Unloved head
engorged
with refusals.
Rejected body
flaking, sugared up,
hurtling toward blindness.
Severed connection to earth,
air, water, and all else.
No true belonging, no safe relations.
Profoundly diseased,
immersed in delusion;
cats don’t care,
demand feeding
and attention. To offer
those things to them is
a purpose. Mechanical,
disconnected purpose;
means to an end.
Been here before.
Unsustainable.
Enough for now.
I’d like to be prairie
but am forced to be war.
Grind and not ocean.
Hustle, not canyon.
I once had a voice
of forest and meadow
but am now distant murmur
of ending on fire.
You prefer my former.
How could you not?
My latter leads nowhere.
I don’t want to see.
I’d rather be alone
with sunset on a mesa
or before me a sunrise
over endless blue water
but that’s not the place
for me now, or hereafter.
Instead I’m the singer
of gears full up with gravel,
chosen and forced to stare
into the sparks
that may ignite a prairie.
Remember the prairie
that is ready to burn?
I keep watch. Alarms
in my voice, are my name,
are my all. You sing of the ocean,
you hover above it. I will warn
of what’s coming. Cassandra
and I understand
who we are.
Tied down
like a fresh shot buck
to a roof rack
(future meals for a family)
Or like a tarp
over a roof under repair
Coverage against
sudden blue sky wind storms
What looks like carnage
or restraint
is sometimes
just protection
as a future sometimes requires
a good rope to bind its past
tightly down until it is at last
transformed into present
Just now one arrow
or sharpened word
landing in an arrow’s place
Bandaged hand holding either
pen or sword but either way
struggling with grip
A face so common
no one feels any need
to put a name to it
Did someone stutter
or was that a
mechanical noise
A voice made of
ground down gears
and silt still in its teeth
Can anyone dance
to a song first sung
by stones falling
from a ledge to
a highway below
and then a car
falling from there and
in this car was a child and
no one dared to climb down
and see what happened
An adult climbed out
years later with
a broken grip
weapons and
a quest
Never mind a dance
There’s a whole book in there
somewhere
says someone
who really doesn’t know
anything about these things
among us: there is no time
to fully explain
how things have come to this pass
but whether because of
a fear of differences,
an unresolved history of slights,
a record of injuries sustained by parties
brightly recalled or dimly suggested;
a daily microcosm replicating
galactic collisions of culture
alloyed with equal parts suffering
and misunderstanding of the Other;
small unending matters of rape upon rape,
murder for entertainment, mayhem
as amusement, enslavement and subjugation,
genocide on behalf of profit motive,
and the reimagination of Creator
as Personal Injury Attorney seeking to pull
whatever it can from Creation itself
until it implodes, or all of the above, here we are.
Regarding the recent unpleasantness:
we endure and shake our heads as if
this can go on forever because of how long
this has gone on, because of how
we have built our home upon this
as if it were a foundation and not
a pile of sharp rocks soaked in old blood
and new flesh — but oh, the stench of it.
How it burns the head from inside out.
How it chokes our children.
How this decay has become
our banner. How we have died away
from each other. How leaves shrivel
as roots loosen. The sun and moon
turning from us. The earth and ocean
say: Together now, or pass from us.
Why I am unimaginable
these days —
appearing whole to myself in no mirrors,
neither literal nor figurative;
merely an apparition when in person,
an uncertain wisp to some, dismissed
entirely by others.
All I can think of, really,
is the discomfort I feel
in various parts of the body,
the structure I used to feel
was a grand little house.
The creaking these days
from the corners and the eaves
drowns out any clear being
in the decay. Somehow I’m still here
but undiscoverable right now.
Disintegration; not showing as whole.
I’ve been the birch, the
definition of bent. Look me
up and see how weight
falls from me. It is
how I’ve been able to hold
myself as lovely despite
my pock-scarred
inconvenient bark. Pure
arc, an icon of resilience
when seen from afar.
I’ve been the oak,
stubborn unhollowed
pillar. Despite the rain
of acorns denting what’s below,
seen as somehow
admirable for my strength
until I fall and crush others,
or until someone else
falls and is broken
while trying to pass
over what I have left behind
year after year.
I should have been
sawgrass or perhaps
wild oats, a purslane
closer to the soil. Some
weed I cannot name now,
less obvious, more or less
scarce or extinct. I still
would have been more alive
in your imagination, but
fixed and unavailable to be
downgraded. Less metaphor
than good memory. Beloved
in a static way.
To relax and
let my mind wander
is to trust it will
eventually find its way
to a bright somewhere
instead of
becoming lost
in this darker wilderness
where I started,
marveling as whatever
path it takes
dips and reveals
creatures in my shadows
who are unfamiliar and
whose motives are unclear;
yet still feeling certain
that this journey
will be worthwhile even if
it merely affirms my desire
to soak in as much gloom
as I can find before I go,
preparing me to be comfortable
should there indeed be
only a void beyond this life.
Done for the day
with trying to choose
how to hold this earth
safe. The only world
we have is in danger
and I need sleep. I’m
a failure, I guess.
I should be burning down
a factory or torturing
someone who makes
plastic straws but
I need sleep. I’m
a slacker, I guess.
I should be beating
a beef farmer
or stepping to a guy
at a gas station
waving a piece
of my mind in his face
while he tries to fill
an eighty gallon tank
in his work truck
but I need sleep. I’m
a hypocrite, I guess.
Staring at screens when
I ought to be enraged.
Spending money
when I ought to be
foraging. Refusing
to dance to their music
but I need sleep. I ought
to be abolishing work
but I need sleep. I ought
not to participate, I ought
to withdraw. It might be
why I sleep as well as why
I always wake up
longing for sleep.
if you ever wake up one day
more transparent than the day before,
closer to ghostliness than the day before,
you may feel at first that this is
the ultimate tragedy toward which
every act in your obviously broken timeline
has pulled you (or pushed you depending
on whether it was in your dreams or your past
where it all began). you shall look through
the formerly corporeal palms of your hands
down at your shimmering feet and see
they are no longer concealing the ground
upon which you walk. you shall sit down,
frightened of sinking through the floor, sifting into
the basement like sand through a sieve.
at least, I did. of course, you may find a difference
between how you disappear and how I am
disappearing. I will just say there was no need
to be so frightened at first on my part because
I soon realized that little had changed
since I’d never left much footprint behind me
before this, having always trod lightly,
never leaving a mark. instead I found myself
floating, walking as I always had
through the same rooms I’d had for years,
touching common things so casually
it was as if I wasn’t feeling anything as I raised
the coffee cup. from elsewhere in the room
any onlooker would have seen me as not
entirely there as I sipped, and that
would have seemed entirely normal. I am,
I think, the only person surprised at how little impact
I’ve had on things around me. a see through man,
a whisper of a human, touching but never fully holding
anything. now, at last, I am frightened.
again, your mileage may vary. at least, it should.
Listening to today’s
pop music:
how comforting
it is to hear
music not written
to privilege
who I am, who we were.
How glad it makes me
to be at last
completely comfortable
with being un-affected
in any strong way
by the hits.
To be able to
decide with no sense
of being dragged
by the emotions
into debates
and passion
about this one’s
merits and that one’s
evils. I can listen and say
that arrangement is
interesting, how do they
make that sound,
the production on this
is wonderful, is boring,
is cluttered, is clean;
then I walk away
back to my own guitars
and songs, taking
what I need
back to the forge as fuel.
When now and then
something new does
set its claws, does
dig in and seize
the means of emotion,
I count it as a late-life gift.
Sometimes I even discard
something I used to love
to make room for it
in my chest where
favorites live. And
the next time I reach for
my guitars and my songs?
It’s there. I am open for
new business. I’m alive.
A line on a blank page:
now is the time to recover.
Whose fault it is
that you never became
the artist you thought you’d be
is unimportant. Unless
it’s your fault. After all, you took
the meds that kicked you over
like a traffic cone and now
conventional wisdom says
you’re too okay to make art.
Then you took the courses and now
you make enough money to live
paycheck to paycheck. School
got you here and art stayed behind.
You lie nightly next to your partner,
screw enough to fall asleep, share life
and love and ease enough
to make the art seem dimmer
every time. You did it all.
Here you sit before sunrise
with one line on a blank page
in front of you. The house is quiet
but for the grinding of teeth.
Now is the time to recover.
An ever-moving stone
at the bottom of a stream
rounds itself into sand,
loses itself in time.
The stream loses itself
as it cuts into stone
to make more sand and thus
becomes a river in time.
Sit beside it a while.
In time you’ll also lose
enough of yourself
to become a new thing.
Will you carry the same name
you’ve always used
back from the riverbank
into your former world?
Do you believe
that world,
alone among all others,
will be the same when you return?
You will now hear a story
with the usual opening
and closing words,
but in between? There is
a stairway in there.
We see the stairs
and hear the emptiness
of the stairwell and how it echoes
when the climber is done,
but none of that is in
the space
we call the story.
The story tells us just enough
of the climber’s life to feel
we know them but of name
or face there is nothing in the story.
We find a single orange peel
on the landing between floors
and all we know of that
is that the story was written
to hide the rest. If there’s
a moral, it’s unknown. If there’s
a lesson, it’s hidden except for
what we already know about how
what we are told conceals
the why of the untold parts: why
the sweetness of the orange and
the strain upon the body of the hero
are left unremarked. Why we are allowed
to see so little and yet become
so engaged, to pretend that once
upon a time we all lived happily ever after,
even the people in the stories we tell
who lived mostly in the gap between
the seen and the unseen and did not in fact
tell us anything they did not want us to know.
We never learned
this story of the Garden:
how someone whose name
is unknown now,
whose existence itself
has been erased,
stepped up after the Expulsion
to steal a kiss from one leaf
of the Tree. Did not gnaw
on the Fruit or lick
the smooth hard Bark;
simply laid one small kiss
upon one Leaf. Wanted to be
able to say that they
had tasted the source
of Knowledge and then went on
through their life without
any consequence for knowing
just enough to get by;
to have a hint of Truth
linger on their lips without it changing
anything inside them. Then they’d sneer
at Adam and Eve for being
so willing to go so far in on the Truth
that it ran them out of Paradise
and into the Wild.
We never learned this story of the Garden
because it was kept from us
so we would never dare to question
if they were right
and so we would never know enough
to be sure they weren’t.
All we have is a view of that sword over there
and the genes we carry that
keep us afraid
even as they tell us to try
and get by the flames
to see what we might be willing to do
for even a small taste of something
that will assure us of the way home.
