strategy:

scare them out of
being themselves

tactics:

war on them
wail on them
point and laugh

turn their names
against them and
into curses

buy them out
assimilate them
pretend you’re them

be them
until they become you
make the whole deal into
a fake and bloated us
until
out of many 
you win

repeat as needed until 
there is no more need 

My band doesn’t make
late night long drive louder please
music, music to forget racists to,
music to smash states by,
music to study war by.

My band doesn’t make
late night all alone in the room earbud
music, music to lower your eyes by,
music to make love to,
music to make you feel unwanted after.

My band’s got a good name, even if only my band knows it.
When we’re on the street
it sounds like keys being struck
on a glass xylophone.  Everyone around us at once
gets well.  America, we’ve got your new anthem

right here.  It’s a happy crotch-based
tune, not old school though it went there once
and not new school though it’s going there now.
My band doesn’t believe in school — we like
the learning, hate the sanctimony.

My band is working for you, America,
working for your love, working for your trust,
scorning your dollars a little.  More than a little
in fact.  We bed with them because they’re warm
in piles in the back of our van.  But we’re not really

friends.  We’re not really friends with you, either.
We’re just the band setting up for the high school dance,
tearing down after the wedding,
lugging equipment to the curb way too late at night.
We’re your band, America,

with our hidden good name
and your new anthem put to the test.  We’re gonna be
somewhere else later tonight, don’t know when
we’ll be back this way, but if you could give us a call
we’ll consider it.  In the meantime

we’re not the band that makes good time music,
music to cheat death by, music to hook horns by.
We make daylight music with glass xylophones
and steel guitars, late night music with full string
sections backed up by wolves.  My band

doesn’t make easy music for this hard country,
doesn’t overcomplicate the easy parts,
doesn’t much care if you like the album.
My band’s got a thousand miles to go
before the next breakdown.

Hope you can make the gig —
it’s gonna be something.

a vine
grows around
the dictator’s ankles.
the dictator falls to
kudzu, or ivy, or
wild grape.

a bicameral congress
is eaten
by ferrets.
both houses
fall.

do you see the president
behind the bees?

all the businesses are closed
for dolphin mating,
their slick sex
destroying the fixtures
and merchandise.

and over there’s a church
which has no walls
so how is a wildfire
trapping people inside?

every artist is struck dumb,
throats replaced with redwoods;
sculptors and painters and dancers fall
in agony, their hands and feet torn from
the bark sprouting and scaling.

I am coming home
naked, hooting, calling
non-verbally, hoping you
have survived the same way.
it seems
the only strategy
guaranteed to work.

Once, prompted by the fatal flaw
of believing I personally mattered
to the universe,
I indulged in a moment of
disaster planning.  “Save me,
save me!” I cried,
under the spell of the belief
that I mattered, that I matter beyond
what I had given and given up
to the Swarm — and then, swallowing hard,
I loosed my stinger and died,
a nameless worker bee
dying for the hive to survive,
because that was my job and my role
and what I was born to do.

I came back as a human,
a fat, sad, disheveled male
with a house full of boxes
of my writing and music.
Last story written, last 
song played.  No one
apparently listening anymore — 
I’m sitting at my desk crying.

How many lifetimes will it take
to learn such a simple lesson?

Comes the day
I live past
my last possibility,

hang me out
if I have not hanged myself
through either disability
or cowardice.  

I don’t care
if you help me by stoning
or stabbing,
impressment or suffocation.  

Help me get over
if I’ve gotten
so far along the path
that there’s no other 
and no return trip, and if
I’m past choice.  

Line me up
and let me have
some last quick gift
of travel home on my own terms.

Can you feel how close we are
to such times?
Can you feel how close I am
to counting on you for this?

What’s that coming up
from the dark water?
A corpse, a crab, a blue pearl?

The teacher says,  
I spy only the blue pearl,
lustrous mystery rising. 

The practical one
seizes on how the crab once seized
seizes back.  Seizes on deniable pain.

The undertaker says,
my concern is the corpse.
Wash it clean. Swathe it.  Bury it.

In this light, which is it?
Maybe it’s all a reflection
of that storm on the horizon,

and there’s nothing down there
threatening or promising anything,
just memory playing with shadow,

trying to claim its place
before the perfect storm
begins the work of drowning.

Wolf-were: a wolf
who turns into a man
at the new moon.  

Vampoor:
an undead being
who sucks wallets.

Ghist: the spirit of a departed person
whose moans boil questions down
to their essence…

some myths,
said the noted expert,
were obviously meant to be forgotten.

Apparently to expand my lead
over other species in my environment,
I can without warning
leap long distances
from a standing position.  

POP!
You annoy me with one word
and I’m over there, across the street,
over the fence, gone away from you
as swiftly as the scorn for you
rose within me.
POP!

I call such leaps “My Adaptation.”
Survival of the fittest demands this.

For this adaptation to become
part of the species’ genetic code, however,
I must mate and — POP! — sadly,
this seems out of reach.
POP!  When I am this lonely
I annoy myself — POP! — and cannot stay
close enough to a partner for long
as I pop off to get away from my detestable self,
which never works; thus, I am always a failure.
POP!

I long to someday conquer this
and spread my jumping seed.  Imagine
the planet seen from above, from on high,
from the heavens — all those bodies
leaping about, like a civilization
grown from a flea circus…and my love and I,
either standing stock still among the arcs,
or leaping away together, hand in hand.

Eating a sandwich made
with bread from the store
that came in a plastic wrapper
that has a farm scene on the wrapper
that shows a brawny farmer on the wrapper
a brawny farmer reaping in a rolling-hilled field

I remember bread from when I was young
and it sang
but this bread is silent

What did the brawny farmer do to the grain
to take its tongue
and render it mute
so that this bread cannot sing?
I notice he does not show his face here
Only his broad and broadly-drawn back
I don’t blame him for being ashamed
What did he do to the wheat?
Everything born of the earth has a voice
What did he do to the wheat?

I’m not even going to ask
about the American cheese

I returned my chemistry 
to the Store yesterday.

I don’t want this, I said.
It doesn’t fit me.  
It’s too big.

They tried to argue with me
but in the end they conceded
that the customer is always right
and I left the Store with a new chemistry.

Put it in and what do you know,
my brain stopped with the yammer,
yammer.  I recognized everyone
as divine.  Suddenly, I liked my eggs
over easy and when I got home
I threw away the clutter on the desk,
all those pages that have weighed me down
by being unfinished and in plain view.
Now all I’ve got to look at
is a clear desk and orderly shelves
of all the books I’ve completed.

I can’t say I’m genuinely relieved;
I’d say the feeling is more
like sitting in my childhood bedroom
looking at model cars I glued together once
and asking myself,

who the heck was that kid
with the patience for such things?

Khaki soil
soft mounded
under the rotted floor
of the old shed —
tearing out the boards
I expose a mother possum,
The Mother of All Possums,
the largest I’ve ever seen,
and she’s with at least ten
young ones and every one
is hissing and hating and scaring
me, the man with the shovel
astonished at all those black eyes,
pink mouths, and white little fangs.

In short order I hear everything
from “they make good pets”
to “they make good pies”
from the crew who are working
to get the yard done, but mostly
we’re all a little fascinated for ten minutes
and then annoyed — we’ll have to leave
this part of the job for the day, give her time
to move them.

You’re looking, no doubt, for a moral.
That’s what writers do, and readers do with them —
assign meanings, encode symbolism, 
scrape together a metaphor we all can use 
for glue to hold our lives together.  
Not this time.  Here’s all the meaning:

Clay soil not exposed to light is tan and soft
where the animals dig into it away from our eyes.
Mother possums are fierce in defense of their young.
Baby possums learn everything from momma.
We let them be because there was no reason not to
and it was a good excuse to take a break and talk
about their eyes, their habits, what we know of possums.
In the meantime she dug in with the family to wait us out
and that’s where we left them.  Small moment, 
disruption for all involved, moving on, getting by,
making the best of things.   

I concede
game set and match

to my little demons.  To my
corrections,
my corrections for,
and my incorrect
actions.  

To my lack of connection,
my unconvinced convictions, and
my uncorrelated understandings
of myself.  

I have been a bastard
ten thousand times over and 
lost myself in diligent pursuit of 
what I felt entitled to have.

Now that I know
I am in utter defeat,
I should forget all this
and go outside on the next sunny day,

go by myself to a bar or cafe
to buy a drink or two with my always 
nearly empty wallet,

to end up there for hours
sitting and greeting unexpected friends
with a delighted smile and the offer
of an empty chair and a drink on me
for their comfort

as if taking a pointless happy afternoon
for myself is no big deal,
though it is,
but then again,
it really isn’t.