the authority cultivator
is possessed
by its almanac fictions
it cannot help you
by design
it will be a reach
to lift your own yoke
to march is not enough
you must stare
all cracker impulse
including your own
down
toss it a grenade’s worth
of humor then
as it fumes
snatch away what you are owed
hurry into risk
rock it till it kneels
spoil it as best you can
hurry
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.
Originally posted 3/14/2014.
From now on,
those who must
for the sake of family or form
mourn in public
a person they did not love,
one who may in fact have been
loathed and feared,
shall (after the funeral) be granted
a huge, selfish wish.
From now on,
those who must
in the presence of general or specific bigotry
bite their tongues to save a job and to provide
for their loved ones shall be granted
one roundhouse swing at and full connection with
a target of their choosing, and they shall get away
clean.
From this day forth,
those whose lives
have been slated for demolition,
slotted for dimunition,
whose lives have regularly been broken
by the blows of ignorant policy,
shall be given keys to once-locked doors,
matches and gasoline to use as they see fit,
and violins
for something to do after
the burning begins.
This shall not be called “karma,”
as one should not have to wait
till the next life for recompense.
This shall not be called
“revenge,” as there’s too much
to avenge and so much work to do
that can’t be done if vengeance
takes hold.
This shall be called bookkeeping —
accounts will be
reckoned and settled,
with the balance owed
to be determined
by those to whom so much
is owed.
Our previously reliable
front walk daffodils
haven’t yet bloomed.
I’m watching the trees in vain
for the customary signs
of imminent breakout.
It feels a little
like Gaia is holding
her Spring-quickened breath
before a plunge
into an ice-skimmed
drowning pool
and thinking
about diving deep
then taking forever to return.
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.
Each unit in this building has a clothesline outside
the back porch window.
On the clothesline at the far top left
hangs a white rayon shirt.
On the shirt, a majolica-styled rooster,
embroidered or screened on — hard to say from here.
I feel like I’m on deadline
to come up with a point here
about a cheap shirt and a tacky design
bellied out like a landlocked sail
over the backyard of a tenement
in my scarred and scrappy town,
like I should say “stop the presses!”
and insist that this is a story
that must be told, one of beauty
in the heart of ordinary, in the face
of what gets called “ugly” too often
by those who like their beauty
caged in an archival box, penned into
the richest part of the Cultural District
that was snatched out
from under the noses of those
who gave it culture
in the first place.
We aren’t far from there right now;
we’re miles from there right now
up on the Hill that hasn’t changed much
and won’t unless some folks decide
they like the view from up here,
and pass an ordinance to steal that view
and free it of rayon
and roosters and backyard chickens
and on-street parking and the wrong people.
It feels like I’m on deadline to say all this
and it’s coming fast, if indeed
it hasn’t already passed.
If anything’s going to happen,
anything at all to keep that sail of a shirt
from billowing toward
a good and lovely life
on our own terms, it feels like
we are almost out of time.
Listening to
young poets
whose work
does not itself hold my interest
but whose joy in the work nonetheless
raises in me
my near dead longing
to be
transported again
by words
first by the words of others
renewing enchantment
and then by my own
finally reminding me
that indeed I still
have within me the spells
I once cast
with ease
releasing from my chest
hurricanes and after
soaking downpours
followed by sun
Listening to young poets
whose work does not itself hold me
yet I honor and thank them
and those who honor and nurture them
for being water and sun
in these parched days
reminding me
that I may still live and grow
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.
Originally posted 12/22/2008.
Each of us is a vault of moments,
a bank for remembered scenes.
Poets eventually spend all that they save,
and I am one — or rather, have been one,
for from this moment on
I refuse to pass my mysteries out
like so many stray pennies.
Let it now be someone else’s turn.
Yes, there are times
when it comforts me to think again
of the way her hair felt
the first time I touched it;
times when it seems important to recall
what it feels like to press
the point of a hunting knife into my chest,
adding a quarter pound of pressure with every breath;
I could still make them real
for anyone who asked,
but could anything I got back
make giving that away worth my while?
So much that I saved from youth to now
has ended up on stages, was spent
for others’ amusement, was traded for glad hands.
What has it ever gained me?
Just grant me now, at last,
my hoard to hold for me alone.
Let me count my terrors and my ecstasies
in my own time, sitting up late at night with them.
Lord, how I wish I had been
less profligate with these
when it would have been wiser
to keep them close.
If I can learn
to be tighter
with a memory now,
I might yet be happy.
I could get a job where no one will ever ask me
about who I was, where I’d been,
how I view the search for meaning,
how I got here.
It’s none of your business,
I will say if they ask me.
Write your own goddamn poems,
that’s what I’ll say.
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
a pipe filled with a black herb.
a series of effects pedals.
a loud amplifier.
a scrappy, crappy electric guitar.
a series of effects pedals reversed from the earlier sequence.
a reduced number of effects pedals. no pedals. no amplifier.
an acoustic guitar.
a change of voice as nothing said or sung before needed to be distinctly heard.
a change of herb.
a pipe isn’t necessary except to loosen vowels when they are too tight.
a pedal moves a bit of air more easily than a puff on a pipe.
a fair guitar smokes itself, amplified or not.
a single chord may do the trick.
a single chord may change a player or the world.
a single chord may change nothing at all.
a single chord may heal or kill or have no effect
except to be satisfied with itself from strum to decay.
a truth that needs telling is that you can’t even do that.
a truth that needs telling is that you will nonetheless keep trying.
Rain has stopped
after all night dropping
on us and ground and roof,
falling into gutters, clattering down
to puddle the sunken end of the driveway.
It’s going to madly green out there
once it warms two more daily degrees
or so. We call this Spring —
or, more often, “mud season,”
the season when we notice
how filthy our cars are.
Spring here is a half-minute of breathing room
between ways to suffer,
a half-second to knock crap off your boots
and your life —
a half inch deep undrinkable lake
in the scant soil
of the backyard.
Season of slop —
our city’s not pretty,
not clean, not bright.
Our roads are holy and pitted
like the path to Heaven, even as
we’ve been dreaming
of Hell’s heat
all cold season long,
and now it’s coming.
It’s coming
in faster bloom than last year.
It’s coming
in smaller snow piles than ever before.
It’s coming
in our unease at how easy
winter was, how little mud
there is to mud season
this year.
It’s coming
as we get around to washing off
toxic grime from our wheel wells,
scrubbing at caked,
kicked up road salt
that’s tearing hell
out of metal.
A warmer world
is coming,
perhaps the warmest one ever;
it’s coming, and
no one’s ready for the heat;
though we all say,
as always,
that we can’t wait,
soon enough
we’ll be staring at that depression
in the backyard,
marveling at the memory of it
full of water, wondering
if we will ever see mud season again.
Originally posted here in September of 2015.
Dates to 2000 or so following the death of a close friend at Easter that year; the original is long lost.
This is an attempt to recreate it, knowing I’m no longer the person who wrote that original.
RIP, Terry Warren.
I come home
craving tomatoes.
I go to my backyard bed
and pick whatever’s ripe
for my favorite summer meal:
thick-sliced plum tomatoes,
Gorgonzola cheese,
a few shreds of basil,
balsamic vinegar, light on the olive oil.
You once questioned me:
why not the more traditional Mozzarella?
I said it’s because I feel that
strong blues make flavors pop
and without strong flavors,
what’s the point?
You tasted it, agreed, told me later
you could no longer imagine
not using a strong blue cheese
in a tomato salad, and I was as well pleased
as I could be that we’d fallen once again into
the same place on something.
I remember this as I stare into
strong blues and bright reds in this bowl,
stare into oil bubbles,
a brown slick of vinegar, remember
you weren’t here to help me
plant this year, to plant the beds with me
scant weeks after your passing;
weren’t here to help me weed
and toss and water and feed;
realize as if for the first time
that you aren’t here to help me savor
the likely last summer salad of the year,
picked ahead
of the inevitable
killing frost.
You drifted into this
as a boat unmoored
might drift:
predictably,
based on past unmoored boats’
behavior
in an ocean with such well-known currents.
We suspect you’ll say now that
you were surprised
to end there of all places.
We have to call you out.
This was so obviously
going to happen. We shook
our heads about it
right in front of you.
We said it
right to your face
so often, we’re a little surprised
you didn’t dream about it
every night. It’s as if
you never heard us —
or maybe you did,
and then did everything you could
to be what you shouldn’t have been;
it’s almost as if you were determined
to end up there on that far shore
starving and broke and broken
with no way to come back, almost
as if you were determined to be
as far away from our good sense
as possible, and we’ll be damned
if we know how
or have the wherewithal
to rescue you now — look at you
sitting there, staring into the sun
as if you’d never been told
not to do that.
