Where my garden was a week ago
is a box of dirt.  My plants
with their unripe veggies
are piled rotting beside it, victims
of something swift and mysterious.
All that’s left are two watermelon vines
too far behind to bear fruit
before the first frost, and a lone
strawberry which is suddenly
thriving. 

I hate strawberries.

There’s a box of dirt
and a couple of useless-to-me
survivors, and I’m hungry
for the squash and cukes 
I won’t get.  I feel like I’ve presided
over a genocide
and am ready to kill what’s left
out of sheer rage.

A box of dirt, six by three by two.
I could almost lie down in it
if it were empty.  Lie down in a box of dirt
and stare up at the sky, wondering
what happened, how I got here.
Ask myself
who will water me as I once watered
what grew here,  what food
I will need. Ask if I can bear fruit
I would want to live on,
and if I will live long enough
to do that.

Under a casket in the spare room I find
a book I’d forgotten buying, a book titled
Art And Fear.

I think being under a casket
for a few years
has made it a better book
than if it hadn’t been there.
It smells like it soaked up
a little something under there
which I think makes it
far more credible.

This is the part where you ask
about the casket.

This is the part where you ask
why I moved the casket.

This is the part
where you can hear an owl
in the distance and cannot tell
if it’s in the poem, the yard,
or the next room,
the part where you stay awake
long after you should be asleep.

right now no proof
of poetry at all in you

an uncut gem
in your mouth

when you clamp down upon it
it will fire up in there 
will shatter into light

but what light

Too true — it feels good
to swing a hand
and connect with a
hard yet crackable jaw.

Hard for some people
to get this:  most
criminals I’ve known
had mountain-high self esteem.

That war thing, the one
where we rush into it singing?
We’ve tried for years to stop it,
and it keeps coming up.

Anger, said the Dalai Lama,
is unnatural,
yet every baby I’ve ever seen
knew from birth how to make a fist.

We cannot be
the enlightened ones
when we can’t even speak truth
about who we are.

Ignore the gurus
and prophets.  We’re killers
to the core and deep down,
we know it.

What we do to survive
is form societies,
then learn to kill
inside their lines.

When I move, you move…

Truckstop, train station, bus station,
airport, port;  remember when those
were the easy way out,
and no one watched you leave?
Remember sticking a thumb out on the highway?
The all-American way
to travel, depend on the “we’ve all been there”
thing…except we haven’t
and “we” means nothing anymore,
if it ever did, if it was ever anything more
than an illusion.  
Good old flag-wrapped dreamtime,
the American walkabout,
legend woven into collective self.  

When I move, you move…

Try to recall what it was like.
Tell yourself
we used to trust one another.  
Tell yourself
travel was a communal experience
and no one except small town cops
ever patted you down,
and they always let you go on your way
after taking the weed you’d hid in your sock.  
Remember
you didn’t care much
because weed was cheap
and no matter where you ended up
you knew you could find more
one handshake away.

When I move, you move…

We used to travel without a lot of thought.
We used to travel without a lot of anything.
That was how you became American:
you just got on the road.  
Had philosophical encounters and wild,
anonymous sex.  Discussed the meaning of life
in the back seat of a big boatcar
with someone who picked you up
on the way to a Dead concert, a festival, your brother’s house
in Middleburg Heights.  
Found a crash pad in a city
you reached before reaching
the city you wanted to end up in,
and decided to stay there for a while…

When I move, you move… 

Everyone’s so damn stationary now.
No matter the size of the beat surging out of the car
the car sits still and only moves in place,
and no one picks up hitchers, ever.
No one buys a ticket last minute
and gets on a plane without running a gauntlet.  
No one rides a train at all
and we fear the buses will smother us
in other people’s germs…
we don’t move at all
without knowing exactly where we’re going,
without a screen to tell us exactly where we’re going,
without a plan as to where we’re going,
only going where everyone else is going.

When I move, you move…
just like that.

Somewhere
in this endless knitting of words
are sense and story
of what is true and 
important and 
though I cannot say
with certainty
what that means
in any given moment,
it is enough to recall
it exists

each time I ground myself
in the grind of bills and 
the scent of my overheated body,
each time I lose myself 
in the sluice of sound and 
the pick-pick-pick of others’ needs,
each time I catch myself
on the tiny barbs and
snags of what seems real.

Each time I find myself
a moment in a minute and
consider what I have learned
from this endless
digging and sifting, this mincing
and dicing of what one letter
may do to change
what I know and feel
and think I know
and feel,

I feel, for one moment,
better.  As if it matters
to anyone that I feel
in any way at all.  As if it matters
that there is a truth to be had.
As if it matters at all.

A clown can’t be approached, though a clown is easy to point at.  
The clown fails professionally, for entertainment’s sake,
as I am failing now to explain whatever I mean
by this.  I am failing now.  I’m sure you

understand. I can understand why
you’d try to help at the last possible,
least useful moment.  I am failing.  Now
is the easiest time to offer, the hardest time

for it to matter. You’ll get to say 
you knew me when I wasn’t and that
you were shocked or not, whatever. 
You can show the greasepaint on your sleeves

where you tried to hug the clown.  What 
I am failing now to completely explain:
it’s not your fault you were late, of course.
Not your fault that what you saw as a hug

I saw as a last smothering.  
Listen:  I am failing now.  
What was once art is now a bad habit.
You don’t need to see this.

she caught the katy
and left me a mule to ride… 

an old blues
to filter inner noise,
to leave some echo —

weird names, slang
that makes just enough sense
to sing along with;

the idea that this story 
is my story, is
all stories:

can’t help but love
that hard headed woman of mine…

You’ll crack a hip
straddling
a black snake

Wreck a wrist
clinging to its
barbed-whip reins

Things will change when
you’re in the chains 
Wise up son for

rowdy boyhood
might make for either
a grimmer manhood

or a more joyful one
You decide the road
but all must lead through

blacksnake riptide
slashhand chains and
wristsnap buck and roll

getting through is all 
in how
you ride

my DIY earrings
used to piss off my mom
now she asks
I need my holes reopened
where did you get yours done? 

my DIY music used to piss off dad
now we’re both too deaf to care

my face used to piss me off
now when I look at it I’m DIY scared

DIY baby
all grown now
no money, no school, no job to speak of
fifteen guitars and no band with whom to hang
fifteen broken vessels in the drunkman wreckage of my face
DIY baby, DIY

I’m DIY, asshole
no one’s bitch or friend
except for the bills, totally free of chains
no cent in the bank and no skin in the game
nostalgia a pillow for the banged head still ringing 
DIY baby, DIY

my DIY was always gimme gimme throw it away
no TV, no DVDs, certainly never a radio
I still have my original twitch from 1977
I still have my original itch and no drugs to put on it
understood the D, understood the Y, 
struggled all these years to figure out the I
but think I’ve got a handle on it now
what I’ve been doing
what I’ve been making
DIY
the three letters inked on my chest
have become a blotch on one saggy tit 
on my DIY body 
my doughy body
my fatty body
my old running out 
body
DIY baby 
DIY

was it worth it
to turn away from so much
while getting to middle age decrepit and poor
with no fun, no wave to catch, no future
but for the obvious one all can see coming
I look like any working man with shelled over eyes
hands numbing from work so I can’t really play
(which was always the goal though it was uncool to say)
blood clogged with the leftovers of how angry I was
and still am but now it’s not charming to be so irritable
when paralysis strikes will the world be charitable
to someone like me who still pushes all away

will it be worth it when soon I die alone
dressed in black for my own ritual
of last negligence recalled for cautionary tale
if i leave burial instructions who will be sure that they are done

the one thing you can’t do for yourself
is remember who you are once you’re gone
too few who’ve seen me will remember me except
as the canvas of the slogan stubborn to the death
DIY, baby
DIY, buddy
DI
DI
DI
Y

Last night of many nights in a row
of this Golden Spike (in which
the mood is that of coal locomotives
on parallel tracks,
racing)

and now will come what always follows
(in which regret, which has been an egret floating
above a calm swamp,
becomes a buzzard eager to feed) — 

What should I call this?
The beginning of this time
of Open Wound under the point of Golden Spike?

What should I call myself?  
Am I just the imagination
of coal, of what was once
a Triassic jungle
now ready to smut up a chimney
as it burns?

There I am saying,
“I once grew and was green
and I now I burn and crumble,
black to red to black
again?”  

No.  It’s all good, even
the very bad.

Regrets?
I’ve had a few but then again,
manic depression is just another word
for what it’s like to have a buzzard poking
at your once high-velocity liver

as you recall how from the train
the cursed bird once looked
like a white, bright blessing.

Careful for the scavenger beasts
that may be found on the street on trash day —
cats and dogs, possums and raccoons,
even the occasional bear in outlying sections —
I placed the entire contents
of a failed refrigerator on the curb,  trailing
a cloud of flies with me from the back porch.
Spoiled meat, spoiled milk, spoiled everything;
everything gone, everything rich ripe and gross
to the human nose.  Two heavy bags reeking,
unbearable almost to the touch.  I heaved them
into place, came back inside;
do you know, not ten minutes passed
before I heard a coyote at the curb?

I let him have at it with his long snout, sensitive enough
to find the good in all the bad I thought was there.
A car came down the hill, and I watched him go
into the back yard and disappear, leaving
only a neat hole in each bag
to show he’d ever been there.  And if I prayed,
held my breath for a second in his presence
as I thought of how my cast-off was his treasure?
That’s my own concern.  From here,
you should go and seek your own in whatever
you are trying to discard, in whatever
is chosen by another to redeem.