While overthinking
how it’s going,
you lose
the moment.

Is this sunrise,
or sunset?
Without understanding
directions, all at once

you find yourself
uncertain. It’s just
a pretty sky. Your memory
refuses to help; you can’t tell

if it’s cooling
or warming up;
whether those distant cars
are coming or going.

Which way 
you are supposed to face
to decide what’s coming
or going is uncertain.

You close your eyes,
still unclear as to what
is going on but 
it’s dark enough now 

to pretend it’s going
the way you want — 
toward dark, toward light.
All you have now

is the moment. 
It is empty.
You are there.
Otherwise, nothing.

What else is there to do
but overthink everything
from here — past,
present, future if there is one.

Make it all up. Keep
your eyes closed. It is
neither warming nor cooling.
It is, instead, everything at once.

That ripple
up your left arm.  That
awful sense of
something crawling.

Nothing there, though.
No bug, no mouse,
no unseen being to be tossed
aside in spite of its
invisibility; you can’t 
get a hand around it
so it must not be there…
correct?

Of course, unless this part of you
has slipped into a secret world.
Unless you are lying on the bank
of a long vanished pond,
your arm immersed in ghost water,
spectral critters there
foraging upon 
your forearm.

You wake up shuddering,
thinking…
but is this thinking?
Isn’t this
an entirely different way
of knowing?
You can’t be sure of that — 
all you are sure of
is that you won’t be soon
falling back to sleep. 

It begins in quiet
at just predawn
while seated with 
back straight, pressed
against the couch,
my hands folded in my lap.

It seems I should be
doing something
since I am awake.
Early to bed, etc.; so
the saying goes. But
I’m surely not healthy,
laughably unwealthy;
wisdom slipped away
when it sank back
into a dark dream river
as I opened my eyes.

A breeze rising in my backbone
blows through from there
to sternum and is swirling 
around my cooling heart.
I hear a ticking from somewhere
from a clock I don’t own. 

My father died not long ago; died old.
My mother will die older; likely soon.
Everyone I know
is on that same clock.

It seems I should be doing something
since I am awake — early to bed,
etc. Of course. It’s a proverb.
It’s wisdom. Apparently
it’s mine now. But what is it
I am supposed to do next
in this remaining life
when all this wind is in my chest 
and a hidden clock is growing louder
in my ear?

Standing in the weeds
behind the bus stop,
waiting. Hope
I do not catch a tick 
and Lyme disease or Babeosis
or have some larger
unknown something
sneak up behind me.

I of course could step out
into the shelter of
the glass box provided, or
get all the way onto 
the sidewalk to wait,
certainly — but that’s how
you become a target.

Let’s be clear that the bus
holds its own threats,
the destination as well is
dangerous, and the ride home
when all is done? A doubling down,
a repetition; a breeding Ground Zero
for the fear in just being alive
in these days.

I could just ride the bus
with my eyes closed
and headphones on, 
I suppose, as so many do
because there seems to be
so few options;

can’t help thinking
that somewhere out in these weeds
may be an Answer disguised
as a threat
and I’m just too conditioned 
to believing in the danger 
of this world to turn around
and face it down and 
draw it close and
see what it truly wants
from me,
from the frightened world
we’ve made.

Dirt under your fingernails
when you get ready for bed;
that’s enough
for today. You did the work
and the evidence is upon you
and clear.

Outside
weeds lie drying
on the pavement where
you left them. Tomorrow
you will pick them up
and take then to the pile
along the fence out back.

Once they’re dried and brittle
some will be used
to spark the firepit
as kindling for an August
night’s party flame. 

It will be a lovely night — 
you’ll have vegetables 
grilled fresh from the vines
you’ve carefully saved 
from the weeds you burn
ceremoniously as you feast.

Look down at those nails
before you scrub them clean — 

take a moment to savor 
the deaths you caused today
to bring forth the most abundant life
for you and yours,
you beautiful man; you,
provider. 

Fell out of bed into
indifferent space. I’m sure

I didn’t know anyone
there, but there were faces

that seemed familiar.
I cried out, I’m falling, falling,

falling out of bed, and I was
pushed back up from below

and pulled back up from 
above. Then, found myself

awake, trying to figure out
what was pillow, what was

mattress, who was below
and who was above and how

was it any of their business
that they should all be awake

at the right time to assist
in that recovery? I’m still

trying to recall those faces
I saw in the liminal world

between falling
and settling back into bed. 

Who cared enough to move me
back into this world? 

May I please know all their names
before I fall again, that I may

greet them one by one and love them
wherever I land next time.

Irving, the big guy from next door
is in basketball shorts
and nothing else
drinking a cold brew coffee
with milk
while sitting on the curb
in front of his building
humming softly. 

Either that or it’s
a pile of trash left from
the pickup yesterday
and a couple of upturned
recycling bins. Maybe
that’s a raccoon, maybe
there are two going through
what’s there and that’s where
the humming is coming from.

Keep the shades down.
Don’t try to determine
what’s true. Sometimes
it’s better not to know.
It’s a city, anything is
possible and usually
many things are true 
at one time here. It’s not
as simple as that God fellow
would like us to believe.

Maybe Irving has always been
just a couple of raccoons
in basketball shorts
humming an Edith Piaf song
in homage to the trash
spread before them
and maybe nature is benign
and malignant at once and 
the whole Good versus Evil thing
was forced upon us
as a restraint against marveling
at complexity?

No, it’s better sometimes to keep
the shades down than to raise them
(even just for a peek) and dispel 
all the joy and enlightenment  
of doubt.

In flames,
as if I were
a forest;
washed away,
as if I were 
a bridge;
shaken to ground
as if I were an old home 
built before
earthquake code. 

Now, you say.
Now you can rebuild.
It’s glorious.
It’s your dream.

I am alone with it, though.
The sheets are drunk
with my sweat
and only my sweat,
and this is not how
I imagined it.

Broken as I am,
on fire as I am,
on the ground as I am,
the flood lapping and rising
up this one hill upon which
I have found myself,

glory and the honest joy
of rebuilding
seem quaint notions 
upon which to rely.

Imagine you
are currently 
breathing pure Hell
directly from a mask
while submerged 
in the cool waters
of Heaven.

Imagine
it is making you more
than ordinarily Evil.

Imagine you have never
in fact been so Evil before 
and you don’t in fact
know for certain
what the purest
most rotten version
of such air 
should feel like.

Imagine
you’ve convinced yourself
that this is the right feeling
to carry into the next world.

Imagine who you will
leave behind. 

Imagine who you will regret
leaving behind. 

Imagine that small regret
turning into self-righteousness. 

Imagine you are breathing pure Hell
and that you now believe 
this is better than pure Heaven.

Imagine the reek of your world on fire
and that you are convincing yourself
that it is not you
but the flames on the tracks
you are leaving behind
on the people you have loved.

Imagine that
the fireworks proclaiming
and celebrating
your misguided vision
of your miserable life

are the perfect backdrop
to accompany your false rear-view
of the Evil you have left behind.

Imagine
you have nothing left to lose
anyway
so why not? 

To plant yourself between
what you are leaving behind
and a new path

is to hold yourself up
as if on crutches
you feel you should not need

but which have somehow
gradually become lodged

under your arms
without you noticing
the process.

Their presence to you
insinuates that
you are edging

toward a failure
of some sort,
mundane or

spectacular,
likely imminent,
possibly inevitable.

You are the between
times. Between
epochs, perhaps.

Crutches
have no roots.
Custom says you

will be moving soon
in one direction or
the other. But

you could defy that.
You could rise.
You could pass into

the earth below.
You could hold your breath
until you expire and vanish.

Or you could
hold fast to where you are
and see what comes to you

there. It doesn’t matter
to the earth if you waver
from side to side,

after all. What’s one more
indecision to the path
of Time, after all?

You’ve been this way
all your life, all through
Time. If you don’t

survive, if you don’t
thrive, it will not matter
to Time. Throw

those crutches down,
then. See what happens.
Nothing binary, perhaps.

Nothing that requires more of you
than waiting and accepting
whatever comes from that.