City
is still quiet,
not yet ready
to accept bustle. 

Out beyond here
small towns,
home towns,
sleep on and on.

All those people
are allegedly my people.
They aren’t 
here right now.

Instead
are elsewhere;
in more desirable
lands, in their heads.

I’m not in there
with them, nor am I
in my own head. Instead
I am trying

to understand
why their peace
has never been contiguous
with my own,

trying to understand
how I do not have
dreams anything like
theirs, no shared definitions

of what awake
should mean, of what
that life
should be. 

Five days later.
I’m trying again.

Morning, again;
keyboard, again.

Silence — well,
almost. Space heater

and occasion cat noises
from elsewhere. Otherwise

it is just me and
a runny nose

simply relating this note
that has been repeated

and repeated and five days
later, nothing new to say.

I will not call this writer’s block.
That would imply that I think

I am still a writer, some kind
of artist at least. Beware

this self-identification,
I say.  It can trap you.

Look at me: five days since
I last tried to live up to 

my label and I hear nothing
but moving air and impatience

from a hungry cat. On social media
my friends are either cheering

their way through good lives
or dying from a case of

being America. I am 
increasingly doing neither.

I disappear instead. Five days 
from now you should stop looking for me.

Five days from now this will be
all I will have left behind.

For our future
we ought to dance more — 
cranes at courtship,
swords at friendly play.

You live longer
with a little banter,
a little back and forth;
when our eyes meet across

proving grounds
with a moment of
uncertainty that fuels
right action, wrong action;

any action, really. Inaction
can suck breath and blood away;
we will go to our graves 
wishing we’d done more

with each other. As good
as it can be to sit by a river
and dream, we have to get up
sometime if only to find

events about which to dream.
So let’s do it — shake a leg, do that
primal bop, bring good swords
to this big dance. Let’s play.

Winter moths 
have begun to show up
on our entry way
and it’s only October first.

Maybe ten tomatoes 
across every variety 
I planted hang out
on my yellowing plants. 

Early birds and stragglers
make for stability — bookends
hold stories to account, keep
a tendency to ramble in check.

I wish I could take back
everything I’ve said 
to honor chaos and excuse
dysfunction. There is neither.

Instead there is 
unfathomable order.
Instead there is
late harvest. Moths

congregate, reminding us
this too shall come and go
and come again. Every little thing
repeated in my lifetime.

A man folds himself
into a bass drum
and rolls down a hill. 

He expects to die 
and does not. Instead,
he emerges rhythmically
into battered new life
once he stops, bruised
and deafened, in
a broad valley.

There is a village 
not far away, its chimneys
smoking as if this were
The Home of
The Fairytale Ending.
He begins to walk toward it.

Waking up today
from this. Paradise, he thinks.

Last night instead of this
he was at
his childhood drive-in seafood place.
A tumble of bad actors
from his whole life till now
poured out of
a rusted white Cadillac
parked in front
to jeer him as he ordered
fish and chips
for his whole family
just like every Friday before.

Woke up
from that yesterday.
Damnation, he thinks.

It is
not yet dawn.
Knowing that nothing
in daylight can either
delight or terrify him,
he goes forward
as a blank from here
with no rhythm left,
no vision of future;
no taste for what is passed
and gone; waiting
for night and what 
that may bring. Hoping
for nothing. Praying
for sleep without dreams. 

An apple lands hard
ahead of me on
my flagstoned walk.

I’m next to a high wall.
No tree peeking over;
it must have been thrown.

Was it an offering or
is this aggression? 

I walk to a gate
and shout that question
hoping for any response.
None follows.

How long
do I wait before
I ask again?

Am I well-served
by not simply choosing
to believe it was a gift
and shouting “thank you”
before continuing?

No second apple comes over
and unsatisfied though I am
as to intention,
I do shout my gratitude
to what is hidden
and walk on.

We were confused when he passed
and we learned from his obituary
that he was exactly who we thought he was.
There were no secrets in that life.

He had met all expectations daily.
He had said exactly what he thought.
He had thought exactly what we expected
a moderately average person to think

about moderately average things 
and if there were outliers
among those thoughts
he kept them appropriately to himself. 

In his backyard he kept a fig tree
which bore good purple fruit. 
He would take a few fruits
daily when in season,

leave the rest 
for birds and rats and squirrels 
and us when we were kids;
when we could we’d sneak in to steal

our sticky few, avoiding the wasps
who truly owned the tree, now and then
getting a sly wink from the porch
from Mr. Montressore.

When he died someone bought the home
and cut the fig tree down to put in a pool
and pretty soon we began to whisper
about them and how could they do that?

They must have been from somewhere else.
They must have disliked wasps or joy taken
in a quiet life moderately engaged with neighbors
and garnished by figs.

We whispered about them.
Made up stories about
why they kept to themselves
like monsters.

We learned what we needed to know about
the people who replaced Mr. Montressore
by the sight of a ravished stump 
beyond the far edge of the pool. 

It’s not like it was,
we’d say.
This whole world
is going to hell.

There are
some little things
that like being little
and you can’t change that
even if you try to grow them.

I’ve met a plant or two
that were like that — 
giving them a bigger pot
killed them.
Or maybe I did it
with some clumsiness
I did not recognize
at the time —
a torn root, a missed
watering. 

What happened to me, 
for instance?

I was supposed
to be better than I am 
but became corrupt.
I don’t recall when
hubris entwined itself
with my fiber,
and now I’m here
and the way back is dark
and the soil I’m in
will be wasted on this being
that is
much smaller at heart
than it appears. 

Attempted recreation (and improvement, I hope) of the second poem I ever published, in “Joycean Lively Arts Guild Review,” long defunct. Written in 1975, I think? Maybe 1976? Who knows now. I was in high school, no more than 15 or 16.

After shift I wait 
at the bus stop
where a loose dog
sniffs around and 
trundles away:
perhaps
to home;
perhaps
to other bus stops.

At the end of the bench
there’s a studiously
shaggy kid
sitting with
a shaggy copy of
“Beyond Good And Evil”
on his knee. 

He’s asleep 
or nearly so, oblivious 
to dog and man.

He does stir when the bus
approaches, jerks upright
into full fear
when he sees me sitting 
right there
looking at him. 

“Ah, college,”
I say to myself.

If I’d said it out loud,
he would likely 
not have heard me.

Go ahead and stuff that filth of yours
under your couch, out of sight
but close by, within reach
once you rearrange
all the furniture
to make it so.

Build a pretty box in which 
to stash it. Play pretty music
to cover the hammering
the sawing. Stain it
a rich mahogany. The hardware
gold, the lining green velvet;
look how that resets your filth
as a curious relic you keep to remind you
of what you are, although 
you never pull it out to admire
or shame yourself with it
unless there’s no one there to see.

There you are with your filth
all gussied up and well-hidden and nearby 
and look at all the other knick-knacks
you think make better sense for a world
you want to inhabit. You
have it all figured it out, you

well-adjusted fuck, don’t you?
At night, or sometimes
in bright daylight when you think
no one can tell what you are doing,
you crinkle
that handsome nose of yours
and delicately sniff the air;
is that a smile?