I awoke and rose
61 minutes later
thinking I’d just looked at the clock
a minute before.  I must have
spent a minute
thinking about why I was awake,
then fallen back to sleep.

It’s as if I stopped
for a whole hour.
Only the memory
of having seen the time
tells me I’d existed then
in a time before
this groggy chain-smoking moment on the couch
in front of a screen waiting to be filled
with proof that I do maintain a presence
during the moments
when I am unconscious.

It is 7:15 AM, EDT, 8/29/09.
All hail 4:59 AM, EDT, 8/29/09.

It was raining then, as it is now;
I was hungry then, as I am now;
the urge to rise and work and smoke
were all the same back then.
Nothing’s changed except the time,
the light in the windows,
and this documentation.

If I go back to bed now,
(and I will)
will I even wake up
again?  If I do, won’t my first thought
likely be the memory of this moment?

How, exactly, does the future ever arrive?

The ragged hair of the unkempt lawn
offers a mixed message:

cut me, restore order;
let me grow, keep a wildness in the city.

I imagine all the possibilities:
then, with a sigh,

pull the mower from the shed
and begin to hold my small place in the world.

In every Paradise —
and there are many,
despite what you’ve been told —
there is a weathered door
or shabby gate
for letting in the things
that are alleged to be anathema
to Paradise. 

It’s no mistake or oversight.
It’s part of the plan to make things
perfect there.
It’s not a Paradise unless
it takes into account
that human need for
energy expended against
threat, and
also offers comfort
for those residents who are not happy
unless some taint of the Other
is possible. 

The existence of the door
is known to all,

and in the gambling dens of Paradise
there is always action, heavy action,
on the exact moment when the hinges
will creak.  Breathless with anticipation,
the happiest people in the universe

always hover silently
around the monitors,
hoping for that sound.

What was said
was in and of itself
unimportant:

there’s a pile of tinder
under every eardrum
waiting to spark.

So the curl of smoke
was to be expected,
the smolder should have been

no surprise…
except to the burning one,
who felt the searing at once

and (with no real say in the matter)
spread it out, letting it burn
out and away from its source.

“Scorched earth” — the words
have a ring to them.
A hot ring, a lovely ring

better than anything
anyone can say,
including what was said.

To say out loud
that you adore silence
is to lie.

Lies must
chatter all around
truth.  Truth
stays silent
because it can.

There it is!

No, wait…

Thinking hard
about how best to remove
my memory of my face.

Is there a miracle cream?
A scalpel?  Chip at it
with a mason’s hammer?

No.

Find a camera, preferably
an old Polaroid
and an endless stack of film.

Take shot after shot, from all angles,
of myself,
by myself in an empty room.

Or, if possible,
find someone who loves me
to do it for me —

then ask them to leave.
Hang the pictures up
in neat rows on the blank walls
and study them

until the “self” disappears.
Only see then the bones, the pores,
the tiny blemishes, the leftward bend to the nose.
Drowning in reflection, I’ll soon forget

that this is a “man”
I know, and become lost in the flow
of errors and mistakes, of the ugliness
once so easily subsumed in a glib blur
I have called “my self.”  Thus

compartmentalized,
the wear and tear
will be all I see when I look in the mirror.

Just another batch of ruins in the crowd.
Another answer to my ego:

look, look, at the failure of coherence!
Imagine the freedom that will come
once I see only the pieces
and stop believing I am any one thing.

I don’t do pretty.
I do real, which is not to say
that pretty is unreal: instead I mean to say

that pretty is as pretty is
and so is ugly, and so is
nondescript, which is what
I most like to describe

and what most catches my eye:

the random and completely
featureless (to our esthetic)
nature of All Nature, including

the artificial one we have made
while preferring to forget that a skyscraper
and a road scraper are as much natural phenomena
as any beaver dam or ant hill:

unimaginable to the blissful photographer
who maneuvers that camera of hers
so carefully to avoid

the wrapper in the foreground,
the rapper in the background:

all that is as meaningful
as any bloom, and negation of the whole

is ugly, which I see is real,
which I see is not pretty by definition
but which must be told.

Excited? Passionate?
No.  Not me.  I listen
to sidewalk and kitchen talk,
any sound of my own
veiled in the meter of a slow rain.

There are times I wish
I was thunder, or more: lightning
tearing a tree down and startling everyone
within view of it,  leaving a hole behind,
or splinters; at the very least, my own story.

Instead, I’m the hiss of
a presence sensed, soaking through,
making the ground soft.
Everyone who walks by
can see where they’ve been
because I’ve been there.

you don’t want to breathe
today

when each sound is music.
to blow a wrong note

seems criminal.
still, you must

breathe, so you go into
a place you think is empty

and continue to do so,
only to find

hosts of song entering,
ready to drown you.

your eyes are swimming,
your lungs filling with voices

without malice
that are still killing you.

to live, you become
a fish: you learn to live in it

until you can evolve
back onto solid ground.

until you can sing solo again,
no one listening, your voice

slung out on the air
in search of a chorus

that can sustain you;
harmony, not unity.