Remind me of how
a Toblerone tastes —
it’s been so long since I
was able to have one.

Remind me what silk feels
like when drawn across the hand,
how feeling that elevates the mind
in blessed ways.

Remind me of my memory,
of senses long denied
expression and stimulation.
Is our best world still out there?

Somehow I’ve felt locked away
from it all. I feel nothing much
other than that. Those pleasures
I once held have slipped from me

and I’d love to gather them to me
again so: remind me. Remind me
of luxury and indulgence. Get me halfway
back to myself. Let’s see

if memory, once roused,
can open its arms enough
to carry me 
the rest of the way.

On a mission to take down
the pain in my leg
took a pill and a drink and one more pill
and sat my ass down
to take off the weight

On a mission to maybe
relax for a moment 
took a drag and a sip and a drag and a sip
and dozed right off
for a whole ten minutes

Tried to wake up for good
with remote in hand
flipped around checked for movies thought about finding
a music channel
but that didn’t last

When I woke up again
a little bit later 
stretched my neck and my shoulder and damned if the leg
wasn’t still a little tender
after all I’d done

On a mission of comfort
for pain and fatigue
Pain of body and soul and fatigue from fighting them both
it’s a daily routine
and it’s Friday again

so it’s been a whole week
of pills and sipping
smoking and sitting and running the word “relentless”
over my tongue and teeth
till it’s all I can taste

Your second hand rugs,
worn thin where someone paced
before you got them.

You windows that get washed
once a year. Your car in need,
always, of something out of reach.

Clothes that never
measure up to how
they were pictured before purchase

because they were pictured
as solutions or answered prayers,
when they were in fact just clothes.

The few things of substance
you cling to: an heirloom cup or two,
one sturdy chair, good pots and pans

collected piecemeal
at Goodwill, at the Sally store,
at the perpetual yard sale

two blocks over, every Sunday
morning; the same place you bought
your warmest overcoat.

You do your best though
every bill feels like
a wound and lately

blood has been seeping through
what you’ve dressed them with.
You stay home, away from friends,

from your past life,
as much from fear
of being seen this way

as because you can’t afford
to step too far off the path
you need to walk just

to stay here, to keep
the little bit of an address
you’ve got. Instead you tell yourself

those rugs aren’t going 
to wear themselves transparent.
You’ve got all night and all day,

all of tomorrow and next week. You’re tough.
Plenty to keep you busy. Plenty
left to be ground down.

1.
How is it that so many of us
can stare into the same abyss
and see different things?  

There’s nothing there
when I look into it. One sees
the authority of star charts

while someone else sees
a bloodstained cross of gold
and another, a rune hanging

in the sky above a gigantic tree.
It seems the abyss is a master
of sleight of hand. Magic

runs deep in there, as deep
as the pit itself perhaps. That’s 
why we have mystics, I suppose:

there are always people
who will try to explain
how the trick was done.  

2.
If I am to be honest
I don’t really see nothing
when I stand before it.

There’s something there,
certainly.  I just can’t tell
what it is and I’m too old

to waste any more time
on being certain before
leaping in.  If it’s a raven,

I’ll find out when I strike it
as I fall.  If it’s a coyote
let it take me in its jaws.

If it’s something I can’t name
I’ll fall into it or fly by it
and that will be that.

3.
When I peer into the abyss
the one thing I can say for sure
is that it’s not me in there.

Whatever is there
is not staring back
at all. Not so far.

It seems unconcerned
that I’m even here.
It seems to go about being

the abyss regardless
of anyone’s gaze. No use
wringing your hands about this,

it seems to be saying.
It’s not yours. Maybe 
you’ll understand someday,

but don’t give up your sense
one day sooner than you need to
thinking it will help:

no one 
has ever
gotten it right.

Food’s just fuel. For me, at least. 
Little pleasure there
beyond that of having
no more hole in the gut.

Taste’s something, sure,
in the moment but 
I don’t savor memory
of what’s good over

what’s good enough.
I know how freakish
that might seem to the 
artisanal masses. I know

you may think I’m exaggerating 
or that I am somehow compromised
or stunted because of this,
and perhaps that’s right, but

you’ve never felt how large
the hole yawns in me or how
it sucks the flavor away
from anything I might use to fill it.

To sit at home alone
and wish you were at home but
in a different home that looks
much the same as this one
but which feels instead like the starry center
of the spiritual life
of a distant world

is to open your mouth and speak
a dead language few people ever understood
and which has long been considered extinct
though it captured dreams and nuances 
not recalled since, things known then only to adepts 
and native speakers and 
now considered to be myths.

To sit at home alone and imagine
that you are not alone at all
and that the home instead is cozy
with others and the laughter and warmth
of bodies and souls are a fire
of fusion like a small sun
over a fertile land

is to fall upon a bed of salted snow
under a dim moon and pray 
for it to turn to sand and a full bright night
on an island no one comes upon
without a blessing from some deity
known to all, unnamed by anyone.

To sit at home alone
and create a song of that same home
growing full to the walls, the ceiling,
the roof and above with a sacred hum
of joy and satisfaction and all the angels
of a commonality not yet in evidence

is to wait for someone, anyone
to come to your home and make it
a home of dreams 
you’ve been dreaming, dreams
no one knows of except you,
dreams no one can translate except you,
dreams no one can enter except you.

A perfect ache:
the recognition of 
the possibility that
you’ve just celebrated
the last New Year’s Eve
you’ll ever have.

It’s not maudlin
or self-pitying to do so.
You’re just applying simple math
to the question of
how many more full years
you are likely to have left
when compared to how many
you’ve had so far; 

you ache a little at the result
but are thrilled a little too
that at least this one was
peaceful and decent and 
done early and well if it’s to be
the last.

You stack silly borrowed hats and noisemakers
on the barroom table before you leave.
Someone can use them next year.
You might even be back.  Who knows?
Not you, of course. The odds
suggest otherwise but you place
your bets before leaving 
when you are so careful with 
such simple, disposable items as these.

Someone’s in the street
with an uncased acoustic guitar
slung behind them on clothesline,
and a strap of sleigh bells tied
on their belt.

I see they also have
a mutty, cold dog
trailing behind.

The wind chill is below
hell’s lowest circles, and
it’s threatening to snow;
I think maybe the troubadour 
is in danger, the dog might
freeze, and I know damn well
this is no weather for
an uncased acoustic guitar
(I’m guessing the sleigh bells
will be fine),

yet the damn fool is whistling
the type of song
you won’t recognize until
spring, at which point you will slap
your forehead and say

oh, damn, now I get it.

Oh, damn, now I get it — 
it’s a song that works
like a heater inside them
even as the individual notes emerge
and chime as they freeze
and hit the ground. The dog
keeps up on its own, the guitar is
superfluous; today is 
as perfect as any beach day,

with the string of bells
ringing out 
for whatever holiday
this has just become.

Why do you think your savior 
came to you under cover
of the night, under sentence
of death? You will say he came

in darkness to show us
the Light. I will tell you in response
that he came to you in darkness
because he was most comfortable

there.  After all, he himself
was dark, his parents were
dark — the ones you could see
as well as the One you could not.

What we know of his life
is mostly nothing — think
of all those missing years:
dark rooms in which he matured.

He was at the end taken 
by soldiers in the dark
and on the day he died,
they say the sky itself

went black to welcome him.
All this talk of him
as light of the world
is misinformed:

he was dark embodied,
yet in the name of easy vision
you’ve made Dark Evil 
and Light, Good. You put his birthday

near to your shortest day
and claimed it was
to recognize the coming of light,
but what if he came at Solstice

to celebrate darkness and your longest night?
You’ve ridden for years against
the dark peoples of the world
claiming you were bringing them

Light, but we didn’t need more Light.
Before you came we mostly
had the balance right, yet you hanged us
like lanterns and set us ablaze

and called it salvation when we
fell to our knees and balled ourselves up
like black stones as protection against it all. 
You think your savior set this path

for you.  You think he’s out there
at the blinding white end of it.
No. If he’s anywhere,
he’s back here with us,

with living and dead
holding us tight to himself and each other
in the warm embrace
of the much maligned night. 

If at the end of 
a long enough life you find
that there are still stories
you’d rather not tell yourself,

that would be the time
to sit down with your choice
of writing tools and put them
into someone else’s
imaginary mouth.

The storyteller you create
might look like you or not.
Might sound like you
or not. Might have every detail
perfectly recorded for playback,
might not. But the gist of 
what you’ve never said
should come through and
it had damn well better be
true, true enough

that when you listen
to the telling you can say
in utter peace
that you’re free of those tales and

you can feel something charitable for them
now that they’re loosed from prison.
Their new freedom adorns them
the way a cape laid upon
the shoulders of a hero endows them
with a certain energy. 

Listen: there’s so much
that gets left over in each life,
so much that goes to waste.
Do you really want to be a party to that,
to hold inside
what has stunted you and deformed you
until you pass on and it escapes,
snarling, into the dark to grow 
into something beyond all our worst fears?

Let them out.
Prepare to die empty.
Give those rotten fables a voice,
see who they might save.

If nothing else you might find room
for better tales within
before you go.