Eyes burning, perhaps from wind
through open window,
eighty miles an hour
past the power plant. 

Cars peel off behind me,
exiting until the highway’s
empty. No one
is going my way. 

The city,
still forty miles ahead,
painting the sky orange
over deepest black.

We’ve been hearing
rumors of riot and fire all day.  
It’s the end of the world, some say.
But no one wants proof,

it seems, except me.
How foolish, how
odd that is — how can you
just curl into a ball and die

or hide in the boondocks
without seeing for yourself
that it is indeed the world ending?
In fact, how can you even flee

such a thing when you consider
the world we’re in?  Maybe
that’s the best of all possible
pyres up ahead.

I gun it.  I go.
I’ve always been the one
who has to know. Stuck my fingers
into wounds once to prove to myself

that the world wasn’t ending
after all, so why wouldn’t I
do this considering how well
it worked out last time?

homeless stories
float the streets
looking for a tongue
to tell them. 

you’re passed out on the couch,
though, television on,
with your mouth closed
for once.

when you don’t wake up
they go on to the next house,
the next street, the next town.
someone will open the door

eventually, and make them
into shows you can watch
at night before you fall asleep.
aren’t you chastened now

that you weren’t awake?
you could have avoided
wasting time later on
passing out on the couch

with a vague sense of envy
for those who give you
such marvelous
second hand tales.

Sipping fine coffee with an old friend; talking,
new ideas pop up —

frog eyes emerging from behind the lilypads
of a long-neglected pond.

I can’t wait for
their deep singing to begin…

the music of the moment,
or maybe it will be made to last;

either way, I’ve not been near this water
in far too long.

When you watch a real person die it’s rather unremarkable, or it can be.
It can be slow and drive you to a feeling like impatience but less self-centered.
It can be counting breaths per minute and saying is that it? was that it? no, not yet.
It can be wondering if it’s always this boring to say goodbye.
It can be wondering if you said goodbye before the slipping had progressed too far.
Did the goodbye take, as if its envelope had not been sealed and it had slipped out?
You search the floor with one eye for it, even as the last breath goes pillowy out the door.

Of course for variety there are the violent and sudden deaths which are not boring.
Really, how many of those do you really see, depending of course on your residence?
We shouldn’t count the theater deaths of media in considering this.
But seriously, how many?
Admit it, there was one, wasn’t there?
Maybe two?
A car crash you couldn’t take your eye from?
A knifing that you happened upon and looked away from?
Maybe one you had a hand in?
It has certainly most likely not been a huge number in any case.

Unless, perhaps, you were a soldier?
Were there so many then that you were bored even with those?

You may be now a expert, an aficonado, of these things.
You may understand many, many flavors.

Perhaps you’ve watched one of those boring, long deaths since?
Perhaps you said as no one but you watched that expiration,

“Go, then…Easy…There you go.”

in a brand new episode
of television’s latest show
about picking through visions
abandoned by the newly strapped

a pair of businessmen purchase
a half-restored Harley-Davidson
with a Wild One era frame
and a brand new engine

if you want to talk America
you can’t go wrong
waxing lyrical over an old softail
coupled to something sleek
and easy to tweak
that was left for the vultures to pick

the whole affair’s broadcast
for your amusement
to buffer your worry

onward then
with your own dreams
of a highway
laid out before you
all yours
after your own big score

I am occupying
your empty house
on your city’s south side

I am occupying
the seashell collection
you left behind

Occupying the mold
that’s creeping over
the saturated walls
the photo albums
from the ski trip and
the junior prom

I am occupying
the leftovers
of the feast

Occupying the soggy lawn
that was overgrown
before winter
and is now pressed flat
from the weight of snow

I am occupying
the weight of emptiness
that moved in when you left
and the footsteps you left behind

I am occupied
with the state of mind of those
who moved you out

I am occupied
with their justification
through seven deadly sins
seven cardinal virtues
seven Roman candles
seven seals and seven stars
a percentage of the gross profits
a fraction of fractionalized effort
the portion rendered
unto Caesar
and the remnant offered
unto God
by the purple robed emissaries
of the King
and all of these are empty
as all the ruined houses
that were once homes

I am occupying the Everywhere
of the New Battleground
Staring into the orange eye
of Monolith
as it claims
it is anything but
Monolith

If I am rejected
forced out or sold out
pushed to the margins
there are always
the foundation cracks
to be occupied
pushed upon
frozen open with water
and blood

made into chasms
wide enough for you
to shelter in
as Monolith
shatters

You’ve been proclaimed
one of that ilk,
the Big Ilk. The sucklers
of The Even Bigger Ilk’s
poison milk who then
soak smaller ilk
with whatever stings.

You’re in all the pictures now.
You’re in all the pictures
you weren’t even alive
to be in. 

In fact,
no one knows what you were thinking
when you walked
against the talk
with the bottle in your hand
as casually as you might at home,

fogging your hedge against wasps.

You’re of that ilk now —
the ones who walk
the talk, even if it’s not
their talk.  Even if
you had a smidge
of heart for the ones
you soaked.

I imagine you at home
not watching the news.
Maybe you take a walk.
Maybe you talk
to the neighbors.  Maybe
they clap you on the back.
Maybe they stand back. 

Maybe you go home
and sit for a while
not talking.  Maybe
you’re just fine, maybe
your eyes well up.

In the pictures
you’re so 
matter-of-fact. So
just do it, so
army of one, so
thin blue line —
maybe at home
you’re someone else,
but you’ll forever be
one of that ilk
in the pictures.

I picture this —
a walk where you don’t
fire, their talk
ignored. No ire
and thus no pictures.
No knowledge, even,
of your name. 

Maybe that’s
what you think about too
while you’re sitting in the dark.

Everything currently going on
has always been going on

What happens on the Silk Road
has never stayed on the Silk Road

What happened on Potosi
is still happening on Potosi and in Boston

and East Willowdale and Basra too
What happens is always happening everywhere

There’s never been a deus ex machina
that didn’t have a machinist behind it

Everything going on right now
has always been going on

There have always been 
palaces and shackles

There has always been
a remembered/imagined wilderness

as a source for cautionary taletelling
Everything is the moment as always

No wars fought for untested reasons
No poverty not impressed from above

Everything going on is always going on
Every moment a syllable of a common language

All that’s new is that we can see it all now
as one moment

which is why it’s so hard to see it
as one moment — we have no practice in that

and it’s why we’re sitting relatively still
and quiet as the moment surges along

observing the entire Flood at once
and hoping we maintain our sanity

The revolution proceeds
in sunlight
and morning cold.

Its exhaled cloud
is rising freely while mine,
condensing indoors, costs me dearly.

I’d consider losing 
more than a few coins
and heartbeats

for the wherewithal
to get out there
into the open air

where the action is.
But instead I’m here
because I have to be.

I tell myself if I can hold my breath a while,
something will change;
the bills will shrink, the accounts

will swell.  I’ll get out
from under the weight of 
hermitage and shackles.

But that’s just more
wasted breath.  A revolution
underway, and despite the slogans

I’m not a part of it, of them;
I’ve got a feeling
I never will be. So I exhale

and bend back to the tasks
at hand, the minute torture
of getting by,

wishing the revolution’s air
would sweep in
and clear this stale room.

Clench your hand hard enough
that blood
leaches into
the finger tips,
leaving them
taut and red.
Simple survival is in your grasp —
how hard can you hold on to that,
and for how long?
There’s no actual cliff here
for you, no tenuous
but obvious ledge
on which to cling,
from which to hang,
but you hang and cling
above a drop
as real as any.  The stop
at the bottom
would be as fatal.
How long
will you hang?
How long will you wait
to find out
how it feels
to land?

When this child of explosions
opens her mouth,
fences blow down.

When this child of fences
averts her eyes,
a flagpole bends.

When this child of the flagpole
sits down to dinner,
the meat burns phosphor white.

Phosphor child,
flagpole child, fence and
explosion child, offspring

of the warrior age, largely unparented by us,
fostered more by the fire and the wind,
fed on and led on and made to dance

hot and crushed, around and around —
oh, my country, ’tis of thee, sweet child,
of thee I sing.  Throw yourself

into the cold, roll till you’re quiet
and quenched — then get
as far away from us as you possibly can.

in our most remarkable moments
we should remind ourselves
that at our primal best
we know what we should do.

our bodies will take over and
we’ll run, or take tighter hold;
feed, fight or flee.
these soft and convoluted brains

want to complicate
everything
but our bodies
know better.

when we stop evolving for a second
and just are lovers or warriors
or right-acting cowards, we are
what we were grown to be

when long ago
we lived
under the
African stars.

Are we ripe enough yet
to fall from the Tree
and in dying send our hopes
ahead of where we lie?

Are we yet mad enough
to join others we have never known,
spoon with them and recognize
common ground to hold?

Are we steel enough yet
to accept that when we fall we will rust,
but it will be a slow rusting
and in the meantime we can be used to carve?

Are we sane enough yet to accept
that action leads to reaction,
that when we act we invite reaction,
and knowing that, act anyway?

Comes a revolution. We will fall.
Comes a harvest, we will be discarded
separately, left for fuel for the next crop.
Our present to be made future, our past

to be made now — are we yet ready to die
for the right to believe that a death
may be worth dying?  Are we steel-sane,
mad-ripe for that now? If we are,

we should whisper it or shout it or even
say nothing at all as we step to it.  If we are ready
then none should see fear in us — or if they do
let it be only for a moment as we ripen to the full.