So. I let go
the bad eye, the good hope,
the indifferent falso banner
of triumph and defeat —
let them off and left them sitting
by the tracks, waiting
to be lifted by another —

and I went on, singing
uncertainly at first
but more and more surely
as time passed;

although I did not know
the words at first
they came to me
first slowly then in a rush
so hard I stopped knowing
ahead of time anything
about what they meant
until after they tumbled
from my suddenly unfamiliar
tongue, lips, and mouth.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

(apologies to Dave M)

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
everyone in the audience
is white. Everyone on the reading list
is white. Everyone, everywhere,
is whitey-white.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
everyone in the audience
is white, and old. Everyone
is old and white and half the audience
is crippled and old, white and
disabled and old, whitey-white
cripply-crippled and moldy-old
and you are too
so it works for you.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
the poets and the audience
are white-old-semi-messed up
and luminous with the heat
from their poems and the burning
their papers give off as they light them
on fire and worship the blazes
out of them, or they are glowing
faintly with the cold that’s coming
and they are passing strange people —
these poets, their audience,
their ordered world-view.

Right now
at a poetry reading
somewhere else someone else
is reading or declaiming
a poem or something like one
and it speaks of their sobriety
or establishes their fucked-up-ness
and they aren’t white or straight or whatever
and never wished that on themselves
or anyone else and the manners
the world demands are not clear
and someone from the first reading
still wonders at a poem’s upbringing
and wonders why they are here.

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
a man wonders why he’s there
and thinks hard, so hard
about his cane and his lack of
empathy for anyone at the readings.
He’s not white, not not-white,
getting old, feeling young, only stroke-dinged
a little bit, not fading (he desperately
thinks about himself); he still dreams
about the dragons circling the walls
and the dangers of the wrong President
and the whiff of climate catastrophe
and on and on about his own lack of
empathy — didn’t he say that already?

Right now,
at a poetry reading,
an aging poet wrings his hands
and hangs his head.

I wish
I could write like this, I wish
someone would listen to me,
I wish for a future and a fury
to consume me and take
my poetry to heaven where
it will be consumed,
consummated, remembered.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
onward,
T

Think there’s any Jesus
in the poem? Trust me:
there’s not.

Jesus is staying away from this
the way that once upon a time the fish 
on either side of the Red Sea learned to avoid 

their former space in the divided waters,
no matter how they longed to be
with their loved ones on the other side.

The dry land between them,
the lane of separation and escape,
offered them nothing while it offered others 

everything. But don’t assume
there’s any Moses
in this or any of my poems.

Deliverance is for the future
and this poem
is in the moment.

No Jesus, no Moses.
Just you and the fish
wondering what’s happening.

Me too, friend.  Me too.
All this Biblical stuff,
the walls of water on either side.

Whose poem do you want it to be?
It won’t be the one I wrote.
Whoever you find there sneaked in

when I wasn’t looking, I swear.
You know how water distorts.
Those fish could be anyone.  

Don’t be fooled. 
That’s how I wrote it.
Anyone could be in here.

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