Too much rain today
for the folks
in California.
How are they
supposed to sing
about the sunshine
if it feels like
a lie?
How are we
supposed to wish
for that promised land
when the people who live there
are drowning?
Tell me
how we can be our best old selves
when the planet
is telling us, implacably,
that we must change
or be washed away.
There will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
the circle of ash in a clearing,
the memory of a gathering.
It will be remainder.
It will be circle of care
and heat.
It will be reminder.
It will be central to tradition
and memory.
It will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
this will be the circle of ash in a clearing,
memory of a gathering.
It will be source of shadow.
This is where it will come from.
Out beyond is where light will end
as changes in darkness only come
from a circle of light.
There will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
the circle of ash in a clearing,
the memory of a gathering.
It shall be a tipping point.
It shall be a council.
It will take us to focus
and its center will be
a pact between light and heat.
There will be a fire one day;
this will be the hearth,
the circle of ash in a clearing,
the memory of a gathering.
It will be a country one day,
there will be light in darkness
and darkness in the core of light,
this will be remembered and caricatured;
diorama in museum,
empty blasphemy in a full stadium,
circle of ash, memory of tradition,
mistake multiplied, memory of honor
and bones. There will be
a heap of scorched bones.
To wake up
in the dark and reach for
first phone, then glasses,
suggests that something
out there is worth
more attention
than what is close
at hand. I’ll get to that —
but first, the news of the world.
If I reach first
for glasses, then phone,
it’s from the urge to rise
and go see for myself
what night holds
right here, in my own darkness.
Instead of either
I shut my eyes again,
ignore the phone,
and roll to my right
into the depth of the bed
where I am reminded
that I am unalone,
where she sleeps, my
familiar joy; I choose
to stay here in comfortable
darkness, knowing nothing else
of the world for a while longer.
Here’s a video of me doing up one of my recent prose poems.
I hope you enjoy it.
Redemption is a fickle beast; chooses its own schedule. It’s an animal hiding in a hollow log, or behind a 55 gallon drum rusting in the woods behind your home. You know it’s out there somewhere, but you can’t decide on what direction you should go to find it.
You stumble on it by accident. You flush it out from its hiding place. Perhaps it’s just had enough of you being stuck in misdeeds and mistakes for so long? Maybe it’s disgusted with you, fed up with your wallowing.
One way or another, it’s out. From out of nowhere an audience appears and applauds a redemption arc, a wrong colored rainbow that springs up from where you are standing as the animal — a fox, a trendy red panda, a binturong —
bounds away from you.
You are left behind trying to classify your Redemption, give it a place in your personal taxonomy.
Don’t just stand there. Start running, let the nature of the next steps decide what to call it.
It is beyond
my power to control
anything that’s
about to happen.
Beyond my power
to affect the weather.
Beyond any power
I could borrow or buy.
Close to powerless
in a powerful wind
making things happen
without me.
I could stand still
and let it whip past me.
I could find myself
standing strong,
or blown over.
Lying there after,
standing there after,
wondering what voice
I was hearing. I think
it was the rubble left behind
praising me. Either that
or it was the rubble accusing me.
Whatever I’ve heard singing
has nothing to do with me
but it is beyond my power
to convince myself otherwise,
and so I am immobile,
and so I remain exactly
where I have always been,
pretending to agency.
In imagining
my next life
I cannot escape
what came before;
in arguing
on behalf
of deviance from
my prescribed path
I cannot speak of future
without exhaling past;
I drag
my faults forward
into hoped-for
redemption
and am disappointed
that I’m not new
now, that I’m the same
set of regrets and mistakes
I’ve always been,
always will be,
no matter my best intentions,
no matter how hard I try.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I watch an old clip on YouTube. Clapton without Duane on the Johnny Cash Show, country-blues riff on Brownie the legendary Stratocaster that sold for half a million dollars decades ago.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I watch Bobby Whitlock on furious background vocals and piano. I watch killer Jim Gordon on drums. Carl Radle on bass, probably on smack as well — and Clapton on Brownie and blues and Patti Boyd and yes, heroin. Thinking of Johnny Cash offscreen in a ruffled shirt.
“It’s too late, she’s gone.”
I’m digging the song, if not the era. Nostalgia is lost on me. I like living in the moment and half or more of the people I have known are dead and don’t live in that moment or any moment now.
Classic rockers are good, are bad. It takes all kinds to make a moment. This is a moment I am making by myself in the living room before dawn — Jim Gordon is dead, Carl Radle is dead, Johnny Cash too. We do still have Whitlock. I try to pretend we don’t have Clapton.
My guitar hand is gone but my nostalgia for it needs to be kept at bay.
Sunrise coming, this hemisphere’s feeling so cold, feels like the world closing in.
Tell me it’s not too late.
I look outside
on a frigid night
at a jagged landscape
clinging to the running boards
of SUVs and trucks,
my own station wagon,
the old car in front of
the triple decker across the street.
Clods of snow and petrified ice,
inverted Arctic territories
waiting for a thaw to get back
to where they came from
before we smashed through the mess
on the road, splashed them up
and brought them here.
By spring, maybe nothing
on the roadside will be local.
It will be a refugee mess
like all of us who have come here
by chance, ended up here
or displaced from somewhere else.
Well, I’m here — who have expected that I would have made it to Heaven? Here I am, though. And it’s just as it’s been described. Clouds, pink light, music from an unseen source. And yes, angels. All with two eyes, all with two wings, white gowns, plucky but serene demeanor.
Welcome to Heaven, they say without speaking directly. Flashing Morse code off their haloes. Communicating without words, communicating nonetheless clearly and directly. Welcome to Paradise.
As time goes on, I notice I’m not becoming an angel; the angels I’m seeing seem to have changed a bit — still with the wings, still the gown, still the demeanor but less serene, more morose. In fact, they’re often stock still and weeping, or twitching and wailing. The music of Heaven goes on with an undertone of that.
I’m no angel. Heaven’s full of people-shades who thought it would be joyous fun and they’re finding out there’s a death-sameness to it that gets to you after a while.
As it is, I’m holding it off. No desire to succumb to this numbing joy. Holding it off with a Jerry Jeff Walker song. “If I could just get off of this L.A. freeway without gettin’ killed or caught…” The sad wings of sad angels, beating guitar time as I hum along.
startled by
what’s come into view
sprouting from the road
in front of me
it doesn’t make sense
but I surely drove through it
a curtain in the road
a rainbow sheet uprisen
from wet-black pavement
no illusion I swear
felt it on the car
felt it in my eyes
am I the same jerk
who drove into it
or am I now
completely changed
by an illusion
after all — it has happened before
it used to be called
childhood and then it was
over and
then it was love
and then it was
service and family
growing into
your true colors
must mean something
if the illusion is to count
I made it this far after all
with my own two faces
my own weakening hands
they say get a grip on yourself
which one should I hold
I respond
they are confused
as am I
but not for
the same reason
I promise you
with one wet voice
In awe of the simple brutality
of aging:
not that
it’s without beauty,
or that joy is not
present, even in the moment
when you know
your true age at last
and it’s exactly right
as it is, even
as it assumes the mantle
of finality; when it settles upon you
that you are exactly
the right age, soaking
up that brief moment
becomes the work of a lifetime.
The simple brutality
of it: the casual swift recognition
that while this may not be the end,
it surely is trending. It surely
has a feel to it,
and this is how it feels.
Now and then
there is a moment marked
by a single tick
from an old schoolroom clock
that hangs on the basement wall;
relic taken from a modernizing classroom,
covered in plain dust and
no small amount of soot put there
after a backed-up chimney
filled the room with smoke —
it happened seldom but
often enough to be
an unremarkable event on its own.
A single tick for no reason.
No one cares if that clock works
so it’s possibly reminding us that it could
if we cared to clean it up a bit.
One tick in a room
where no one sees it moving.
“Here I am,”
it says in a room where no one
spends much time. Randomly.
Desperately,just in case
someone is listening.
The floor is always lava. My feet are always burning. No one ever knows what’s happening. No one else feels the heated floor, the measured melting steps I have to take.
I’m going to tell of what that’s like, but not today. Today I have no choice but to keep it to myself because to explain it I’d have to open up and let the flames out of my lungs to which they’ve risen — up my legs the fire goes and there is a burning within.
It’s clear to me that some people like to read about the burning. It’s clear to me that I’m their choice to feed them the fire. It’s clear to me that they think my fire can counter theirs. It’s clear to me they are wrong.
The floor beneath me is always lava, and with that awareness as public knowledge now, I will keep my mouth as closed as I can until I can no more.
I finished my term today and when I stepped out the door afterward I looked up at the sky and thought about that being a form of graduation. Reflected on what I’d learned. Tried to choose a life’s work. Tried to think about who I wanted to be.
I finished my term today and the final grades are in. I seem to have passed all the critical tests, the crucial exams,
the certifications for the New Life. I looked up at the sky and reflected on what I was supposed to do — what shone upon me now, what I attracted unto my self under the grand roof of Heaven.
I finished my term today and realized I had no idea what to do next. Reflected on direction, considered standing still for all the rest of time. Instead I looked up and began to rise. Ceremonial to the end. The writer of ritual endings. The knife wielder, my hands moving above my head. The only tassel to toss is the one on the scabbard of the athame.
This is how a long semester ends — uncertainty and a fall back into superstition.
This is how I discuss my lost youth. This is how the aged degenerate.
This is how it’s done. This is how we do it.
Dark Matter 