I am direct when, as I rise to the daylight’s challenge,
I say: appreciate the oyster for its difficult shell.
I am wearing no such metaphor on my own armor.
It is hard for me not to love the oyster

for such impenetrability. I burst into fragments inside
from quick, combustible self-disgust whenever
I use the word “I.” Who is here? Get out, musher, mingler.
Don’t remember letting this one have the reins.

Do not like to speak of this, so don’t push.
No oyster here, full of salt and sloppy gut.
Don’t care that you think this could be easily consumed,
a luxury for the luxurious. The rings of this shell,

ragged, a terrace whose contours could be read
well enough from outside, ought to tell you: get back.
Get out of my head, you miserable self. Get back from
the perimeter, readers, interpreters. Not here for it,

not your delicacy. You get what you are shown
and are entitled to little more than, perhaps,
a vain attempt to handle what looks like little more
than a rock. Put it down. Back away. Don’t assume

it will open in due time, in your time. Long time
you will wait for that, driver, handler. What is offered
is all. What is held back? Guess again and again.
No oyster here. It could be empty. It could.

Every day there’s a morning
I wonder how long it will be
before we damage the sun so much
it will refuse to show up, but it seems
we aren’t venomous enough
for that just yet.

Did the earth pretty well in,
tossed some junk on moon and Mars,
left a few things adrift to crash
where they may, if ever. Maybe the sun
takes no position on all that; maybe it’s
too big to be bullied, but somehow

I suspect we’ll try. It’s in our nature.
Someone’s going to try it. They
will wake up one day, point at the sky,
say, “Next. I got next,” and ball up
their fists and go to war against the sun.
The sun will flick us off like lint.

We won’t know when to wake up
on those first days. We’ll sleep through it
until it gets cold and we starve. The sun
won’t show up again till then and it will say,
“Apollo, remember? Huitzilopochtli, Ra,
Mithras, Inti — you forgot, and you found out.”

I tell you I long
to vanish into a year
where I am not myself —
1842, 2148, I do not care —
any year at all that holds out
a certainty of erasure, one in which
the person I am now
couldn’t possibly exist.

You ask how I cannot believe
in myself, in how I could be
a reincarnation of a past being
right now, and that if so
I was likely myself as I am now
back then; you don’t understand

how I cannot hope
that next week someone
will make a breakthrough
on immortality and I will indeed
remain myself far into the future.

You ask how I could deny myself
such possibilities. I lower my eyes.

I cannot look directly
into the face of someone
who dares to see me
as worthy of either.

A reconciliation between
inner and outer storms comes
during a walk in early spring,

first warm day in a winter while,
pushing too warm for
these clothes; princess pine

beginning to push past
the winter leaves toward
long missed late day sun.

Stopped on the path by the sight
of a wide spray of fallen oak leaves splayed
upon the softly crumbled trunk

of a tree — not their source, one that itself fell years
before, its surface riddled now with ant-roads,
its flesh chewed and weathered nearly into sand.

The light upon the leaves bleaches them
to a pale brown. No doubt brittle to the touch
from death, but from here they look like

a snap shot of banners or kerchiefs
flying in a brisk wind — image from
a pageant, renaissance fantasy; then

I shake myself free, let nature be free
of my interpretation — layers here of past
becoming slowly, unstoppably new;

one more step and into view comes
more princess pine, green rising
by the side of and fed by the rotten trunk.

You know, at least half
of the people you see are not
people, he says. And it’s not
like you’ll ever understand
the difference — no glasses
can help with that, it’s not like
that movie which only got it
a little right, mostly wrong. I’m
never sure. Not even about you.
I work it out in my head and the clues
don’t add up to certainty. The guy
at the convenience store, he’s not
one of them. Lets me use the bathroom
if I need it. I have to do him now and then
in return, you know what I’m saying?
That makes me sure he’s a human.
A man’s man for a man, you know?
That old this for that, that old scratch
each other’s itch. I’m not sure
you’re real — you never ask for
anything, just hand over a dollar
when you have one to offer. It’s good
to see you here. God bless,
even if you are one of the ones.
I’m not sure about you. God bless.

To ingest cannabis when life
is apparently free of obligation
is to examine the word “obligation”
as it it were a spear pointed at your time.

Some of us can stand there
in front of the spear,
see it coming clearly,
then duck away with little consequence.

Others simply
catch the spear in both hands
before it can wound,
and fulfill what’s been thrust upon them.

I am neither.
I am of a different group,
those who will automatically step
from the spear’s merely projected path

unless they fear that they can not
avoid it — and if
they can not avoid it,
they do not partake.

This may feel like
trivial information
to you. If so you do not see
in this one small fact

how much of a life
may be ruled by a sense of
obligation as
unavoidable danger

and of even
potential pleasure
as a place
of near-certain death.

If I am a temple, I’m tired enough
that the censers won’t light, broken enough
that the congregation fears a collapse,
soft enough that my gospels dissolve on delivery.

If I am a garden, I’m soft enough
to be tilled and planted, tired enough
not to care that it hurts, broken enough that
what is sown might not grow.

If I am a boat, I’m broken enough
to be an accidental submarine,
soft enough to sink slowly, tired enough
to lie on the welcome bottom until I’m gone.

Tired, soft, broken.
No one is supposed to wake up
this way — alive, awake, refreshed;
those are the preferred words.
Nonetheless, I use tired, soft,
and broken because this
is how I begin year 62.

Remember the first book
that ever turned you on
to how you wanted to live
forever after? Do you recall
the letdown when you learned
how wrong it was about how
a life should be lived?

That day when you learned
there are more things
in heaven and earth
than have been contained
in your literature,
when you saw the author
as a monster or worse,
a human; that day when you
put the book aside and said,

it’s my turn to step up and be
star-blessed with wisdom earned
through disappointment. My turn
to write the book that will disappoint
another one at some future time.

I’m reading it now
and I’m not disappointed as you were,
though I can feel how strongly
you reacted to that first devastation —

so much is contained in your literature
that I’ve just abandoned my faith
in my heaven and earth to live
in yours for the moment, turning pages,
fingers crossed, silently praying:
don’t screw it up.

Dream-shopping while odd music plays
in the backroom of the dream grocery store.
My foot tapping — wind droning, hand drum beat
and a strum — is that bandurria or
fado guitar? I should know this.
Should be able to differentiate. It’s
my dream after all. I don’t like my
instruments mixed. Give me purity,
not this wholesome mess of intentions,
though I admit to sustained grooving

as I try to pick out something for lunch
that will do more than just sustain me.
I want to eat something transformative.
I want to consume dream-flesh and become
all that suggests. The music keeps playing
and the counter clerk glares at my dawdling
and prodding about what each food can do.
“Try it and see,” is the refrain. “But I can’t
eat it all,” I cry out to the dream space.

I am beginning to love the music now
precisely because I do not understand it.
It’s evidently too much to ask that the food
be as simple as the music is not. If I am to be
transformed it will be on an empty stomach,
possessed by rhythm, longing for more.

I wake up, humming.
Where is my guitar?
So much to do before breakfast.

Sit and see the things.
All the things.
Make a plan to observe
the best things, the ones
that make for a best you
sitting there pleased
with yourself.

Examine, for instance,
the winter moths still
astonishingly alive, then
think about life in the
concrete, the me music
of surviving.

The things can be harsh
or soft. Sit with them
day or night, sit with
whatever your choice
of time of day or turn
of weather.

Maybe there’s a dog, maybe
some hawk takes a bird.

Observe the waning moon,
how the night around it
is a shade lighter on one side,
not a comment
on your life or any life,
just the moon being itself
in sunlight’s angled path.

Learn that you
are not the boss of things.

It is good to sit and see them
and learn that things
do not center you, that things
do not even try.

Trying to read
a book tonight
with my name on the cover;
title, “My Story.”

I don’t know
who wrote this but
most of the chapters seem
improbable.

I hear there’s
a movie being made from it.
I’m sure they won’t ask me to star
or consult me on the script.

Nonetheless, I’ll pay good money
to sit in a theater and watch.
Just me and my Milk Duds, just me and
my giant Coke, just me and some foods

that might kill me. That would be
something, all right. One for the sequel —
a man dies from self-inflicted damage
while watching himself on a screen.

Aren’t you dying to see yourself
fifty times larger than life? Isn’t that how
you want to go — I know I’m good
with it happening that way. It just feels right:

better than dying in bed, better than dying
a hero. When I’m gone you’ll have the fake book
and the lights camera action of the film
to remember me falsely by. Meanwhile,

I’ve got this book to finish and hope
that they cast a better person than I am
to play me. It won’t be hard. This book’s
a good lie, with good bones to work from;

exactly the type of book I’d write about myself
if I were inclined to do so, though I’m not.
I’m better as reader than writer. I’m better
in this than I ever was out there.

The disappearance of light this evening
was a comfort. I’ve fallen out
with the need for engagement, lying here
on the couch with nothing to do
but note every sign of aging
and disabling, no need to hide dismay
or fear. Strangely, I felt none;
it is accounting time. 
For once, no feeling other than
a dispassionate summing up.

Outside the feeders have gone night-quiet.
The usual flocks are somewhere
doing the same slow rebuilding
as I am before the light dares us all
to come back into daytime
where every weakness shall be exposed.
Until then? The couch, the thinking,
the steeling of my own wings
for tomorrow’s flight.

how swiftly
untouched
becomes
apparently untouchable
and unloved becomes
utterly unlovable
in our heads and
cores

how easily
another’s invalidation shatters
our own experience of
our own validity

how often
them breaking a window
to escape from us
as if we were on fire
translates into us thinking
what we see in the broken glass —
shards, blood, scraps caught
on the points — is an accurate
mirror for who we are

we must close our eyes
to all that
and chant ourselves back

repeat:
I am not
their wreckage
neither toxic
nor shattered
neither invalid
nor in flames

open your eyes