sit back, ease a hand into
the cooler, snag a beer,
open it and take a long pull
with one eye on
the neighbors and how they
wash their cars, how they
garden. they’re doing it
all wrong. you are better 
and faster and more productive
with your time than they are
which is why you’ve got
beer time now and they don’t.
of course, they don’t know you’re
watching and judging, you
neighborhood ghost — as far as
they are concerned you’re just
the mystery crank in the old Camry
that no one talks to and that’s fine
with everyone. it sure suits you right down
to your pale toes. leaves more time
for beer time, for sitting and judging
and watching incompetence
while wondering how you got so old
and everyone else got so damn stupid.
ease back with another beer and think
a little more, for a little while longer —
how much longer, you wish you knew
how much longer it’s going to be.

In a crowd of those
laughing and pleased
with themselves and their words
for a minute or two

Been trying to write my own ticket
Spending my words
like subway tokens 
to get nowhere really

Realizing that my tokens
are anachronisms
for this crowd
I look around for

a faintly rumbling track
and get myself up
to the edge
to wait

thinking to disturb them
and make myself
a splatter of memory for them
for at least a minute or two

But of course I cannot jump
so I get on the train
with everyone else
Seeing how many of them

have the same clear
and hunted look I am wearing
Recalling how many of them had been
standing as close to the rails as I

In a minute or two
this train will stop
Some will file off
Others will get on

using their own versions
of tokens or transit cards
Many wearing the same clear
and hunted face

which may in fact be
the truest and most trusted ticket to ride
If you are born to ride this train
through these darkest tunnels

for anything longer than a minute or two
your certainty that you don’t belong
may be the surest proof that in fact
you do

Insistent mistakes
frame the debates
among the factions
righting wrongs
and dispensing justice;

insistent mistakes spilling
from mouths and documents,
trickling into the water supply,
chuckling as they embed themselves
wherever they can live longest;

insistent mistakes
disguising themselves,
and once disguised becoming
prayers, doctrines, orders, law;

clothed in what they claim 
is faux-leopard — don’t believe
it — can’t you smell the blood there?
Speaking in what they say
is God’s only tongue — how odd 
that it’s the one language
you understand.

Insistent mistakes become
conventional and eventually 
canonical, and then 
insistent mistake is piled upon 
insistent mistake;

the stack reaches the sky,
blocks the Sun,
confuses you into taking
Dark for Light — 

insisting upon it, in fact.

An inclination
of mine that sets me
rolling downhill
more often than not
is to begin each day
with a question
and then spend all day
not answering it. 

Not just not answering it,
but fleeing from the work
of answering it,

sometimes through pleasure,
sometimes through wallowing
in agony or what to me feels like
agony — it would likely
resemble simple irritation to you,

but then again, 
you’d probably just
answer the question
off the top of your head
when it first came up
and get on with living.

We are inclined differently — 
you toward the ascent, me
facing the other way. It’s not
a moral failing

but it is a failing, a hole
deep in my metal
that you can’t see, a hole 
that will crack open
and break me someday
when at last I collide
with the bottom of the drop.

On that day I will be unsurprised
and frankly disappointed
if you do anything beyond social tears
and a shrug to see me off;
if on that day you break
because of my breaking
and you don’t quickly heal,
that will mean I was wrong

about everything,
about all of it, it will mean
that I should have faced those questions
with the first answer
I could come up with
whether it was wrong or not,
and then gotten on with living
as if I was right.

grime on my bumper, and so what.  
it’s not like it hides a beautiful body.  

enough rust and holes
to make next inspection a worry.

enough grunts and clicks and creaks
to make driving anywhere a symphony.

it still runs well enough
to make me mostly unafraid to go anywhere.

it’s got lots of room and red sass to spare.
above all it’s got a banging sound system.

sometimes I joke and say I’m going out 
to drive the stereo around my city.

it’s no joke to do it the way I do it, though.
they hear me coming long before they see me.

in dead of winter I crack a window
to let the big noise out for passers-by.

in height of summer I open it all up
and let it rip for everyone to hear.

there’s an occasional strange glance
from a car or a walker when I pass.

it’s not pretty, and neither am I.
gray on my head, grime on my bumper,

holes where no holes should be;
two hundred and forty thousand miles

of rattle, squeak, bomb-bay bass and 
shouting along to blood passion songs.

it’s not like I can hide in a beautiful body
so I might as well turn up and show up,

for as long as I can, for as long
as the rust holds together.

Six PM.
Darkness not far off.
A neighbor’s cat
loafing on the front wall.
Doing the afternoon thing —
TV, a glass of water,
a wish for enough ambition
to practice the guitar,
a self-loathing raised
from the soil of knowing
how much I could be doing.
It’s a lost day, again, one that goes
by the formal name of
Monday through Sunday.

I’m jealous of that cat
for such willing public laziness.  
I’m jealous of the dead
for never having to move,
for never being expected
to move.

Six PM
and you shouldn’t look at me.
If you look at me, 
don’t be jealous of a damn thing
about me. Move along.
Do something I won’t or can’t do —

look alive.

we are natural
as we are

natural as plague
as fire ants

skyscrapers and letter bombs
animal products

ash wind blowing over burnt land
animal flavor

natural as rat packs
as ticks in spring

toxic bloom brownfields
a natural spoor of animals

stripped rights of devoured bodies
a natural prey of animals

natural as locusts
as red tide

slander and disgust with others
a natural call of animals

genocidal anthem barking
a natural mating behavior of animals

natural as whales beaching
as fish kills

to say we are not 
to say all things human are not natural

is natural

to use our surroundings till they no longer surround us
to then lament how evilly we shall starve 

is natural

to starve 
to become extinct

will be as natural as anything else we’ve been and done
has ever been