Originally posted 4/2/2011; original title, “Exile: Portraits.”

I live alone in the far woods,
among good words
in this house — air conditioned,
well-heated, smelling
of mountain spring
in the dead of winter,
wrapped in
a perfect shade of rose.

I like it here.
I like living alone
among words.

I like the muscles in words, like
how they move, 
how it’s not even work
when they move. I like
how different work is
from that.

Sometimes I talk to myself.  
I say, out loud,
that I don’t want my hands 
or my corn anymore.
I’ve held too many things
and been too well-fed. I’m trying 

to be leaner, a good citizen of the world,
though I’ve not left this home soil
in fifty years, though I was born here
as were all my genes. Lucky 

for me that I like it here. I like
being alone, 
living with words — 
I like the work they do
without appearing to work at all.

The only time I ever left 
was when I was sent to kill. 
I came home certain
that all the creation stories 
my little nation ever taught me
were literally true.  A coyote

indeed brought us fire, the snakes
indeed were postal carriers to the gods,
I indeed was fashioned
to wear the word “warrior,” and
someday, all will indeed be restored. 
It has to be true: every brown person I killed
in every country where I killed them
told me the same story
in different words,

and I like words. I like 
the way they move, the way
their muscles shift, the work
they do without appearing to work,
I like how well-scrubbed

they can make me feel.

Originally posted 8/11/2012.

In my lost year of seventeen,
I had my own blood on my hands.
Drugs heaved their song inside me
and I did as I pleased,
for I planned to die young.

In my lost year of twenty-one,
my hands cupped more blood.
Dead sex occurred to spite the loss of live love.
Anything was possible;
I was going away.

Lost years between twenty-four
and forty-four? I picked off the scaled, dried blood
and washed the flakes away. No itemized
seductions, untaxed by hope,
I just lived as a matter of fact.

Fifty-two and lost again, or found again, or just awake.
I sing with longing to feel blood in my hands again,
to revel in rage, sex, and passion, to roll myself in great drugs.
I sense again that I can either create my world
or destroy it; am energized by every choice being perhaps the worst.

Originally posted 7/27/2013.

For each guest,
a gift of honey in a small jar.  

Broad leaves for plates, laden
with sticky-starchy rice, a bed for 

cloud-white fish, steamed
and spiced. Tumblers

of cool juices, a good wine
of humble provenance

in a thick-walled carafe.
Unfamiliar fruits

placed within reach
to be eaten at leisure.  

Then I woke. This all became
a fading dream.

Ten minutes later, cannot recall
the perfect conversation

that accompanied the feast, do not know
the name of One who sat across from me

and made me feel small and
full of future as if I were a seed.

I remember no words, but dimly recall
the taste of that fruit,

how the honey in glass
glowed in the sunset, 

how much I wanted
to call that place home.

Originally posted on 7/28/2013.

You see yourself
as a mere trajectory, a clear arc

from yesterday to now, a line in mid-air
revealing origin, predicting destination.

What about now? Are the lines
around your mouth right now just a residue?

Face yourself for once. That arc behind you
is smoke. Are you really still on fire?

Originally posted 7/12/2010.  Original title, “Gentrifying Worcester.”

Where I live
they’re opening cute bars for the cute,
sprucing up streets ahead of the cute,
renaming old squares for the cute.

This city was never built for cute.
We’re the city that either
swallowed cute whole or spit it out.
Now our throats 

are so clogged with glitter
we can’t breathe,
yet we squabble over 
how to swallow even more.  

Downtown frets 
over how to paint itself more cute
while up here on the hills 
we’re hoping cute washes off

before we can’t recognize ourselves
in what’s left of our sturdy old mirrors — 
hell, this city is my sturdy old mirror.
There I am in its empty red-brick

monuments to old machines, 
its neighborhood dives,
its warehouse squats, its 
half-eaten streets, its good dirty diners.

This was the town where we used to depend
on the knowledge that cute always fades
like a Saturday night drunk
propped in the corner of a diner booth;

it kept us from envying cute too much.
We’ve forgotten that too often, when cute sobers up
it either runs out on the check or leaves a bad tip
and anyone left has to figure out how to get by.

Underneath this city is a river
no one alive has ever seen. Downtown
they’re talking about cutting it open 
and making it cute. Cut it open,

I say. Cut it open —
see what’s collected in the dark,
but don’t count on finding cute down there.
Don’t count on finding water flowing there;

we’ve sweated, bled and cried here for years.
All of that has to have gone somewhere;
if you listen, you can hear it still bubbling
and it doesn’t sound cute to me.