I don’t know
where the spaceships are.
They’ve been promised
so many times and yet 
they’ve never shown up
in any provable way.
Now and then a sighting
suggests we’re all
just missing them:
looking at the wrong time
in the wrong place. Mistaking
them for strange clouds,
dismissing alien music
in favor of the cluttered percussion
that is the human way.
One way or another
the absence
of the spaceships
is troubling
and I fear I’ll die
knowing nothing of them. It may
mean nothing, but I feel
that all they’d have to do
is show unquestionably up
and everything, whether miserable
or ecstatic, would shift a few degrees
toward balance. I hope
they come soon because
I don’t know
where the spaceships are
and in their absence
it seems that 
everything miserable
is swallowing
everything ecstatic.

Trying to understand how things happen.
Silence is the whiteboard upon which
the teacher writes with a small
stick of light. The words glow blue-black
up there before us all. Each minute of class
contains a lifespan. All minutes
are lifespans, in fact. Do you know
how many lives end as quickly
as they begin, how we thankfully
are never fully aware of it
but can sense, somehow, at times,
the sputtering back and forth
of ghost beings who were never here
long enough to register as such?
Human and inhuman alike, they mattered 
as much in their impermanence as we do
in the only slightly longer time we are held here.
The teacher writes on the whiteboard with light
drawn from the flickering in the room.

Trying to understand how anything happens
in such poor light. How in all this cycling
there is no moment where everything is alive enough
to have full agency, and no moment 
where everything is dead enough to have full peace.
The teacher writes in silence. Feel, it is written.
To understand how everything happens, you must
feel the static from all these comings and goings.
The stones themselves flicker under your feet.
Can you now feel them? Nothing and everything
happening at once, lives and deaths, existence 
a flame first here, then there. Consciousness
humming a steady note with a name
we keep meaning to look up to see
if one truly exists for this. The teacher
writes in what we once called silence
with a small intense light on the whiteboard, 
dismisses us without turning around, keeps writing
as we go out single file from the room. 

A gardener lies on his back in the late fall stubble
in his suburban garden.
He looks up and begs God for healing.

His hair’s dirt-full from lolling around out there
for so long. It’s been a day or two, you see,
since he first laid back and let the earth hold him. 

So, how about it, God? he asks. Are you willing
to heal me? I’ve broken so many parts 
I can’t do recovery any more. I’ve got cornstalk slivers

somehow in my back, somehow the dirt 
in my hair is coming to life, somehow last night’s rain
didn’t do a thing to clean me or quench my thirst.

God, meanwhile, is listening with only half an ear
to this. There’s a giant gap in Creation
that needs filling and this is just wind whistling through.

When God speaks at last it’s only to say, 
oh me. Oh my. Get up, beloved. You’re mistaken
if you see me in your details. I dwell elsewhere.

If you want to heal, forget about them. Get up and grab a shovel.
Look at the big picture. Pitch in and help re-weave the rip in the canvas.
Don’t blame me for the little cuts, the thirst, your wormy head;

just stand up and stop asking me to do all the work.
Spring after winter, fall after summer; that’s mine.
Tilling, planting, tending, harvest are yours. Get up.

To be lost
in a pocket
like a key or
an urgently needed coin
and know that
someone’s trying
to find you

To be right there
between their fingers
and have them 
impossibly fumble you
back into the dark

To be sought
then remain unfound
in a pocket or
a deep bag
riding on the hip
of someone
seeking you
calling for you
although they know
you are right there
with them

is to find
the hole
in the dark
in the cloth
and fall through 
to the hard floor
in the hope
that the sound
of you hitting hard
will serve to announce
your presence to those
searching for you
before they move on

Who needs a reason
to be naked
in their own
summer bed?

A heat wave ought to be enough
to make you happy
to choose the exposure
but here you go again, rationalizing,

telling yourself 
that if you die in your sleep
it won’t matter to you
if they find you like this and

it’s so ridiculous
to think you’ll be forced
to rise from bed and fight
a home invader:

if they kill you naked
you’ll be as dead as
if you were clothed;
if you kill them

you’ll certainly have time to dress
before the coroner
and the police arrive — 
or you can choose to be found

in your just recently savage,
still bloodstained skin,
still clutching the bayonet
you keep by the bedside

or the baseball bat 
you keep by the bedroom door
against such an unlikely 
invasion of privacy. 

Sleep naked, then. You clearly
already have found enough
to worry about and no one’s
here to see or care.

The elders have told us
the moon is not fully at home

in the sky. Whenever it
vanishes it is because

it sinks to its true home
under the waters. 

Ever since I learned this 
I have been throwing myself into ponds, 

seeking the moon on lightless nights, 
but have never found anything. 

I have lately been eyeing
the ocean as a place to look:

the ocean, full of its own light 
at times but more often darker;

full of life, full of death, full of
whatever it is

that makes me long to dive in,
and if I don’t come back up?

Don’t assume I’ve found
the moon. It may be that instead

I’ve found the reason the moon leaves us,
and I’ve made that my reason as well.

you were saucy
once upon a time

in love with all
the damned objects

tingling if you heard
anyone mention Satan

forbidding the term
“adulting” from your discourse

except in complaint or
humble brag 

you were easy-wild
once in a while 

sat up all night
cybersexing distant names

with one hand
from a close-up screen

while below you in the family room
you thought of as hell

the others sat feet apart
and never talked at all

you were busy
back in the day

with a life no one but you
claimed to want for you

they almost had you convinced
you were the crazy one with your

black leather and star studs
it felt wrong to them that you brought them

into the chamber of orange plaid upholstery
and something soothing on the stereo

you were something
you were onto something

I’d like to see
the world become
as bright as corn
and as sweet

As shiny as
a sword fallen
to the ground
when dropped
by the soldier
running to embrace
their child

I’d like to taste it
and find it
as sharp and thrilling
to the back of my throat
and the front of my head
as a good whisky
after a terrible day

There have been days
where I could see how
it holds itself
above our slash and burn
Where the liquid churn
of the feeder’s many
starling voices
made me forget
they are another part
of the problem
we’ve made for ourselves

It’s too hot already and
it’s barely sunrise
but a good sunrise it is

In the time left
it’s grand to see the ailing world
still able to be as bright as corn
solid as song
strong as a Scotch in the soul
ready to show us
how great it can still be
and will again be eventually

NOTE: I would just like to apologize for my absence for the last few days.  I’ve been a little under the weather and simultaneously very busy.  Not a good combination for a writer.  

It is a not-small thing, maybe just
a man-thing. I don’t even know
what that means, not anymore,
it may be wrong to say it, maybe
I’ve always been wrong and it’s
more of a white-thing or a consumer-
thing, a privilege-thing made
for Americans by Americans —
an agreement-thing, consensus
enforced by having grown up and 
made to live by immersion in its
warm and fusty air — 

that sense of competition
with whatever that is scurrying
behind you that is never there
or visible when you look back
to see what’s catching up,
the perpetual echo of shoes
dropping, doors shutting
back there you should have 
walked through instead of
plodding along this way,
forced through the warm
and fusty air — 

the sound of your weight
pushing past regrets into
this brainless way of being 
whatever you have become
today, now, being yourself
having come to mean 
unconscious respiration,
gasping in the warm and 
fusty air — 

where it’s always
the national anthem
on the stadium speakers and always
the same accurate deploring
of the lyrics by some
and always fighting immersion
in the vastness of the masses
who don’t care much
about the song
as long as what follows is
a good game or race, where always
the provocation to a fight
is present and part of the 
attraction, where it’s a 
man-thing or not, just
a human thing to be this
deep in the struggle to breathe
as one treads water, the fetid
water we have no choice 
but to struggle in as we struggle
to draw in what we need
from the warm and fusty air. 

We have not discussed this 
but you should know that 
there are specific ways 
in which I can be easily 
moved to impulse;

for example,
let’s say you tell me
something about myself
that I know is true
but refuse to admit:

something pleasing
or desirable will do it
most strongly
as I tell on my mistakes
and flaws readily,
almost glorying
in the one-sided frankness
of agreeing with others
about my faults and failures. 

With this admission
and your compliment
I am now moved to create
a disaster of myself
that will end my appeal: see,
I told you I was a problem
and you didn’t listen. That’s 
not on you but on me.

What a world 
you live in
that you encountered
me and thought I was 
worthy.