Morning work:
cat kneading on
its daily blanket,
now and then
anguished or delighted
but finally completed
work from me.

If no one ever
sees any of this I know
at least one cat
is happy.  The blanket 
might not know it
but it has played its part
as well as it always has.

As for me: what do I call
the feeling when some work 
of mine is complete
and it was misery,
it was ecstasy or outrage
or all three and more beside:
or more to the point
what do I call the feeling
of it possibly being
the Last or nearly
the Last One?

The cat is content,
and the blanket just is.
I’m driven to keep going
into their space and then
getting up and going
elsewhere into the day
without ever knowing if tomorrow
will be the same. 

Who will read this poem of blanket and cat,
anyway? Why should such compulsion
drive me? Am I the cat, 
simply assuming each day will be the same?
Or am I the blanket,
there when the routine is not my own?
Are all of us just the means
to a still-unknown end?

I could have been anything.
Anyone.

Heard this young,
still hear this so often — why
not do this, why not try
that, this is not a wise choice,
this will leave you poor;

look at you, look at you,
didn’t we tell you? Look at you,
failing, breaking under
a burden on a pile of cracked stone:
this was your chosen work
and look at you
breaking yourself
along with what little
you are leaving?

Behind me? Hordes.
Doubters and lovers with
mouths hanging open.
Over them, a cloud 
of their wet breath
laden with regret that they
went along with this,
with me.

They are right, I could have 
been anything, anyone. My knees
are purely shredded 
from how many times
I fell on jagged shells
of what I broke open
along my way to here — 
I could have been anything
including a stupid man
unable to tell
failure from triumph. 

You can see how I got here
from where you are, though;
maybe it’s enough
to be this: a billboard
by a roadside that reads

turn back, you could still be
anything, anyone
but this. 

Oh, how we rejoice
in telling people
they come to us
unbidden sometimes;
this one came
in a dream; that one
tumbled through 
and popped out
while falling
off a horse; it was
a gift, a Muse 
on a day trip
may have been involved;
sometimes it just
happens.  

Truth is? We
learn that subterfuge
early. We need to keep
some mystique around us
else they might discover
they could do it too,
and where would we be then?

Never let them see
the smoke rising from
the head at all hours,
the late night flinging
the pen across the room,
the paper flying off the desk,
the cracked screen left
after punching the old laptop.
The partner
cursing as they tell us
the typewriter is keeping them up
far too late and don’t we both
have to get up for work
far too early?

They rarely come easily — 
we are working
on them even when we
are oblivious to the Work
going on within;

if they come 
in a vision, folks,
it’s in a vision of 
a factory and it rarely smells
or sounds as it did
when it was still raw and smoking
on the belt coming to us
for final assembly
and inspection.

It begins again
with a gnat in my ear
as I’m trying to sleep
that will not let me go,
that evades the swiping 
and keeps buzzing
until I am forced to exchange
my place in the bed
with this place on the couch
and the keyboard
I’ve been estranged from
that does feel like mine
again, not yet. 

I start as if
I’d never been here before — 
yet I have lived,
wept, laughed,
puzzled, and chased 
buzzing gnats
from my ears
over thousands of early hours
while being here.

Sitting here again, I start
as if I’d never started before 
and never before said
these same things to myself
while swiping at a gnat,
asking myself the whole time
why a gnat always finds me
at the least opportune moments
and drags me from wherever I am
to a keyboard
or a notebook 
to humble me with its buzzing
as if either
could drive a gnat away
for good this time
after never having worked
before. 

The gnat always claims
it’s going to work this time,
promise. That’s how the buzzing
translates. That’s what 
the promise sounds like
this early, before you can
disagree, before you can swipe
one more time at your ear,
before you shut down and sleep
and wake up later to find
that yet again it hasn’t worked,
at least not yet.

I tell myself 

maybe it will go away
all by itself one night,
and maybe that night
what will wake me
is the longing
to hear it again,
just one more time,
for old times’ sake;

and maybe there will come a night
when it comes back
and that will be the night
when I at last
catch the gnat and hold it
in my hand and stare at it
small and fragile there
on my palm,

and maybe I will weep for it
as I sit on the kitchen floor
and for no apparent reason
wonder why
I’m hearing nothing now
but can’t go back to sleep,
at least not yet. 

Let me come to the point:
I can’t remember the name
of the particular door I open
whenever I step through into this

from that 
where I daily make a cup of coffee
and scratch my various itches
before sitting down to this Work. 

If I ever knew the name
I have forgotten it, or 
let me say instead I feel
more often than not 

that whenever I walk through,
coming or going, the name of the door
changes. I’ll puzzle over this
each time. What is the name

of the boundary between where the Work is
and where living happens? I pass
back and forth wondering
about such foolish things. 

Please contact me
that you may at least understand
where I’m at.  

I can’t describe
the landscape well enough
for you to come find me

but you might find yourself enlightened
and informed by the view.  I hope
I can do it justice — really that’s

the only hope I have now: 
that by you being in touch I might
be able to warn others who might come.

Please contact me, reach out
that you may understand
that I was never comfortable among you,

even if you still cannot see why;
and even if I am somehow at home here
it is not any place most would want to live. 

I get up
Write a poem
Make some coffee
Have some food
Put another round into the clip

I get up
Make some coffee
Write a poem
Make some food
Count some pills into a plastic cup

I get up
Have some water
Make some coffee
Fix a poem
Sharpen the edge of the big knife

I dream a poem
Get up and write it down
Delete it when I read it back
Make some coffee
Eat a food that one day will do me in

One day I’ll change it up
One day I won’t think about poems
One day the coffee will be left unmade
One day I’ll won’t get up
One day the Tool will be set aside

the form I see before me
is not the true form.

do you see what I do not?
it is possible my eyes deceive me.

it would not be the first time for those little liars,
those deceitful balls playing with tricky light. 

if you say my true name I’ll change
into my true form, if the tales are to be believed,

but why should they be? the writers
have eyes which may be just as dishonest

as my own. they might have no backstory
to support the legend. so the legendary true form

may be not a true form at all but simply that
which kills the perceiver before they solve the mystery. 

never trust a writer to give you all you need 
to seize control of the world. they’re a posse of deadly clowns

riding out in search of illusions they’ll tell you are true,
and they may be right but they don’t know and won’t know

until you are staring into the mirror they’ve given you. 
they wait to see what happens.

no matter what happens,
they try again.

Last night
I dreamed
that there
in my hand
I had conjured
a gnome
in a red hat,
something
from a book
I’d read long ago. 
He began to spin
there on my palm 
and when he at last 
spun away it was as
a dervish born
in a handful
of fire.

Last night 
I remembered writing
this poem once before
when I was no more than
18.  Back then I thought 
I was something,
didn’t I — back then I thought
I too had been 
formed in a hand
to be a dervish
in a handful
of fire and that I had 
a fire hand of my own making
and I spawned poems in it,
fast red, and long burning hot,
and I spun them into the world
to ignite anything
other than myself, but still
I burned, almost, to ash.

I soak my wounds these days
in any running stream
I find
and think of how
I am no longer what I was,
am I — no dervish,
no wick, no kindling
in this poor hand,
and I am grateful
for how final and good
it feels to stop short of a full life
of poems romancing the mythology
of scorched earth.