My last name
is likely derived

from the color of a swept wooden floor
or the dirt swept from it
into a pan
into the trash

from the color of shit
or the body of a dead blossom

from the color of waterlogged pilings
under a fog soaked dock

from the color of

things walked on
things discarded
things never seen

unless you’re drowning

Again, for the second night,
stupendous winds in the dark.
I should take greater note of it —
after all,
everything is a mission —

but instead I sigh
and turn my face from the window.
It will wait, I say,

but will it?  What blows across the weeds
tonight?  Is there angel or demon
in that wailing?  Some lost spirit
looking for a translator?

The wind doesn’t care. 
It tells its stories
to anyone who will listen
and leaves it up to me
if I want to answer.

It will wait, I say again;
less certain, though, I fight sleep
and wonder if there is something
I should be doing now
that should not wait. 

Everything is a mission,
and who am I to decide
not to undertake it?

Knowing
that demand, I turn my face
to the wall anyway.
Sleep robs the wind of me
tonight, but the wind
will wait me out, knowing
I will have to respond
eventually.

Thinking hard during
a night drive north
on an empty road,
the dark rolled tight around me
like a cigar wrapper.

This evening
a young girl with a strange name
asked me why so many of my poems
seem to include some reference
to being apart from my body,
inhabiting it as a foreign entity.

I know it’s true —
I am a passing voice.
Every moment a container,
a long tube awaiting flame.
I’m the filler made
to go up in smoke.

When she asked me if
I ever feel whole

I could feel the weight she was ready to hang
on the answer…

and said yes,
there are moments. 

And then I stopped,
unable or too shy
to explain.

We looked at each other.
She shook my hand and left…
and what I should have said
came to me on the road, here, now,
hot with the urgency of needing to get home
to my bed, to her…
should have said:

Don’t worry. 
It will happen,
It will be better.
Someone will set you on fire,
or you will find your own source
of spark,
and you will understand unity
as a curl of white in the air
that scents everything, that makes you
and the air and the breath and the fire
one.

no broad brushstrokes today

this is no day for sweeping
rationale

instead allow
only detail
through

pray that by bedtime
your eyes sting from having seen
what is directly before you

having concentrated
on tiny ants
sand between toes
fine blond arm full of hair
flaked lips
scent of garlic on sweet tongue
tomato flowers (yellow toothed bells)
finger whorls
may you then know that
there is no global only local
to be revered

and stop claiming you care for what you cannot hold in your own hands

The only true art I’ve ever made

is the C-shaped scar I bear
in the back of my left hand
where I once laid a cigarette down
to burn through a fifty dollar bill
in an old bar trick.  The trick
is that you challenge someone else
to do it and tell that person that
if they can hold their hand stiff
till the bill is burnt through,
they can have it.  You of course
say this knowing that the bill will not burn through
because the heat from the cigarette rises
and will only char it, but in my case
I knew this and used my own skin and cash
to demonstrate the folly of such an act,
and thanks to Jameson’s whiskey
was able to shock and horrify others
with the resultant minute long endurance
of the pain.

My hand swelled and a cavern opened
on its back, weeping pus
for two weeks after, and I never had it treated
because where would my point have been
if I had, if I’d acknowledged how much stupidity
it took to point out stupidity?  To make a fool
of myself to the point of anguish?

Now I touch that scar and proclaim

that everything I’ve done since that night
on a stage or a page, every word I’ve written
or placed in its round hole,
has been a fraud and a cheat, and only the single “C”
on the back of my left hand has been the truest Work
of making my point known,
and the only thing that mars its perfection
is that I did not put it on my writing hand,
my good hand, my false right hand
that now lays down
ersatz spectacles
of vulnerability and sacrifice for others’ pleasure,
and there is not enough whiskey in the world
to make me believe it does not hurt
worse than the fire on my left hand
ever did.

The matter at hand
is this boiling pot.

A first bubble rises and bursts
to herald the success
of heated metal
at causing the water
to roll. 

My own contribution
has been incidental —
I filled the pan
and turned the knob,
and this happened.

I’m trying to recall
why I did this.
All of tomorrow
sits before me
this late at night
and I don’t remember
the smallest thing
about what happened today
or why this was
necessary.

Seems a shame to let it go to waste —
what shall I cook and eat?
Let it be breakfast time!
No one ever made a law
that a day must start
at first light,

and even if I don’t know why
I started this,
I can put it to use,
certainly.

“In life sometimes
it’s not whether you win or lose,
it’s how you run the race.”  This
glittering insight
is provided by
yet another news reporter
doing voice over on a story
of a man running a marathon
with inoperable cancer. 

I wonder,
sometimes, what the news reporter
says to his children when he gets home
from his day.  “Don’t worry
about getting into college, Evan;
it’s always darkest before the dawn,” I imagine
him saying to his eldest son.  Assuring
his distraught daughter, “There are plenty
of fish in the sea, honey.  He didn’t deserve you
anyway, you’re young yet…”   And the youngest son,
still in Little League, gets “What’s important
is that you tried your best.  Let me tell you
a story about a man, a brave man
I met today…”

If that were I
facing my own children’s problems,
I’d probably be speaking in tongues,
leaping from frog to slick,
not trying to puzzle them
but succeeding in spite of myself.

I’d say to my eldest son,
“The sky is a blurred blanket,
a dingy parking lot of old dreams, and
you’ll be forever trying to unstain it.” 
To my daughter I’d say,  “Leap
into the market of sandalwood
and rejected shoes, and walk barefoot
among the stalls until you you are shod.”
And little Stevie would hear of alligators in flames
and the wings of ardent warrior kings shining
as they play catch with the hearts of clouds
among the fields of Vatican rubies.

One of them would say, “Dad, you’re so
weird,” and go back to listening
to Coheed and Cambria,

and then I’d nod
and tell myself,

“There is not enough cotton on earth
to block the impact
when the blocks of the broken Temple
fall from above.”

I see them lost,
seeking comfort in vain
from me, and
I tell myself,
as the blocks fall around me,
that this is why it is good
that I have no children:
I would likely just use them
as paving stones
on my way toward
the abstraction of living.
This is why it is good
that I have no children
in my core.  This is why
the news reporter exists:
so children can thrive
on a plane I can’t reach
through marathon
or long hours sailing
the deep seas
in the dark before dawn,
no matter how hard
I might try.

We breathe on average
23,000 times a day

but our things each breathe
once
over the course
of their lifetimes

We do not notice
usually
that it is happening
their respiration
does not depend
on our noticing it
but
the guitars and horns
in their cases
and weapons in holsters
are in perpetual stir around us

We imagine the anima of the graphic crucifix
inhaling and exhaling
on the nail on the wall

but now contemplate the original wood
flavored with his blood

Did its breathing speed up and slow down
as he struggled upon it
or
did it remain
steady throughout

and do the remaining
possibly false remnants we revere
as relics of that moment today
breathe still?

The things we think of
as not alive
do not care what we think of them
do not care how we use them

23,000 self important breaths a day
Vibrations in the larger sacrament
Flavor and no more

The bloom.

The flower of the vein
that I opened in the neck.

I opened it
and the dog moaned
before it quaked and folded down
upon the flowerbed floor.

I put the knife under the tap
and watched the tendrils
slip across the surface
of the steel into the trap.

I sat by the dog and stroked it
as it died without understanding
that I pursue beauty wherever it hides
and that the bloom from its throat
was my lovely, lovely gift
to myself.

I am in bloom myself,
I told the dog,
and it mattered to me
that this was true.

How it mattered —
I was learning what it took
to raise a bloom
from its hiding place.

In love.
In love with the sweet ribbons.
This flower is my decoration,
my day of fantasy and slippery play.

In the sleep of the moment
a last shiver, then nothing.
Nothing, like the scent of this iron bud
opening, its trailing petals.

Thinking already
of the next cutting I shall take
from the garden of all skin
that stretches before me.

It was the song that brought on
this urgent insomnia
and now you can’t stop humming.
This long after midnight
the city is finally quiet
but for the occasional siren.
You have known that song
for a long time.  It rises,
it slides down, it wails
of a disturbance somewhere.
You might dare to call it romantic
if you’re listening, knowing it may mean
that somewhere passions
have run over the brim
of one or more lives.  No matter
that it may herald death or anger;
when you’re not the target,
in the middle of the night
it’s hard not to stop and strain
to hear it, try to figure out
where it’s going.  It’s not hope,
exactly; instead, a curiosity
about how much is happening
elsewhere in places more alive
than where you are.  As close as you are
to sleep, your eyes on fire, your back
hard and heavy, your breathing
slow, your throat raw
from smoke and fatigue,
when that song starts
you jerk forward in your seat
and are drawn into the night
that is growing longer,
longer, even as it fades.
It’s not the right time for this.
It’s not even your business to care
but you do, somehow,
and that is what keeps you up at night.

The ex-skateboarder
is a current cook,
thinks about cooking
a lot, cooks all the time,
in fact cooked his way
all the way
from Rhode Island
to Virginia
by way of Michigan.

Sometimes
he stops thinking
about the lead line
for two minutes
and wishes for a night listening
to New Model Army
after eating something good
someone else had prepared
in the fifty-first state
of the union,
the one that only exists
as the hypothetical next stop
on his road.

This,
he thinks,
is a good grind,
today is a good day,
or at least
it’s as good as it gets.
I can live with that
even if now I have to walk
where I used to glide
until I get there…

and eats what he cooks
because he knows where he’s been,
anyway.

A cross-fox
bears black bars
upon his shoulders
that demand attention.

One red squirrel
glimpsed at the park
means more
than all the gray ones.
Let a black one show up
and someone will call the news.

The white skunk
(not a scent of black
on him but for the eyes)
comes through the yard,
and it’s as if a yeti walks among
the trashcans and weeds.

When Maggie, the new girl,
raised her hands
on the first day of high school
and defiantly showed us
her twelve fingers,
we shuffled in our seats
and communally resolved at once
to shun her.

I am sure that in
the years since, at least one
of my classmates
has been deer hunting,
looking to to hang
a ten-point buck or better
on his wall.