the hatred felt
by those of a certain ilk
is understandable
if you step back
and think of a world
where everything was promised
to all of a certain ilk
and some had it delivered
while others kept chasing it
but all believed in it

the hatred felt
by those of a certain ilk
is understandable
when you step back and see
that what they were promised
were stolen goods
and they never knew that or
chose to ignore it
so when those who were robbed
finally got a chance to point out
what was taken
it is understandable that those
in unlawful possession
might be pissed

the hatred felt
by those of a certain ilk
is understandable
if you step back
and see how that anger
is misdirected by the original thieves
away from themselves
and toward those now demanding
some consideration for their losses

those of a certain ilk
hate for a cause
written on gauze
a bandage over the thin skin
of deep wounds
whose source they will not imagine
because of the horror
they will be forced to own
if they do

the hatred felt
by those of a certain ilk
is understandable
even pitiable
forgivable to a nearby point
but not excusable
when it is maintained
by willful ignorance
and a stubborn love
of apparently useful
myth

if you want to hate
the haters
be sure of them
before you begin
for if you see only
the front
you will miss
those of a certain ilk
standing behind them
smiling at you
all knowing
and certain of the power
that derives
from hate

Your opinion seemed right to you
and then
shit started. Soon,
it happened:

Nazi,
says the anonymous poster,
you’re a
Nazi
for suggesting such a thing.

By now, you’ve forgotten what you actually said.

Nazi,
you respond,
you’re the
Nazi
for bringing
Nazis
into this.  Trying to scare me
into shutting up by invoking
Nazis,
that’s a
Nazi
thing to do.

Nazi Nazi!
chimes in a
supporter of your enemy
(and what was this about again?)

Nazi! Nazi Nazi Nazi!
NAZI!

Damn, but it feels good
to bring them up in connection
with anything at all —
baseball card futures, Area 51,
that Palin woman, hairstyles,
the latest incarnation of garage rock.

Damn, it feels good
to hear that marching
in the world outside.
Almost like your blood
demands it from you.
Almost like it doesn’t matter
where you were headed
as long as you eventually
get to a point

where that word can roll off your outstretched fingers.

Dawn hasn’t warmed us
for months.  It might as well
have stayed dark all winter
for all the credit we gave the sun
for coming up, for if there’s no warmth
in sunlight, why have it?  That’s been
the prevailing opinion this year,
as it is every year.  Even as the days
have gotten longer,
we have continued to complain.

The hyacinths
know better, as always,
and have been employing
that incremental heat
for their own ends
for quite a while now,
trusting in
the inevitability of what was to come. 
Today, or yesterday, they broke through
beside the walk.

Their sudden arrival tells us
that it’s time for spring at last,
and all at once mornings feel downright
balmy.  We’re stupid this way,
forgetting every winter
that spring will come,
and that we’ll be surprised
when it happens.

Thank God
for the hyacinths giving us a heads up,
or we’d look even dumber
with our mouths hanging open
a few weeks from now
when, as always,
everything else pops.

Everywhere I go
I carry two tinfoil wrappers
twisted shut,

each one the size of
a pack of gum,
each one holding part of

a collection
rendered in miniature,
a collection of all my friends.

The dead ones
in the right hand pocket,
the live ones in my left.  The dead ones

on my favored side,
the live ones carried offhand
as a backup.

When I need
to say something deep
I take a packet out

and open it, pop one,
freshen my speech
with another voice.

When I’m done,
I carefully pull that friend
from my tongue

and rewrap
for future use.  None of them
have ever complained

so I have to believe
it’s ok with them
that I use them this way.

The dead ones
have more time free of the pocket.
I think it’s good for them

to get out and be heard
even if their flavor
often darkens my words.

They at least
make me feel good.  The live ones
don’t come out as often

as they are frequently
unruly and crack my voice
a bit.  We can speak for ourselves

and be known that way,
they grumble. Therefore
I sometimes

take them all out at once,
put them all in my mouth
and shut up while they

talk to me from within.  I’m
kept informed that way, and so
think to honor them

by giving my full, sour attention
to their tastes.  I still prefer to
let the dead ones work for me while running

my tongue over my teeth
and recalling
what the live ones have taught me,

what they continue to teach me.
But I will not shift them
to the right hand pocket —

too risky.
The dead ones arm me better
with their settled opinions

that are sharper for having had
greater use.  It’s been suggested that
I mix the two, but I don’t know what

my reliably dead friends
who adore me would say
if they were to hear from those who know me now.

I don’t even know you, they might say.
I’m not sure I ever did.  And I’d hate that.
So I keep them tightly wrapped

and close at hand, the known quantity
always in easy,
subconscious reach.

Dead friends in the right hand pocket —
quick to come to my rescue
and make my words clean and fresh

with their voices frozen and cool
as breath mints.
Live ones in my left —

astringents, bitter favors
to be taken sparingly
for fear I might have to speak the truth.

when the hose fails
and leaking antifreeze
pours greasy green
onto the snowy roadside

when the cold crunches
inside your nose
as you wait for the tow
that is forty -five minutes off

when you try to calculate
how much damage this will do
to your rent still in arrears
but your fingers are too numb to count

when you’d cry if you could
but you’re cried out
when you’re alone and cold
and there’s no art in your thoughts

except for the simple art
of fixing a hose in the dark with no tape
or replacement coolant
the art you’d wished you had learned

and prepared for in advance
but it’s too late and you’re stuck
awaiting the mercy of a better artist
when he comes and shows you mastery

this is no time for you to slink
into a blank book and create a world
where things like this don’t happen
to anyone particularly like you

but there are people out here
who will lay down money to bet
that this is exactly what you will do
that you will make something precious of it

if you ever get out of here
without frostbite or breakdown
and return to your insulated life
full of what ifs and should haves

and that it will happen again
and more than once
because you only ever learn enough
to arm your self against aftermath

never enough to prevent the disaster
never enough to stop the leaks
from occurring
never enough to be anything but useless

for any practical life

I got nothing today —

just the cackle of a neighbor
and the steady breathing of the cat
while the heat kicks on and off.

The world goes on outside…
I take it in.
I spit it out for others to use
as they see fit,

but it’s got nothing for me.

After working time
comes supper time
and after that comes
chocolate time
and after that
comes sleepy time

and after that,
animal time, when
you are asleep
and not dreaming.
You’re an animal then,
in animal time,
the only time you’re not
slaving, eating, or caught up
in human re-visioning.

You don’t know this
when it’s happening,
but don’t worry
about it — you’re human,
and your ignorance of it
is to be expected.
You forget the animal in you
in order to free the human,
but the animal
does not die
and it comes out
when you have left
working and supper and chocolate
and time itself
aside.   You’re mammal then,
warm blooded and
present only for yourself then,
living without obligation.

No one knows
if the mammal dreams
in some way, its internal life
undetected by us, in those moments
when we are being human.
You can search for it if you wish,
but you’ll likely be disappointed.
Some things you aren’t likely
meant to know
though it doesn’t mean
you shouldn’t try.

Perhaps some day
you’ll take a mouthful of chocolate
and the beast will flash
into view,
animated by pleasure.
I wish you luck.
If you discover
its hiding place,
tell everyone.
We are dying to know.

The girl
poured slowly out onto the pool deck
from her room, turning to slide
the door shut behind her.
I can’t take look away.

At this point in the poem
my Audience takes me to task
for calling her a girl.  “That’s a woman
you are talking about, not a girl.”

The Audience is correct, of course.  “But calling her
a woman,” I protest, somewhat sheepishly,
“feels like a lie from the height of the tall pile
of fifty years I’ve got under me.  Every one that age

still appears a child to me, no matter
who or what they are, how they look; I can’t call
a girl a woman in the voice I’ve got to work with
at this point in my life.”

“Then you need to change your perspective,”
replies my Unforgettable Audience.  “Don’t call a woman
a girl if she’s a woman, asshole.  It cheapens her.  How old
was this ‘girl’ — eighteen, nineteen?”  Plenty old enough
for you to notice her as a woman, right?”  And the Audience

has me dead to rights. She was beautiful; tan skin, dark hair,
shy blue eyes, slightly chunky with a white bikini
that didn’t quite fit according to the rules and customs
that we’re supposed to believe…” “GET OUT OF THE POEM!”

snaps the Unrelenting Audience. “Just for one minute
can you stick to the point? We’re dealing with real life here,
with objectification.  You can’t even see her because
you’re obsessed with that body, and calling her a girl

helps to reduce her worth as a human, while your self serving
commentary about ‘society’s rules’ is a cover to make us think
you’re being deep when all you want is to get your rocks off
with some thinly disguised eroticization of the moment.”

“Well,” I offer, “she was the one wearing the bikini…”
“There you go again,” the Audience scolds, “blaming her
for your clumsiness.  I don’t know what to do with you.  You seem
so intelligent, so smart about so many things, and yet
you can’t stop for a moment to call this woman a woman,

to address all the possibilities she holds…”
And the Audience throws up its hands
and turns away.  I can’t say I disagree.
I’d walk away from me too, if I could.

Everything that was said was correct. I couldn’t help
seeing that woman as a girl.  It’s no excuse, but It happens
with girls and boys of a certain age.  Each
looks like a child, or close to a child, and I know

they aren’t, but the clock inside me is spinning so fast
that I find myself behind the times too often,
and it leads to my saying something that I regret
not thinking through.  Somewhere inside me is a well of poems

I dare not write because I know the All-Knowing Audience
will see through me.  That if I do not take enough care,
something will slip through obscuring the moment
I’m trying to capture, and all I am — all insecurities,

half-baked prejudices, remnants of a past life
I’ve tried to escape and make over, over and over —
will be revealed.  I am not that poet, that person.
I hold myself and my problems close.

The poem I am trying to write is better
than the one I can write.  I can say,
She poured out of the room onto the pool deck
and leave the qualifier aside. I can rexamine the way I see her,

refashion the word girl, talk of how she transfixes me with her shy style;
offer more detail, make her real instead of abstract,
make her uniquely herself, not a rendition of my image
of her self.  One word changed, an entire world transformed.

I sit by the well inside me and stare at her,
afloat on a poem.  On the other side of that well
is the Audience, watching for what I do, hoping
I do it as carefully as I can.

I look over now
into the face that haunts me, always
demanding my best.  I recognize that face:
a man I’d like to know.

Early evening, late in February,
I see a tiger in the shadows by the fence.

There are believed to be no tigers in Worcester
at the moment.  Our lone animal park
holds cougars and polar bears.  If anyone here
owns a surreptitious tiger, they’ve been keeping it
well-concealed. 

I watch the shadow tiger move past the cars
into the scrubby, snow-stained backyard. 
Perhaps it is a Siberian tiger.

If a tiger once tastes human flesh, it is said
that it will remain a maneater forever.  This one
clearly sees me, but makes no move in my direction.
It may have eaten.  It may not know how sweet I am.

Or perhaps that’s just a legend.  Perhaps the dream tiger,
real or unreal, has tried a man and found it wanting,
is seeking goat or sheep or some game creature instead.

The tiger (and I am certain now that it is unreal
but cannot take my eyes from it) has stopped by the oak tree.
It looks up at something.  Perhaps at unfamiliar bark
and a scent it’s not had to identify before.  Perhaps
it is listening for voices it may recognize.

I call it, using a name I haven’t spoken in years.
It turns and tenses, fangs and stripes bared
but transparent. What I see through its body
seems menacing in a way it was not before
as if there was an overlay of pain before me
that I am seeing only now.

Mystery cat, tiger in the mind.
I long for you to be more real than I can conjure.
Come and tear me up, leave my true blood on the ground.
I am tired of my fear of ghosts,
wish to fight something solid,
to die for something real.

The feather
on the sidewalk
could have come
from any bird.

I want it to be
from a robin.

It’s time, I think,
for spring:

they’ve been gone a long while now
(although it’s a lie
that they all fly south; I’ve seen them in packs
among the bittersweet vines
in Harwichport
in deep December),
and they rarely appear
this early in the city,

I’d like to think that
one made an exception for me
and me alone,

knowing I need the mud-time
badly right now.

I want to have my feet sink into
what was once frozen
and come out sucking and black
with heavy dirt,
because that way I could feel
like a farmer
tuned into the signs
and signals of newness,

and that bird would be telling me
things only I needed to know
as I knocked off the sludge
and smiled.

A boy was an infant for a while,
then a boy.

A boy did not think he should be here.

A boy imagined a difference,
and it did not happen. 

A boy was menaced by his mirror
with a face that was familiar, so he changed it. 
But the face within that new face remained present.
The two had common eyes
and softened the same way
when they became melancholy.

A boy grew to disbelieve his mirror.
What he saw in there instead
was a movie. That actor
looked young all the time.

A boy learned to comb the actor’s hair
and to play his banjo.
He saw the actor’s wife
in the background, another actor.

A boy would sometimes pause the movie and ask
if what was before him there
was the difference he had imagined
and wished for when he was young.

Really, I couldn’t tell you, responded the actor.
I’m a stranger here myself.