Time to light the lamps
on the end tables
in the clean, dated living room
and welcome expected guests
to your home for sitting time
where all will talk to each other
in awkward tones as they’ve not sat
together this way for a few years. 

Now to the kitchen to unwrap
the gifted food and the soft drinks.
A few from the other room come in
to offer help and together you move
the food around, the plastic glasses,
the napkins, the paper plates. 
Everyone’s so careful not to spill
a thing and in fact nothing spills.
All remains perfectly placed as if
that’s how the rest of the world
stays intact.

After, you speak out loud
to the remaining guest:
the invisible, the unspoken,
the one they came for.

“It was nice, wasn’t it?”

A job listing in my morning inbox:

“Denial Resolution Specialist I”

for someone who wrestles the gap
between a patient, a provider, 
and an insurance company
that will not cover
a treatment for illness.

I don’t know if I could do this: take on
a full time job as an angel wrestler;
if there are even angels
in insurance offices they would likely 
bruise my hip before they would acquiesce
and pay up; I’d walk out every day
limping, my very name shifting
as I considered
my failures, my victories —
who am I even, my daily question;
the casualties incidentally
piling up and up, a mountain 
higher than the rescues,
neither close to the height 
of the business of healing
and how it happens or not.

I cannot imagine
what a “Denial Resolution Specialist II”
deals with. How they even breathe
under the weight of the title. 

Take it as it comes.

The small explosion of joy
when your teeth come together
and the Early Gold yellow cherry tomato —
last of the season — bursts in your mouth,
you are grateful that it’s good
as you cut down its browning parent
before deep fall and subsequent winter.

Take it as it comes.

You don’t think much of justice any more,
so when comeuppance happens
to someone deserving, or when good happens
to someone deserving? 

Take it as it comes.

Stripped of love, denuded,
clothed in loss and neglect.
The least brush of a hand across your arm
raising a specter of possibility
and you dare to let a smile show
as if everything is in fact 
going to be all right.

Take it as it comes. 

The end only becomes the end
when you reach the end
and you at last understand
that you’ve been
walking autumn streets, and only
autumn streets, from birth to death. You see 
the home of your dreams 
set among trees draped in late red
and late gold. Another burst of joy.
Another glimpse of fairness. Another
smile coaxed forth. And then,

whatever comes next.

Surrender 
the whales to their 
extinction. It can’t be helped.
We have better things 
to do. Bigger, better,
ocean-churning fun
and commerce to ply. Why,
let’s give them up and 
keep going. We can, we
should. 

Abandon
honeybees. It can’t really 
be stopped now, can it?
Can’t run around
catching each one
and cradling them in our 
hands. No fun in that — 
once again give them up
and let’s keep going.

Monarch butterflies — 
who needs them, those 
Halloween handkerchiefs
on the breeze?
We can make simulacra,
work them into some promotion,
turn them into seasoning for the season.
Keep going. We must, we should.

We can
surrender anything
we want. Surrender our
teeth, suck in our lips and 
see what falls from the open corners
of our soft mouths. We can 
teach ourselves to sting and pull honey
from the market as gardens
struggle to thrive. The kids
are going to love the memory
of butterflies, much as they
love dinosaurs. See how
we keep going for as long as
we can, as long as we are here.

Not a container 
for your perceptions. 
Not a box to stash yourself in. 

Seek no hard place in me.
You should not feel free
to come in and grind an ax.

Not a brand
or logo to wrap around
some crap you want to sell.

Be yourself with me
while I am being myself,
precisely because I strive to be

wholly myself. Let’s enter into 
tandem being.
Side by side. Enough.

I filled the feeders
and no sooner had I 
turned my back
upon them that
the downy woodpecker
landed upon one
with me not being more than
a couple of feet away,
not yet even off the mulch
that surrounds them 
in the front yard,
the front walk still
several feet ahead —
the concrete
that I’ve always seen as
demarcation, mine 
versus theirs, and
when I turned back
to watch him, his red
patch bright before me
as he hammered so lightly
upon the seed block,
he did not seem concerned
and I was so honored to be
thus disregarded.

Suppose you stop being
an entire universe for one minute,
become static just long enough
to allow for a chat with the universe
you now and then think you see next door,

the one that claims
to love you, the one that suggests
a merger or a default recognition
of the folly that one is not one
with others, that there is in fact 
only the One Universe and each of us

maintains our fiction of being separate 
because without those individual perceptions
the One would cease spinning and weaving
and begin to collapse, would indeed neither begin
nor end its dissolution, there would be no slow
entropy toward closure but instead — eh,

I am getting ahead of myself. Suppose
you stop being whole for a moment,
give up the private chants and personal incense
in favor of looking to the left and right
and underfoot and overhead for signs
that you are not alone and physics
and chemistry suggest bonds beyond
your conception. The imagined universe next door
is just how you conceive of your inner separations 
in order to justify locating them out there somewhere,
maintaining treasured fictions beyond credence.

There is no universe next door shaped like you, you giant.
You long to kiss or fight yourself, you colossus, you cosmos.
You are not alone and there is no wall
to be breached, you conqueror; you warrior: mounted and ready,
supple and loose for whatever comes next. I don’t know
what you think you might find in those eyes you seek
but there’s nothing there you don’t already contain. 

Suppose you stop being your own universe
and see you are not the center, that you are not alone,
that there is only One, that it laughs at you thinking
such grandiose thought; that you are in fact held up 
by the arms of the One as you spin through this;
that you are forever cradled, unready,
playing your small part, forgetting your lines, 
forgetting your marks, allowed to lose face,
allowed to begin again.

wooden matches in
cellophane-sealed packs
three boxes to a package

found when I pried open
a cabinet drawer on the back porch
unopened for years

wrenched it open
with brute force and
a big screwdriver

that was all
that was inside
how old could these be

as the fireplace was sealed 
decades ago and
the wood stove was removed

when my father
could no longer cut wood
and my mother didn’t want

to pay someone
to do it when the kids were too
far away to do it for free

this is why
the house has seemed so
cold for so long

they couldn’t get
to the matches
and there was nothing

and nowhere here
to set a safe fire
and make the home warmer

strike anywhere
printed on the boxes
but why test it when there’s

no reason and no hearth
when all you can do
after one test match is lit

is blow it out

“I always keep some whiskey handy in case I see a snake…which I also keep handy.”
― W. C. Fields

It’s a philosophy I can get behind —
carry the danger
and the defense from danger

with you in a deep pocket or 
sling bag, easy to access,
within reach at all times —

poison and counter poison, 
which is not to say poison
and antidote as that’s not quite

how it works.
Which comes first, the venom
or the liquor? No reason

to make a hard rule of it. Thirsty?
Peek into your bag
just to see the snake. 

Take a few belts
of whiskey and soon enough
all you taste is snake.

Does your snake have
a name? Is it Daddy?
Is it Mommy? 

Does your whiskey have
a name? Is it Money?
Is it Jesus?