A fire from the center of the earth
breaks out now and then
to remind us of what is possible
and beyond our own capacity.

Flaming, streaming rock
turned plastic, slippery, and red
comes to the surface
through generations of old stone 
and when it catches anything
it burns everything and our weakness
is made clear.

We stare into it, 
offer it fear and faith. 
Name it for a goddess or god,
curse it as an evil, 
flee it and photograph it
and tell stories of its potency,
its devastation,
its swift re-creation
of the land it seizes
or the ocean it boils.

On the horizon,
a glow announces the coming
of the central fire. The world
made new, in ways we cannot
replicate. No wonder

we fear it.  No wonder
we gave it a god’s name,
a goddess’s name, a divinity
all its own.

Everclear in the air: “Daddy 
gave me a name,
then he 
walked away.”

I think hard enough, decide
this is my song.
I drink hard enough, then
I know it’s not.

If there’s a song for me
in the air already,
I’ve forgotten how to find it.
It’s like Everclear’s song-daddy:

left a mark and 
vanished.

My daddy didn’t drink.
Quit before I was born.
Sometimes it felt like
he should have kept at it.

Like it didn’t matter
that he wasn’t drunk.

I’m sure there’s a mom song
out there for me too.
Once again,
I can’t find it. 

Ozzy, Danzig, 
Pink Floyd, 
maybe some older bit
of nonsense.

None of this
does the trick.

I think I’ll find my songs
on a Soviet-era radio.
Something with tubes,
something drab and static-full.

There are too many songs
in the American air.
Can’t believe any of them.
Can’t buy any of them as mine.

Daddy gave me a name
then he stuck around.
Mom gave me a birth
then she stuck around.

I wore out my welcome early.
Don’t need a song to tell me that.

Stingy Night
takes its time
with me.  

If I had paid
more tribute to it
I’d be in it now,

that’s for damn certain.
This long day 
would be over

and I’d be enveloped
in warm, blanket deep
blue and black.

But last night I stayed up
till dawn, playing at
being one of those

who do that. I’m not
one of those who do that
though I recall

trying a few times.
The price was too high
and I’ve stopped paying.

I’m a physical dead head
mess. The whole system’s
gone bankrupt

as Miser Night
holds back its gifts.
I’m not asleep

when I need to be.
You call it
insomnia, I call it

the payback.
I don’t dream
like I should, I call it

the lost wages
of not sinning enough.
And when I do doze midday,

twitching in my lazy seat,
Night counts its coins
and laughs, that clicking keeping me

from falling away
completely.  Night
breaks me, leaves me broke.

The poems often start
with an anchor to time:
dusk, midnight,
eclipse twilight,
predawn. 

It’s never two fifteen PM,
you may note. 
Never suppertime,
never late morning
coffee break. 

Why do you suppose so many
of these poems begin
at liminal moments?

Asking for a friend.

Why do you suppose
there was never a full length manuscript
from this poet? Why do you think
they never got there? 

Asking for a friend,
a friend afraid to admit
that they want that answer.

Afraid to say that answers, 
whether given freely 
or puzzled through,

are often the graves 
of minute reasons to remain alive.
In those times when the quest
is more invigorating than the arrival,
accepting answers
feels like moving closer to death. 

Asking for
a friend, as always,
one seeking
to understand

thick, stagnant truths
like the one about how
no one wants to touch
this old body of mine,
not even me. The one
that pushes out
another question:
why is that? 

Asking for a friend, one
tired and purely
disappointed friend.

How is it that one can be
so terrified of uncertainty freezing solid
one trivial answer
at a time?

Asking, you know, as always, for a friend.
Asking for one curiously ignorant friend.

Asking for a friend,
one like a shadow
who won’t step out
and be seen as solid —

say at two fifteen PM
or late morning coffee break — 

one who prefers the blur
of in between moments.

A friend who ghosts away
into the surrounding dark
once they’ve heard the answer.

Y’know,
when I had a job
I liked my job.
My HR job —

yeah, I was 
one of those.

I liked the problems,
I liked the people
at my job.

At my job
the bosses liked it when
I listened
and answered 
as they expected.

If I disagreed or took another tack
they called it “recreational arguing”
and dinged me on my review,
year after year,
for doing so.

A disrespectful thing to say —
as if I did not care, as if
this was a game to me — 

as if the day to day labor
of how to make lives better
during the third of a lifetime
people spend at work
was amusing, was not worth
consideration
from multiple angles.

They won. 
They won
a different game,
one I didn’t know
I was playing.

Years ago now,
all of that. Water 
over the top
of a failed dam.

I do not argue anymore
for game or love
or righteousness.
They taught me
how to play the real game —

the one where I sit
and wait in the dark.

I sit and think
of how to play the game.

I sit in the dark
even while 
the dark sits in me. 

the difference between
humans and other animals
is that we insist
on defining in detail
every difference between ourselves
and other animals.  

the difference between us
and other animals
is that we create charts
that show the differences
among wasps and hornets and bees,
another that does the same
for butterflies and moths.

wasps, hornets, bees,
butterflies, and moths already know
they are different from each other
and do not care.  
serene in their varied ways
of folding their wings, 
secure in their multifarious stings,
aware of what is required of them,
they are certain that they are
what they are, are not
what they are not.

the difference between humans
and other animals
is in how much we put into 
charting difference,
in how much we gain
from parsing it out.

the other animals
don’t need to work so hard at it.
they already know.

they already know us, as well.
they do not see our differences.
they see us as humans regardless of differences.

see how they side-eye us,
every one of us.
see how they sidle away
whenever any one of us
closes in.

If you go through that door
you will enter a room

already full
to the ceiling

that somehow
never stops filling, 

a mouth
that won’t spit, that only swallows.

That other door
in the far wall

opens
on an empty room.

I have seen people
going in there all day,

no one has come out.
The room is small and 

there’s no question about it:
it is empty. I wouldn’t

go in there. You
will not come out.

I don’t know
where those people went

and neither do you.
Do you want to risk 

vanishing? Perhaps
it’s better on the far side

of Whatever.
As for me — I stand

between these rooms.
I get to choose,

to comment, to advise;
my advice

does no good to others
as far as I can tell

and for myself
I will not choose. Why?

Go into the stuffed room
and try to breathe. Go into

the empty room and 
try to exist, or at least be seen,

then tell me why
I need to decide. 

While you stammer
I’ll try and come up

with a satisfactory name
for the room we’re in,

or maybe I will do
no such thing. Maybe

I’ll just keep its name
to myself.  Keep it safe

from everyone who insists
on choosing one door or the other.

I’m done with being
at all creative

It doesn’t pay in any way
even with the obvious
lack of financial incentive
known to all

But the emotional
and spiritual payoffs
that have been ascribed to it
are in truth nonexistent and

in this forest where the leaves
are nearly wealth and 
nearly perfect there is no exchange
as what is theirs remains theirs

and here I am with poems and 
sketches and of course
the odd guitar riff
Once again there is nothing
to be taken from this work

It is all about what you give
and what you pretend to receive

So while I do not object to giving
I must confess I’ve given much
and must conserve my remainder

because I’m certainly old enough 
to understand how little
I’m likely to truly receive

I have certainly had worse days 
and some of them felt like this one,
like the world was sneering at me
and my feeble attempts at competence
while also crushing every good moment
for others as well in a tempo of
damage increasing worldwide.

Here I am thinking I’m mired
in yet another catastrophe
that in the long run will be minimal
compared to what will be true misery
for so many others.

I should be thankful instead
for such small problems as these
that feel like knives now,
like scalpels cleaving into me.

I pull it together.
When this is done,
what will I have left?

Gratitude, resolve,
relief; I hope as well 
that if I am worthy

I can rest in the knowledge 
that I did my part 

to brush aside my own pain
and do what I could
to pull those less fortunate
from the teeth
of this sneering world.