Again upon rising I do the simple math
of how many steps I will need today
to get by and through without
drawing the wrong attention
from the right people.

I don’t care about them much as individuals
but I allow their gaze potency,
even when I can only imagine 
what of me it brings to their minds.

It was a good sleep, a good dreamless night,
then I woke to this fear as I often do.
I woke to the notion that I am a mistake,

and that this day will pile on
affirmations of that fact
until I fall again into the dark
and manage to forget
who I think I am.

Not even six AM
and it already feels like
one of those days.

One of those days
you will look back upon
a few days later
and shake your head
and say it right out loud:

man, that was
one of those days.

And of course you
will know what you mean,

but someone listening
will misinterpret it certainly
and think it was an angering day
or a saddening day

when all you will be trying to say
is that the day felt stale and familiar
from the beginning, yet another day
like all of them had been lately,
and it was neither
a good day nor a bad day,

just one of those nondescript days
where you could have tossed it from a window
into a dirty pile of similar days in your back alley
and ten minutes later you’d be unable
to distinguish it from the others
despite the fact
that it had just happened
and it ought to be fresh enough to stand out.

If you tried to explain all that to that listener
they would be bored and walk away muttering.

If you tried to explain it to yourself —

how you came to have
such a monstrous pile of boring days
piled up out of sight of everyone 
behind the facade where you live —

I think you’d stop talking,
choke on words, eventually scream.
You would scream into a pillow,
into a closet, into a glass or a mirror,

thus completing
yet another one of those days.

If I could somehow split
my head in parts
and allow multitudes inside
to comfort and cleanse 
what they found there, 
I would.

Open my face
like a vault door.
Let in anyone 
who offered to help.
I would.

Asking for help
is not my thing
because in the past when I
was far less what I am now,
too often the helpers
acted more like vandals
or thieves; it is hard
to open my head now
knowing what’s been 
stripped or taken.

If I could open my present
as I have opened my past
I might find a future.

Saying that is so easy
it must be false.

Saying that is so easy
and I am not. 

Saying I will open the vault doors
of my eyes, shut the alarm
of my mouth, and then let anyone in
who offers?

Saying it like that
is like ending a story
too early. Like
killing off the hero
before they even start
the journey.

Ever rumble
with your ghosts
by your side against
real live foes? Have you
ever reached into
your pocket for 
something to use as 
a weapon and found
a family history, once sharp
but now dull along the edge?
When you pulled it out
were you surprised by
how light it felt in your
hand and when you looked
at your hand were you shocked
that all you could see was 
your bones clutching
the dear dirty book?  Did you think
you were really going to get away
from all of them? They’re
your family, dead and never
gone, and they stick by you;
sometimes you fear them
and sometimes you hate them
and sometimes they are all you have
to wield in battle. They can really
hang you up
the most, they can really
piss you off, they can really
look you in the eye.

You can’t keep going
forever. At some point
you fall over and wail
from your new place 
on the ground.  

At some point 
it becomes too much,
this aging. This failure
of parts, this damage
regime taking over.

You stare at a picture
of your parents. You understand
how it was for them, how it
is if they are still here.
You fold your head down

to your knees and do
whatever it is you do
to invoke something
to stop it: prayer,
positive thought, 

a hearty scream into your 
ailing skin. You swore
you’d be different,
you’re the same; maybe
that’s the worst part.

I burst through a door
and climb stairs to
a friend’s apartment.

Did I leave my cell phone here,
I ask? You’ve never been here
before, they respond. And I realize
they’re right.

So I go back down the stairs and
out the door and start running,
face aimed down, scoping
for the phone along a route
I may not have run at all
for two miles back to my house,

till I realize there’s a phone
on my hip in a clip, nothing 
I recall, and this is not my phone.
No idea who it belongs to. No idea
who these people in the contact list are.

I keep running back to my house
hoping it’s still my house. Along the way
I stare at the ground, wondering why
I’m in such good shape that I can run
like this, memorizing the moonlit
asphalt as if I were going to be
tested on the location of each speck
of sparkle when I’m finally at rest.

I make it home, hit the doorbell
as I have no keys with me, scramble
to the front window to scream 
my partner’s name, relieved 
to recognize the reflected face
as my own, glad that she seems
relieved to see me, to hold me
as I go through the front door.

I am typing this on my cell phone
which was where I left it by the bed side.
I am typing this on my cell phone
as I try to get up from bed
on my stone heavy legs, with my lungs
torn and wet from something.

This may have all been 
a dream, it all may have been a 
projection, a mistake
in my perception,

but I bet I could be blindfolded
and brought to any spot on the route right now
and I think I could tell you,
once the blindfold came off,

where I was and 
what I was thinking
at the time I bent to look there,
how far I’d come
and how far was left to go,

and all of that would come rushing forth from me
the second I saw the map
of mica in the black tar.

We’ve spent our entire lives
looking at scenes that will someday disappear
and yet we are happy much of the time,
centered on the illusion of permanence.

Every house, every church, every factory
or office we’ve ever been thrilled or angry
or bored in is going to fall to pieces eventually.
Maybe we’ll live to see it, maybe we will be

the ones to do it by fire or dynamite,
with sledgehammers or through simple neglect,
but it’s going to happen with or without us
and until it does, we will pretend it will never happen.

More than once I’ve had the joy of shifting
a public view — I put hammer and crowbar 
into play, slamming down old boards and pulling up
rotted floors, changing what was once a fact

into a memory of fact. Life went on without
the shed and the garage. I can see them if I squint
at the spaces where they were, but there are people
who never knew they were there and for them things

are just fine as they are now. 
Things were just fine as they once were, too.
Nothing is permanent, and every thing is fine that way.
Things change. We change. Things don’t matter much.

What matters is us changing ourselves
to fit into the changing nature of things.
We move into impermanence while clinging to things.
We pretend about things, and hem and haw and fight and weep over things;

things that will inevitably disappear just as we will inevitably
disappear from the sight of others, through fire or dynamite,
by our own neglect or choice, by the sheer force of time
if by nothing else; yet somehow we are content

to pretend otherwise much of the time
as we look at scenes from which we will 
someday disappear, scenes that will someday
disappear: the central illusion of permanence.

A thin man takes off a diamond-paved mask.
Another releases a white horse in an empty palace.

A man slumps against a lit, street-level window.
He goes on to levitate above a roof ledge, then settles back to safety.

Ah — there’s a woman in this one, behind the wheel of a muscle car.
A painting of the same woman, blindfolded and bound, is resting on an easel.

You see the oddest, fanciest people at an Old West wedding.
You see them again at a funeral on the day after the wedding.

A downcast man sits on a roof ledge with another downcast man.
A woman strokes another man’s hair; someone here might be an angel.

Those shoes, that hair, that coat, that long walk in a desert without dust.
That hatchet, that payphone, that Jeep, that briefcase paved in diamonds, full of water balloons.

And now more Jeeps, more muscle cars, more deserts and angelic nights and grand clothes.
There is an obvious way to end the endless but I’m afraid of what world I’ll find if I turn this off.