These junky feet
suck. Neither big nor small,
invisibly broken since I was young
and now the damage is catching up —

I’ve been places with them, I admit,
some places I do not regret,
but now I can’t stay upright on them for long.
The long stumble of the past few years

led me here to a seat on a broken couch
and here my ass is going to stay.
I’m looking at my feet, good only now
for kicking — buckets, rocks, myself.

I’d cut them off — but then, why stop there,
and if I dulled the blade while cutting them off
I might be unable to get to the sharpener
and continue up the body. I suppose I could

bring all my knives out
and have them close so I didn’t have to waste
time sharpening this one? I’m glad I thought of it
before I started sawing away, before drowning

the carpet with blood and the air with screams.
Glad I can put these feet to a productive use
one last time. One last journey ahead of me:
a short one but one I should have taken sooner.

But it’s so nice here on the couch
that I might wait a bit longer. See if things
change. See if I change. See if the pain fades.
See if anything at all presents itself anytime soon.

The black cat lies on my chest
and demands attention. She doesn’t care
about civil war or climate change —

just wants what she wants,
what she always wants. I’m not certain
love is the right word for her part in this.

I’ll call it that for the moment.
For the moment it feels like the right word.
Love holds her to the simple path

of touch and feed and sleep
and while it won’t stop my world
from dissolving around us both,

it will do for the moment to keep me
from despair for the future
that I know is short (for me at least);

I have no illusions tonight —
just the cat, the comic films,
love’s promise of a full night’s sleep

erasing the day, the week,
the year, the era, and all the sick air
I’m so tired of breathing.

Admit to yourself
that at least some part of you
has at least now and then wanted to be
full-on mediocre —

that you longed for a living room
with matching recliners
and cheap Van Gogh prints
on beige walls,
an endless string of Sundays
of mild chicken dinners
and football, always football afterward.

If you can acknowledge this
you can then go on
to admit your utter fear
of the thrilling days
where you find yourself now,
this moment in history
that pushes you outward,
finds you attempting to burst
from your public skin into
some new and unfamiliar form —

it would have been so wonderful
to have been unremarkable,
to have been comfortable,
to have had the luxury of banality,
to have been able
to be part of the weak scenery,

but here you are.

I’m not looking for death,
just acknowledging it when I say
lately I’m striving
for great last words
to leave behind.

It would be so, so good
to push back
from the desk and say,
“At last.”

Every poem’s been
an attempted epitaph
or suicide note
that wasn’t good enough,
so I had to stay alive
to write a better one.

You’re going to moan,
“how morbid,” I know.
Call me goth or melancholy,
tell me I’m obsessed to the point of
mediocrity —
I have heard it so often
I take it to heart now and then

but I have no other way to be fully alive
than to look the inevitable
right in its deep dark maw
and try to stuff something down there
that it will choke on and
be unable to dissolve.

you’ve had
a long needed
full night’s sleep

upon rising
try not to lament
this daybreak as a literal
fracture in the good mood

all the fears of yesterday
remain of course but

instead for a few minutes anyway
enjoy the gentle crack
of the beginning of weekday
routines in your neighborhood

an egg must shatter
upon fulfilling
its purpose

Certain people
have stories
about nights
they couldn’t sleep
for the wind whistling
in the crabbed trees
outside their childhood
and how the sound
masked the steps
of the bad parent
coming up the stairs

They tell them
every chance they get
assuming
the rest of us
are condemned sailors
and this is our part to play
in their lives

One of them
is bending my ear
almost double right now
with the weight of
that long ago inflicted
still acute pain

and I’m chafing
at the telling because
I’ve got my own
long rehearsed story
queued up and ready to go

and there doesn’t seem to be
an opening for it here

We’ve all been there I know

Don’t you hate how
that weight
hanging from your neck
gets heavier with
their every word

Simply stated, tonight
I have looked at my life.
Where there should be

terror and misery, I find instead
the face of peace and
a sliver of beauty,

what Rilke called
a form of terror
located this side of terrible.

Maybe I’m not far enough in
to see the far side tonight
and fall to my knees in fear.

If so, then this is as far
as I care to go right now.
I will allow myself to pretend

for an evening. The horror
in my life can remain beautiful
tonight. Let me sleep till

the broad light of day.
I’ll deal with it all then,
and at least have the memory

of this peace to steel me
as I turn to face
that deadly angel.

If your shadow ever
breaks open before you
and a shinier you pops out
like a fresh chick from a dark egg

what you should do
is eat the shell at once, swallow it whole
(because nutrients, y’know)
then shoo that newbie away into the forest
or desert or teeming city streets —
wherever you find yourself —
to fend for itself.

Swallow enough of your shadow
and you will change for the better,
we promise. Look
at how that new you is doing,
for instance. Whenever its shadow
hatches a shinier child
it sucks up those fragments
then mothers that new bird
all the way, every day.

You wouldn’t do any of that, of course.
You wouldn’t have a clue.
You would drink in front of the kid
and kick it and call it names
until it wilted or rotted clean through
and dulled itself right back to being
just like you —

which is why we’re telling you,
don’t do it. Don’t try.
It will hate you for it
but be infinitely better off on its own
even if it doesn’t survive,
and the rest of us will be, too, because
no one needs another just like you.

To all my well-loved ones
throughout this time,
across all this space,
I beg you not to despair
for more than a moment
over that which appears
desperate and beyond change,

for the single lesson of history
is that anything
may shift in any direction
at any point
through the appearance
of something unexpected:

a plague,
a wayward ship,
a rogue wind,
a single bullet.

All we must do,
always, is learn
to see the open door
beyond the moment,
gather ourselves into
a phalanx of hope,
and walk through.

If only I could tell you
everything I know
about this space
into which you have come

and see how your face might change
as you learned of what is in
those dark corners
and got a glimpse under

its shadow-born foundation
to see the hard stone
it is built on,
I might feel better

about how I breathe now.
I might learn to inhale
without fearing the worst
has entered me.

I might imagine
exhaling no trace
of poison into
your available air.

Instead, wordless and unable,
I sit and wait for you to just feel
the same nameless
everything I know.

It’s all I seem to be able
to do: this waiting, this stunted
breathing, this fear of full living.
This selfish dying within

that offers you nothing
but precipice.
It is unfair to assume
that you should fall when I do.