I mention my pain out loud and
to facilitate my healing, kind folk
point me toward a hymnal for the Natural Congregation

of the Church of the Hairy Woodpecker.
Pick it up, they urge me. Go into the woods
and sing along, or better still, just listen.

I do and it’s certainly a lovely rhythm,
but not meant for me. I’ve tried
and the peace of nature’s not my language,

not in my range; I cannot fake it well enough
for the congregation gathered there
not to know and not to stare.

Instead I’ll sit here and keep the windows open
and think about what it would be like
to be rid of the kind folk, to just leave

the windows open and let the Church
say what it will about the one who won’t come
to the service. He’s got his own

God, or hymnal, they might say. If they’re right,
I’ll sit in waiting for that for the rest of my life;
the windows are open. Let it come, and let it be soon.

You make a damaged statement
and every last friend walks out of your home
while you sputter your mystified apologies.

Afterward, in bed, you lie awake just long enough
to be satisfied that you didn’t retire too early;
you sleep well for a change.

Isn’t it magnificent to be completely alone
and allowed to be the freakish, broken dog
you always knew you were? This is what

your family made you for, this angelic feeling
that you would be perpetually misunderstood:
whatever would come out of your mouth,

no matter when, no matter who was around,
even them, you would say the wrong thing.
You get up, offer a whimper, a bark. It’s all

annoying. It’s all the wrong language
for those around you. Hello, you say,
but it comes out good bye. I love you,

you say, but it spills out like a popped
blister soaking the earth and it’s too late
to shut up, to stop; no one’s listening

to what they call your bullshit
You might as well eat acid, a gun barrel,
a Nazi talking point, a dagger cookie,

and a baby one right after the other. It doesn’t matter:
you’re a bad dog. They don’t want you
anywhere other than on the killing table now.

Today I shall begin anew.
I will tell myself
I was born
to play this role.

Even before I get up I will lie here and pretend
I have changed overnight
into someone who gets the right things done
at the right time. I will lie in bed and tell myself

that if I do it right I will get to do this again tomorrow,
and again on the day after that. I will erase
previous days from my track record —
all of them, if possible. I will lie there and decide

that even if I wipe the record antiseptic-clean
I will keep my name the same so those
who have disapproved of me can change their minds
and praise me for the transformation.

All this joy to come from just lying in bed
and running new lines. I swear won’t think today
about yesterday and how I blew it. How I have
blown it over and over

by lying in bed too long and thinking about
yesterdays, the permanent record
of yesterdays strung into a necklace of lead.
I will lie here and think of anything other than dead weight.

To maintain isolation in this crowd
of friends, good people
gathered in a deep backyard
around food and smoke and
hours of catching up
after a plague year, seems
such a ridiculous pose.

To imagine that
a tragic face and story
should be your sole currency
among such friends would be a sin
if sin is real; instead
call it a willed stance, a facade —

which is not to say that
your story is not tragic and
your face does not bear the marks
of it, but to say that every face here
bears marks and yet somehow
there are still loud birds unseen
in the trees and lazy dogs and cats
and laughter all around.
You can be gloomy anytime.

Let go for one afternoon
and see a promise here that
after hard seasons
there will be softer days, and
even if you never attend
another, someone in the future
will recall this night
and your presence here
and be comforted by it.

I should be content
to look at a mountain
for what it is
and not as a comment on my life.”― David Ignatow

Outside something something
nature. Creature, plant,
rock, shadow on ground.

Inside something something
human emotion, insight. Illumination.
Metaphor as deep as depth.

Between something something
and something something a wall
unbreachable. Out there we call

“the world.” In here we call “soul” or
something. We call poems “keys.”
We try to make world into soul

with a key to a door we think we see
in the wall. Something, something;
something about the lock being broken

and something about trying to make things
work for us that are not our concern
while something laughs behind our backs.

That’s not door. That’s still wall.
That’s not a soul and maybe there’s no
world. This is a poem, or something, it seems;

a key that unlocks Nothing.

Your parents are going away,
diminished ghosts drifting off.
Whatever shall you do?

They are feeble, spiteful clouds
now, raining perpetually on everything.
You dry and fold their clothes

and fret to yourself about how
you will ever empty the house
while they thunder, cast bolts, start fires.

In other words, you keep living as you always have,
doing all the hard work you think is necessary
to hold them, like smoke, in your hands.

Nothing has changed. Look down at those palms,
those naked palms. All that’s there is a scent
you can’t follow to learn where they are going.

Check yourself. There appears to be
a thin coating of slime
on your affirmation of purity,

a subtly gleeful aggression
in the way your principles allow you
such arrogance, perhaps indicative

of a willed inability to compare and contrast
your own righteousness on one subject
to your complicity on another.

If I were looking into a mirror
while doing and saying these same things
I hope I’d shut up and tear my face off.

If I found your face underneath mine
I do not know what I could do
except wall myself in with mirrors

so I would always remember
where I came from and never be able
to go back into the world.

If I later tore that face off to find beneath it
only the bones that history gave us both,
I would do the only thing left to do:

go back out there and let the people I’d hurt
judge me, then shun me or embrace me as they choose
while I bled and tried to grow something new.

I knew a broken shell
with a name and a shape,
a solid being somehow
more or less invisible
to people on the street
where they lived.

Some said they had
terrible history,
some said they cracked
in the recent past,
some said nothing. Most

said nothing, just crossed
themselves or looked
away from the thing
rummaging through
the recycle bins once a week.
It was the eyes or the clothes
or the nonsense they spouted
that kept people looking away

and one day they did not
come around anymore, some said
they were the dead found behind
the convenience store but there was
disagreement about that but not about

how much my dog missed them,
how they loved to pat my dog
whenever they passed my own
precariously inhabited building,
long out of code, the unregistered cars
in the driveway, the weary yard
full of feeders and birds; whoever
that cracked shell was, I didn’t know,
but I trusted my dog
for missing them when they were gone.

The secret to not feeling pain
is to swim in a world of hurt
so thick and profound
you cannot tell the difference between
agony and getting by.

I’m sorry if this
suggests that personal heartbreak
is my job to such a point
that I appear to have tattooed it
on my eyes, shading everything.

Believe me, I wish that were true
for it would suggest that I believed
in redemption, that I believed that
erasure was possible with
work that allows for art’s divine intervention.

I might believe that, if
the right god had ever appeared to offer
a hand. If the art had ever taken me closer
to that throne — bah. There’s no
one throne, no matter what the books say.

I’ve read them all, even written a few.
The secret to not feeling agony
is to make a place to put its overflow.
Art can do that. It can’t erase it completely,
but out there, somewhere: equilibrium.