
I can do anything, says god.  not yours,
mine.  thank the bastard of my head,
he’s on my side.  canvas old buddy,

you’re never gonna know what hit ya.

This is how it happens: your voice finds its word
and it’s suddenly bigger than you are.
You’re carried to the top
of its eruption…

now you’re lava,
ash, sticking to cars and walls
of compounds in tropical plains
at the foot of the word,
it builds a cone
so steep, you’re going to slide off,
become a refugee fleeing it…

then you stop,
dig in, be honest and ruthless
with yourself: you were always
a nascent chimera, embryo dragon,
you roared but didn’t know
how to breathe fire or how to be
your combinations, here is your chance to learn
as you tumble across
smashed landscape of home,
your backpack full of notes, letters;

and you craft the next word
now, your voice so shattered settling
like Atlas moving a little to make the weight
bearable, now you are blackwhite crawler on moonscape,
first time visitor to naked rock: perhaps
traces of past natives, but who cares, you’re here…

and now it is fire and now it is a sea boiling up ahead,
and it’s time for the next word,
you’ll coin it
for the pinpoint bludgeoning of the rolling soil
cooling to blue now, red now and again and after,
roads melt, glass melts, salt melts,
the sugary drug of not caring where the word goes
and how the voice roughens around it;
for you know now you were never
just a throat, a lung,
you were always more
than a bearer of air in a vessel
you didn’t build.

You’re a damn good pure sight to see
for those who flee this, looking back at you
surfing your voice on that word,
riding atop the archaic spit
of the mantle below the crust
making new land
that once tilled will be rich.

Whenever it stops killing
and smoldering, wherever it stops,
that’s where you deepen into your own.

That when you
can claim it.  Call yourself writer,
story teller, poet.  Call yourself
volcano surfer.  Call out the name
you choose for it.  Pick the next word.
Call up the fire.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

We watched him
break
then saw him
fixed. 

“Fixed”
is a perfect word, lays claim
to past wounds that are now invisible
or only reminders if the scars show.

“Repaired” is also perfect, suggests
meeting of unnaturally separated parts,
so the sight of him once shattered
and now repaired is heartening.

We shuffle along
swept up in our own cracks,
puzzling through the memory
of not being in pieces,
if we can recall that at all…

so when he speaks
from his entirety,
not concealing past injury
but showing how he has healed,

we see it.  We feel it.
We are moved to action,
and perhaps
a little ashamed.

Enslaved to a horoscope,
some won’t drive far when Mercury is retrograde.

Engaged by humor,
they let offense slide off their numb tongues.

Enthralled by heritage,
they won’t give credit to others.

Eviscerated by holy writ,
they scourge the unbelievers in their prayers.

Enlisted by history,
they reap the bodies of the designated scapegoats.

Every time it happens,
we call it instinct

or natural order or divine will or the stars aligning,
when in fact it comes down to

what we allow
to rule us without forethought,

and from horoscope to Holocaust
is not all that far to travel.

Bridges are burning and
I’m a little glad to see it.

Crossing them
seemed sometimes
a blasphemy.

In broad daylight
or even at night
when I’ve been alone,

there have been moments
of silence and separation
when I’ve felt that those distances
from rail to wave
and across the stream
were just meant to be.

Still, despite
my fear of heights,
there will be times
when I will think
of those bridges
on fire
and long for the courage
to run out along
the cracking spans
and see how close I could come
to the other side

before I fell.

From atop this rock
I can see seven others
in this stream. 
Some are slick
and moss-black
and breach the surface
almost not at all;
others hump fully up
gray and knobbed
into dry air.
Depending on how
willing I am
to leap across
or soak myself
stepping in,
there are so many ways
to get from here
to the far side
that I am perplexed
at least, frightened
at most, with thoughts
of what may happen
if I fail to choose
correctly.
Stupid,
says a branch rubbing
another branch by chance
above me;
stupid, says
a broken acorn falling
then floating by;
stupid,
echoed by the click of stones
against stones in the stream bed
pushed into speech by the flood;
stupid.  Get across
by crossing.
So I spring from the rock I’m on
with eyes closed, knees bent,
waiting to see how I land
before deciding
how to proceed from there.

A remedy is offered in an alley.
Money moves
from sufferer to healer.
quickly.  What has been purchased
proves to be weaker than was desired,
but will do.  The sufferer mutters,
but settles for it.

A farmer settles on a smaller price
for a larger crop, smoldering
with thoughts of winter ahead.

Linchpins
are carved from hard wood
in places where there are no forges.

Where there is only soft copper
and little wood,
those who need linchpins
traditionally long for iron,
will scrounge and scheme
for something to trade for it,

and plan for war.

While we’re all making do,
civilization develops,
rises, and falls in upon itself.

Without each other to shore up
our resentments, to bear
our brunt,

we’re nothing.

That there is a matter of fact,
of any fact,
is not obvious.

That there is worth
is ruthlessly questioned. 

That chaos is our manacle
is not permitted
to be discussed among polite company.

That we once had hopes, good ratios,
explanations, heroes,
is not worth mentioning.

Are you sick yet from stories
of sickening eggs?

It is no wonder we admire vampires.

Are you romancing cameras?  Are you
booking trips, taking trips,
tripping on music? Are you
blue-fingered
from holding on?

We hide our marrow in our parent’s bones.

Are you yelling loud enough?

Our pockets are rusty.

Are you saying please and thank you?
Are you paying for what you always got for free?

Sucking on dry bones,
we must fall in love with whatever
seems as warm as blood.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Monster
is multiplicity of me — awkward me,
smooth me too,
ripped up me in claw costume,
clay head, raw meat eyes.

Monster Me drinks a little, expand
each bogeyman, and then all
see it, see me.

Each Monster is not
response.  I don’t answer
with me: Monster Me
doesn’t talk,
just stands scary —
animal leather-hand,
vegetation jaws, mineral
lungs. 

You gave Monster Me to me,
enabled me
with reasons
not to be shown off.
Made me these jungle desert
alpine scimitar teeth.  Made me
folklore legend leftover spooks.
Made me a book
read and tossed into a garden
on fire.  Monster Me, a pair of
clamps on a veined muscle.

A monster is not
mothered or fathered;
to be rather stark
it rises in a stand of
pointed sticks, sore,
and sleep
never a bed.

Monster Me, I am that —
all of that, all of them,
no me in there
I do not want to flee.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

On Monday
I acted like an ape —
frenetic, colloquially
“bananas” I guess,
though that’s too
pun-stark obvious;
Tuesday was sick sorrow
that bled into Wednesday’s anxious,
death-certain march into
Thursday’s despair
that became Friday’s joy
at the approach of safe Saturday,
and while the coming Monday
holds its own fears
it’s still Friday
so I’m going to dance
to something loud
and hellacious
from now until Sunday
when I’ll likely fall down
with my frozen head
stuck on Monday
and start the whole
ape cycle again
with the same flaming arms
and the same stuporous sense
that every week will be
forever the same.

Your choice
is simple: the bullets
will always fly, so you can choose
to be behind the bullet,
or in front of it.

Of course you could choose
to be the bullet
that is neither behind nor before,
that does the wet work
and cares not for choices
while faithfully doing its job,
but the whorl of your eyes
tells me that’s not for you,
so choose:
where will you stand
when they fly? Will you stand behind,
admit your love
of the firm trigger in your hand,
the sense of control, answers
delivered so swiftly?  Or will you stand in front
and admit your love for the bullets
and the guns, the sense of surrender
to answers received so simply?

You protest
and say you can always stand aside,
but tell me you truly believe
you’ll always be able to stand aside.
Tell me you don’t know now
where you’ll prefer to stand
when the whistle comes
to tell you the bullet is flying.

Tell me you think there’s a chance
you won’t have to choose
and I will show you
how the dirt below your feet laughs
through its long and heavy
load of blood at the thought of such a thing,
choking on elegies, recalling funerals,
mad men staring past the heaps of dead
before them, the bodies piled
and lined up for interment,
the old who will not speak
of how they chose to live
by standing behind the bullets,
knowing they could have chosen
to stand before but for their precious lives
yet unlived.

Tell me you can stand aside
from that giving and taking
and I will show you how it feels
to have the choice taken from you
and find that wherever you end up,
behind the gun or in front of the bullet,
you’ll feel like the bullet
has found you.

The animal you chose
to keep in that ring
with the secret compartment
is wobbly with hunger.
You haven’t fed her for years.
You forgot her.  You let her starve,
and now she’s bone and hide.
It’s time to open the vein
in your palm and let her drink
while you cradle her and tell her
of your forgotten love of her fur
and her wide yellow eyes, but she perishes
before you have finished,
and you are left agog with the shame
of having chosen and then
abandoned her.

Listing and bouncing from wall to wall
as you carry her out to the yard
you walk directly to a tree
and, laying her carefully beside you,
you begin to dig the hole
for her body.  You dig deeply
and the pile of earth rises beside you
until it blocks the stars,
which do not reappear
even after you’ve stepped away
from the mound.

She was so small
when she died.  Why this grave
needs to be so deep
is something you’ll think about
for a long time.

As my body
refuses me
shelter, I leave it
and go into
the teeth outside, amazed
that there is no pain
when I am ground
between them.
I float into
the throat behind
and lose myself
in there, feel it
fold around me
as I go down, down…

Ideologies fall from
my skin. Pressure
around me soothes
and shapes me back
into something I can stand…

If I return to the body
at some point it will be
in a form that will compel it
to take me in and keep me
safe, and if I don’t, what
a miraculous place to be —
inside this belly, in this starry womb
I had forgotten…