oh, fuck it. you
are not a mistake
or a problem, not at all.
no matter what you’ve been told.
fuck it. you live in a society
that was built by shifting blame.
do not believe in it or accept it
as the way things should be.
delight instead in how resistance
can be framed as a dance.
delight instead in how you have survived
such things. delight in your own being.
you were not made to work this hard.
Tag Archives: poems
Oh, Fuck It
Conditioning
Stormbringer, supercharger,
strong attractor, such memory
of how little I cared for consequence
in their presence. I was young
and loathed myself except when
I exalted myself, and I had no balance
between. Stormcharger, super-attractor,
strong bringer of past to present, memory
of what I gained and tossed; nonsense,
these things – storm attractor, superbringer,
strong charger – are words only, things
I mastered long ago, things I made up
for the purpose of raising the dead
from the tombs within me. I was young once.
I killed that youth six times over. I am old now,
still ready to kill that youth, superstorm, charge attractor,
strength brought to bear upon how sick I am
with nostalgia and regret for how I let myself go
and how often in recreation of those forces
I let myself go feebly into their streams again.
Sea Mammals
Manatees (AKA “sea cows”)
are favored for their cuddly bulk. Orcas
get a viral reputation for gang
action. Big whales are everybody’s
best mystical gymnasts, dolphins
sexy slick bobbers. Seals reek up
beaches and docks but damn,
they’re cute as hell. Sea otters
rock and carry rocks, lie around
floating handsomely. We want them
all working hard to make us feel
connected to something larger
than ourselves, our puny little
destroyer selves, and if they don’t
we’ll flutter our left hands in dismay
as our right hands snuff them out.
Mercy On A Cold Morning
The mercy of a calm cold morning
keeps me snug in my home,
safe from chaos.
I get to pretend I can’t hear
the roaring outside over the sound
of my comfortable furnace.
There’s not even a storm
to fret over. The sun’s bright,
the wind chill is rough
but I’ve seen and felt worse.
I can deal with that.
It’s not the wind making the noise
that I’m hiding from. The roar I fear
is human, full of words
I can’t or won’t understand
that drilled through my sleep
and opened me
as screwworms might
but without leaving a visible trace.
The mercy of the cold morning
is that it keeps me
from stepping to the sound
and joining in. I can choose
to stay here and pretend
I hear nothing, can pretend
I won’t soon need
to become harmful as well.
From where I stand mercy
is a cold illusion I can indulge
as long as I stay inside,
so here I will stay
for as long as I can, knowing
it cannot last and I am needed out there.
How To Be American
To be aghast
at our ghosts
without admitting that
they remain among us
is to be willfully
American.
To be comfortable
in this haunted home,
oblivious to what
some feel
in its most sunlit rooms,
is to be carelessly
American.
To laugh off every
chill as merely historic
or imaginary,
to turn away from
the ancestral familiarity
of those faces of
menace past and present,
is to be blindly
American.
Not to see
any of the ghosts,
not to see them
in every corridor, closet,
basement, school,
prison, or mirror,
is to be resolutely
American, is practically
to define
“American”, is the
quintessential practice
of being
American.
Weed (I See You)
You. I’ve watched you
with them. You’re a weed,
an invasive, a non-native
sucker on the tree of their life
and I see you, see how
you entwined yourself
into the fabric of their life
and grew there impeded only
occasionally by how shallow
your own roots were regardless
of how high they rose,
and that’s a damn shame.
It would have been far more fair
if you’d withered there, stuck on them,
and dried up and turned to twigs
and were then brushed off and left
in the dust behind them as they
walked forward in light and beauty.
I wish I had something more to say
and I wish there was something more I could do
but some things are beyond fairness and
justice doesn’t grow everywhere, so instead
I’ll just remind you that I know you’re a weed,
you know you’re a weed, and while in another field
you might have been a lovely bloom,
here you’re just a strangler on another’s vine
and I see you, and I’m not alone.
In A Time Of War You Seize The Nearest Weapon
There’s so little inside me
you’d think I was a balloon
if I didn’t weigh this much.
I’m not a balloon. What, then?
Maybe a hollow iron sphere.
Steel encapsulation.
Knock on me and I make
a pleasing sound. I’m a bell,
a closed bell, dark inside.
Knock on me and see
if you can understand what I say.
I’ve spoken an empty tongue since birth.
Now I’m old and resigned to it, but
there was a time when I tried
to crack myself open and become a full throat.
It never worked. Here I am, then,
a hard ball of air. When things are hot,
it’s hot air; when things are cold, you can guess.
Things are hot right now and I’m boiling.
Not likely to crack but if you swing me, I’ll bust heads.
If it gets cold, I can break them just as well.
Understand one thing, though: I’m not one of you,
will never be. I’m the big hard void and will be,
before and after your war. You need a bell like me.
I do tend to ring your way. It’s an accident, really;
a mistake in your favor. Think of me as eraser,
here to shift the ledger; to wreck it
and in the process of wrecking it
to crack myself open at last,
make my one rightful noise, then shatter.
I have no illusions. You won’t want me
then. Will have no need of my voice
once the breaking’s done. In a time of war
you seize the nearest weapon. I’m ready.
I’m your rock, your branch, your
morningstar. Let’s swing. Let’s sing.
Inventory
Revised. Originally posted 6/10/2012.
Hair, sifted full of gray.
Cut, less than good.
The scalp’s not flaking
with the new shampoo.
Face,
starting to furrow, starting to line,
starting to bag and sag.
Fuller than it was, much rounder.
Beard, uneven,
post-trendy, stubbornly
present for thirty years in this form —
the only thing the same from when I was,
arguably, at my peak of flavor.
Neck, undistinguished.
In fact, let us from this point on
use that word
as a frequent descriptor.
Let us say that as a whole,
the body is undistiguished
except where noted otherwise.
Shoulders, undistinguished.
Here and there skin tags
which some claim
are proof of heart disease
though they are not.
Chest, furry.
Bigger tits than I’d like.
Currently,
I have some great and knifing pains
in my right upper chest, strong enough
to take my breath, pains that slice
from front to back, from nipple to blade.
Right side argues against heart attack;
I go instead with pulled muscle, or strain
from sleeping wrong; part of me
hopes I’m wrong as it will add to the value
of this poem in my Body Of Work
if I die after writing this,
wouldn’t you agree?
Arms, undistinguished. Hands
weirdly lined, a palmist’s dream or nightmare;
joints stiff as dry sticks every morning.
My eyes barely catch light.
My ears do my best work.
My ears support my hands in whatever they do
writing, playing music, meddling
in others’ opinions and business.
I don’t know how it happened,
but I have a voice that to the ears of others
is far better
than undistinguished.
Brain? Can’t we just
let the soup and stew up there
do for themselves? Perhaps that can be
left for another day? It’s not a chemistry to admire,
to emulate or strive for. It’s not like
I haven’t got enough documentation already on that;
look at the bottom shelf, all those
yet unpublished books I’ve written, all those
piles of poetry, all those lines.
There must be formulas somewhere.
Gut, prodigious, not at all
undistinguished but in fact
a salient and unmistakable feature;
all in all, these days the most memorable
feature. Bullet hole scars all over it
from surgeries, not injuries. I have not
been well, not at all, not for a while.
Genitals?
I have a partial set, a half empty
glass. I will explain the next time
I’m drunk, if I remember, if
I’m in the mood, if you earn
the right to hear it,
and if I want to. For now enough to know
that what’s here works,
somewhat surprisingly.
Ass? Undistinguished.
Thighs and knees and shins? Chickenesque.
Feet? Cracked and horned and rimmed with callus;
they are undistinguished
if craggy.
All in all, not horror show,
not Chippendale’s. Not at all the worst ever,
not at all the best; mostly indistinguishable
from tens of millions of fat older men.
Asking me how I feel ought to be
superfluous.
I hope you are listening.
I feel exalted.
Think of a slice of heaven
as you would like heaven to be.
I’m that.
For me, it is a dark bliss bubbling over, a pot
of warm molasses, a scrap on the stove
I forgot to clean or put away.
This body may soon be forgotten
by those too pleased
with being young to understand
how an older body makes richer music.
They may think it plays a poorer score
no. Every mad note of it, scoffers,
every mad note is still remarkable,
and I am a Goddamn hallelujah chorus
because I am holy and wholly
who I am.
Martyr: Clarion, Shine, and Chime
The sole of the boot
approaching your face.
The air compressing
ahead of its arrival,
a wave of dim purple,
red, blue, diffuse.
What you want to say
to the power about to smash you
into the dirt won’t come out
of your mouth. You push
hard, try to unclench;
nothing. The air turns
to pure and solid shadow,
then to hard leather, then
to explosion, red
and blurring. You still
have something to say
but are not sure it will be
understood or heard now.
You choke it down though
you can still hear it, your clarion
and shine and chime.
Again it comes:
your clarion, shine, and chime.
Someone is crying it out.
Someone will triumph
where you did not. Someone
will rise from this same dirt
and remember you,
you who did not cry out
because you could not, and
you will not die.
The Pebble In My Shoe
1.
Inside the pebble in my shoe
might be a universe.
2.
We don’t know
how much space a universe takes up.
Might be many civilizations in there,
colluding, working my foot into agony.
3.
Maybe they think
they are appeasing God,
and maybe they are.
4.
In the pebble universe
they serenely do not know
the nature of reality.
5.
In this universe we also know
little of the nature of reality —
the difference being
that we know this and are rendered
far less than serene by the knowledge.
6.
Wait a second, you say —
if they know a universe and
are part of ours, why are we describing them
as separate from one another?
Isn’t this a case of scale
or compartmentalization? All one
universe, broken into parts?
7.
Wait a second, I say.
Boundaries, walls, hard edges.
I’m in pain. There must be
another universe. Our own
would never hurt me.
8.
In the pebble universe
they say
the same things we say here
only smaller.
9.
Turning on the news
again in this universe and
watching the news of this universe,
or the news from inside the pebble
that irritates me so, or maybe
it’s the news of the one universe
that holds us all. I’m in
as much pain as all of them can hold
and unable to stumble away from it.
Lacrosse
I never played lacrosse
but I often feel like
my brain’s been cradled
in the throat of a stick
since birth.
My dad’s goalie stick
is still on the basement wall
at the old home. He still
shows off the scar he got
playing in college.
People would ask him
if he learned how
on the reservation
and he’d shrug it off in public
then fume privately to me in the car
or the living room:
our folks
never played lacrosse
and I wasn’t there
long enough to learn
even if we had
There are fading
teenage sketches
still on the exposed drywall
next to where the stick hangs,
the largest being one
of an old man’s lined face, long hair,
eyes wide open, looking to my right.
I think I drew that face
one summer before
I gave up
that kind of pen forever.
I recall that summer
I rubbed witch hazel
over the mosquito Braille
of my sunburnt
forearms and calves.
The only way I could ever draw a face
was to have it looking to the right,
not head on or to the left,
and the face’s eyes
never looked into mine
or yours. Always a little side-eye,
always indirect.
I never played lacrosse.
I’ve never lived on the rez at all.
I haven’t drawn a face in years.
My father is so very old.
I can’t remember how witch hazel smells.
I’m going to die one day and I
will have to come at it faking all the way —
split roll dodge. That’s a lacrosse move.
I looked it up. I have had
to look everything up
except for the look in my father’s eyes:
always a little side eye.
Always indirect.
There Is No Why
If I say
I am depressed
someone always asks “Why?”
and sometimes
there is a “why” as simple
as saying there was a soap bubble,
a rainbow ball
that disappeared before
I could touch it, perhaps,
or the thought
of an unrepaired mistake
from fifty years back.
Sometimes the “why”
is a burned bridge or
a puff of smoke
from a ruined hope.
Sometimes, the “why”
comes surging up
from chromosomal
oceans, a wave of regret
for how I was conceived,
how I evolved, who my
ancestors were. All those
possibilities, yet now and then
there is no “why” at all.
Now and then when
I say I am depressed
it’s like saying I’m cold
in August, or lost
in my own bedroom.
I don’t know who
I become when it happens
that there is no “why.”
Is that me on the floor,
me in the corner, me
with my hand buried
in broken glass? Why?
If there is no “why”
there may not be
an “I’ either. I don’t know
how it happens; there are times
when depression is an icy lake
I sink into and disappear,
asking “why” as you are asking,
getting the same stark answers:
cold, dark; unreasoning descent;
eventual surrender.
Which is to say, sometimes
there’s no answer at all. All I can do then
is stroke for the surface and hope
for a fire on the shore
if and when I break through.
Something to light my way home and then
warm me back to life.
A fire like you, perhaps.
A fire in the shape
and sound of you.
New Slang
Swore off using new slang
some years ago as being
too much work for too little reward,
too much risk of ridicule,
too much displacement
of beloved words
for words whose tenderness
I did not fully trust. Now I’m alone,
silent in the dark;
nothing to say
that anyone
seems to understand.
People my age
seem too stony to me, no longer
pliable or open to the moment.
People younger than I am
seem too stony to me, too ready
to catch me slipping.
People older than I am
seem too close to death for me,
resigned to waiting just a little while
before I’ll understand them,
but I do understand them. I do.
Lost enough people already
to have stopped being terrified
of how this journey ends
if not yet to have embraced the ending.
This fulcrum upon which I now sit,
moment of balance between
current and former selves,
moment in which
my darkening
and stiffening tongue
has been stung
by misuse, cheated
of its ability to change?
It’s finally a comfort.
I’m waiting to tip away
from youth, slide into old age.
I am not in love with how I am,
but I am nonetheless alive.
I still have words. Still speaking,
even without a clear sense
of where I will be heard
or for how long.
To Fail Again
Whenever he thought
he was on the brink of understanding himself
better than before, he would have
the same vision of being buried deep,
carried by unknown people into a cave
in a procession lit
by a single white torch.
They’d place him at the back of the cave,
alone with the torch, laid out on the stone floor
in the dim light until the flame died,
at which point he’d get up and stare
at the prehistoric walls
and see upon them fantastic pictures
of dancing beings of light and air
trapped incongruously below.
Then he’d shake himself
loose from the vision and come up
to ground level and try and try
to bring those beings with him,
or at least to tell their stories,
and he would fail
and fail again
but each time, he’d look forward
to returning to the cave
to try and fail
and fail again.
Dark Matter 