Longtown Larry
and his big-headed friend
with the unknown name
(though they’re always together)
sit talking in the town beach parking lot at sunset
in Larry’s blue Dodge Ram truck
parked at an angle to the lines
far away from the remaining few cars 
again

They’re talking about 
White supremacy or maybe sandwiches
hunting dogs or muzzle velocity
or how to dismantle the colonial state

Either that or they’re in love
and this is all they ever do about it
in this beach town where everyone
knows Longtown Larry
and his truck and the friend
with the big head and no name
who isn’t from here

It’s worthy of suspicion
on so many fronts

One of my gods lives
off Pound Hill Road
near the overgrown source
of a spring. I could drive you there
in forty-five minutes.
We can get there by sunrise
if we leave now, 
and we should leave now.

Another god stays
out behind my shed
where they sit centered
in a ring of mushrooms. 
(You call it a “fairy ring?”
I don’t.  No fairies here —
they didn’t come over with you,
no matter how you hope for that.
I have another name
for what does live here, and
I’m not telling.) 

I only go there 
when passing
from this side of the yard
to the woodpile where
there may in fact be
another god who’s squatting there
until I burn it all up. 

Neither god
seems concerned at all with me.
That suits me just fine.
I give them the space
they deserve and need;
they stay happy.

None of these gods,
in fact, care much about
what I do. They are
non-interventionist.
I pay attention to them
because the landscape 
demands I know them
and that ought to be enough.

I know your God — a singular
God, a capitalized God —
lives elsewhere. You get around that
by saying God is everywhere at once.

I’ve asked mine about that.
They say they’ve never seen your God
around here and having known them
for years, I think I’ll trust them on this.

The car is warmed up.
Are you coming with me?
Maybe you’ll see something
worth seeing, maybe not;

maybe you’ll deny everything
from your God to my gods
to the sacred nature of red ripe
tomatoes. Maybe you’ll be right.
Suit yourself. I’m leaving now.

Four months now
of arithmetic sleep
instead of rest. Doing

the math of rent and
utilities, his own food
versus the cat budget,
chewing on his 
inadequacies by the numbers,
his heartbreaks by the score,
until just now. 

Hard to say why;
maybe a nightbird’s call
heard during
his meager sleep
pierced his dreams
and changed them;
maybe yesterday’s storm
purged his atmosphere;
no telling. Not our place
to know for certain,
as he did not. 

All that can be said
is that he woke up
without a spreadsheet
in his head for the first time
in four months and 
while he knew it was 
just tucked away
for a moment and not gone,

he felt light enough without it 
to step out on the
soggy ground before coffee
and look at the washed streets
and the fearless sparrows
on the feeders. 

The greatest longing, always,
has been to belong, to find
a place to belong, or even
to belong in whatever place
I was in.  Whatever place

I found myself in, I decided
I would belong there. I tried.
I tried to belong — not fit in —
I could always fit in — I wanted

that lived-in look, that perfect
archetype look. Sometimes I’d get
close, but then I’d wake up at dawn
or before and see the dim street
and say, this is not a place for me,

I do not belong. I’m too — elsewhere
for this. Too off-world origin story,
too mystery parentage
for this settlement. Whatever,
I’d then say, that’s all too much
romance for a potato-man like me,
and I’d move on. 

Moving on is where I belong.

I take close up photos of my face with my phone.
I discard several of them, choose one, manipulate it
into a more sullen shading that feels more me tonight;
cartooning it, making a graphic novelization of a man.
I take this changed photo and with the power vested in me
to do what billions of others have done, I transfer it to
the world-shrouding cloud and place it or some link to it
where others can see it so that they may identify my words
by my face. Some offer approval at once, others ignore it.

I am disappointed that this is my face tonight.
I am disappointed in how I see myself.
I am disappointed that this seems honest and accurate
and somehow, the best picture I’ve ever taken of myself
or even of anyone else, or anything else. It is so —

ugly. Ugly is not considered a valid word and someone
will likely contradict me upon reading this and say no,
this is you and it is beautiful. All things are beautiful.
Every face, every person, every, everything — except
Evil of course, that’s ugly. Always ugly. 

I look at the photo again. It’s honest. It’s truthful
about the current state of a man with multiple illnesses
and a graying conscience. The light manipulation I did
was as honest as the framing and the lighting. I did it
to grow and accent truths worth noting about the face
and no attempt at hiding the changes has been made.
The face hides nothing, and I am here to say
ugly is a truth as strong as beauty, and more common.

If you must insist on all things being beautiful,
if you must call this face beautiful, then I must ask you
to consider what you may be denying
about the ways of the world. You aren’t doing me a favor.
I’m fine, or at least at peace, with not wanting
to stare enraptured into that face that was never anything
but a deviation, long before I took this picture,
long before I started making this face my own.

Hope, said Emily,
is the thing with feathers
and she was right, but not
in the way you think —

Hope is in fact the thing
with a torch and a sword
fighting for you in dark swamps
and reeking bogs. Standing between you
and the cop’s headlights.
Laying a hand on your shoulder
as you tremble near the railing of a bridge. 

The feathers Hope carries
are yours. After such battles,
Hope pulls them from
a bag where they’ve been kept
for you.

Hope puts them carefully
back into place upon you: trophies
for valor doing double duty
in your wings.

Hope says: fly.
I will hold you up,
will bring you home 
if you fall. Fly.

Love and honor
for the days
behind me;

a deep sorrow
for the days before me
that I will see;
hope for those
I will not see.

Trying to imagine
happiness, to call up
unalloyed memories
I can feel in the moment —
and though I am failing

I am at least reassured 
that I know I felt it more than once
and that there will someday
be people
who will feel it again,

who will fall to their knees
in praise of life and living
and beauty. 

Tomorrow, I will see
if that’s enough
to lift tomorrow’s darkness
when it comes. Today,

though, I just
sit.