How much there is still held inside me
after all these decades of allowing
my supposed best and worst out to be 
criticized and praised out loud.

People say self-care
is more important 
than the Work. Rest and be well, 
they say. What you’ve done,

what you could do, matter less
than the resistance you offer
by being healthy and secure. 
Teach the demons, inner and outer,

that they cannot win. Somehow
they ignore the fact
that any battle has casualties.
If I do not survive in body and spirit

because I’ve put body and spirit
into the Work, who dares to say I was wrong?
Even if no one knows who I am
a year after I’m gone, I will have done my part,

and the part I leave behind
ought to be enough for all who remain here
to say I did what I had no choice but to do,
and that is how I will be fulfilled.

When you see your ghost
behind your eyes,

it is only right 
to offer it flowers, wine,
sacrifices;

offer it your apologies
for keeping it imprisoned
for so long,

then set it free.

You miss one hundred percent
of the shots you don’t take,
read the poster
on my former manager’s wall.

It should have read, “You miss
one hundred percent of the shots
I forbid you to take,
and one hundred percent of the shots
you take without asking me first.
Then again, it’s better to ask for forgiveness
than permission — but do both
at once one hundred percent of the time.”

Fifty percent of the reason
I quit that damn job was
that damn poster, and the other
fifty percent was how sick I was 
of the damn cafeteria. How I could never
eat my lunch in peace. How no lunch
was ever one hundred percent 
free of work, network, busy work…

no matter. I do not miss
one hundred percent
of what I stepped away from. I take
one hundred percent of the shots now.
I miss a less than exact percentage.

Let’s not, in fact, admit to there being
percentages at all for missing and taking now.
I take a tree, I miss a stone.
I miss falling, I take flight.

I took my shot. I took 
my missing it as an immeasurable ocean
upon which to set sail.

On one of the rare occasions
twenty years ago or so
when I came pretty close to 
Pulling It Off,

I lay upon
the bathroom floor surrounded by
concerned cats and pulled myself 
together even as I regretted my weakness,

telling myself I was doing It 
for others, staying here
for the fear of leaving
others to live in the wake of It

and how It would ruin their lives to lose me
that way and have all they knew of me
erased by the vision of me ending up
cold, bled out upon the ancestral tiles,

ringed by the only beings
who stayed with me
through the dimming
and the light going out at last.  

Twenty years or so later
I question that choice, uncertain
that living on past that day didn’t ruin
more lives than Pulling It Off would have,

thinking of the saddened people who’ve met me since then
and the ones who were there who’ve endured so much more,
and while I’m better now to some degree
and wouldn’t do more than think now and then

about trying once again to Pull It Off
and still on occasion
regretting my weakness at the time,
I am glad there are cats around me here, just in case.

Open a window to see
how things have changed from yesterday,
or even as far back as the day before,
the last time the windows were open.

Look into whatever is out there:
a cloud obscuring a dimmed sun, a front yard
damp with failed promise. Having expected
so much from you, it looks back in disappointment.

The weeds keep returning and although
that is to be expected, every year it’s
a source of your submergence into regret.
Your landlord says he should have paved it all.

There are days you agree with the old grouch
until the moment the sun comes out of its obscurity
and you remember the pink and green-slate leaves
of the hen and chicks growing in the broken front wall.

You did not plant them or plan for them
but they keep fighting through to the light.
The weeds you deplore are doing the same.
Hope, in its many shades of green, always shows up.

So you sigh and dress for changing weather
and prepare to weed — taking the unwanted
away, clearing for the desirable. You think about
repairing the front wall. You decide to let that go:

what has filled in the cracks
is too settled to lose,
and too perfect inside the damage
where it grows.

If anything at all
could divert the train I’m on
to some destination not promised
on its itinerary, I’d gladly
make it happen.

Ride the line long enough
and you realize
it’s just a long commute
to an unappetizing job site
that’s been marketed as paradise.

They said we were bound for glory.
I see glory off on the horizon
and I don’t think the tracks
will pass through there, not if
we keep going as we have.

I could have been a gambler,
a midnight rambler — anything
but good and holy. So: next
slow curve, I’m jumping off.
Likely end up broken and dead.

No matter. I’ll be still.
If they never find me I will
be right here forever, off
to the side of the cursed track.
Could have been so much worse.

In all the time I’ve spent
everywhere but here,
I only ever wanted to be
anywhere but there.

Here is also there.
Here is more there
than I care to admit. How
to be present anywhere

is my Great Unknown.
On the shore I long for desert.
In the desert I thirst
for sea and shore.

In a monk’s cell I would dream
of dissolute throngs; in a mob
I would no doubt separate
and seek a nook in which to cower.

Family, did you ever imagine
I would ever settle well, nearby,
ready to drop in for a visit and stay a while?
Friend, beloved, did you ever fully believe

I was as much a nomad as you are?
Inside, the best face I can muster
is a sour one. All outside will see
sweetness, a lifelong facade.

I only know how to be absence
in your presence, and I am sorry,
but these times being what they are
it is a living of sorts. Onward.

Time to rise, my friend,
but before you do, a question:
if you were to die while dreaming,
would you know?

Would you lie there cooling in the bed
while wandering through a palace
or riding a wild dog along a red ocean
at the sunset of twin suns? Would your heart cease

in the middle of finally getting
an answer from your mother
about the troubling dates of her first marriage
and your birth?

While dancing,
perfectly abandoned,
with the never-before-seen Right Light
of your Life?

In other words, if you die
in the middle of a dream —
if you stop being, just stop —
do you continue?

Would you even know you are
no longer? Are you certain?
Are you certain it’s Monday again,
and that you will be rising shortly?

The door to this house is open,
leads nowhere. Once inside
you are outside again and you
will keep entering and soon you realize
you will never get in.

No matter how long you do manage
to stay there you will have no choice but to leave
and then no matter how far you go from the house
you will find you are inside. Once inside you cannot stay;
once outside you cannot leave.

The people who live in the house are
shells. Hard, sometimes showing a trace
of what they once were, but overall when you listen
to them? Ancient oceans, the cry of drowning
in sight of a house by the shore, forever falling into the sea.