Once your ears are folded and stitched in
to block the voice of Outside,
you’ll sit back and expect to hear
what you’re really like.
You’ll be disappointed.
Once you realize
how much of what you tell yourself
is a lie, you’ll need to seal your eyes.
Seeing how much of Outside
rejects your Inside, rebukes
your thinking, and negates
your perspective, you’ll want
to be blind.  You’ll want to be deaf
too, but it’ll be too late for that. 

I love dark toast.
If the tips of the texture
of the slice are just singed,
just enough to hint of carbon,
so much the better.

I love a bad note
dropped into an aching run
by a horn player hanging on
to the edge of music
by the love of music. 

I want the crestfallen temporary failure,
the dinged-in-the-attempt, the just-ahead-of-broken.
I want imperfection
that praises perfection while knowing
how boring perfection can be,

that honors the pursuit
without exalting the capture.

Also, I prefer hot
and fleshy curves
over cool, gentle slopes.
Give me real skin that rebukes
all the popular defaults.

I want a little warfare
in my personal peace,
reminding me
of why I value peace
without submitting to its tyranny,

its demand to be all of time
and all of history.  Give me a Bronx cheer
over undeserved praise. Give me
an obituary that tells the tale
of me as constant bastard and frequent fool,

of my fits and starts, my graces and my stumbles
toward extracting moments from undistinguished time.

Give me sun in a pre-tornado sky.
Give me a beach
scoured of its tourists by storm.
I always cheat in favor of the emptied,
the desolate, the contrasting view.  

I yearn to be with those like me
who smell a rose in the compost
even if we won’t be here to cut it;
the ten year old kid with broken sunglasses
singing loudly off key at the local open mic

while his mother shoots phone video
and beams and struts and smiles.  
I love the way I applaud him
as if it was the last time
he’ll ever do this,

and maybe it is. Maybe he’ll go home
and never sing again after seeing that…but I doubt it.

I applaud and seek
any grand charge
toward the rejection of oblivion’s dominion
however it manifests, even when it manifests
as a mistake. God doesn’t make a mistake,

it’s said.  God leaves us to make them
and when we now and then fail to do so,
God reminds us in the next second
that while divinity is not impossible to touch,
it skirts away from us as quickly as it arrives.

I munch on near-burnt toast 
with a possibility howling inside me.
I hear a music I can’t imagine how to play.
I scramble for the ring I can’t quite see.
I call on a God who will pull it away.

There’s that edge, so bright it hurts.
So slick, so smooth, so present, so hard to seize.

One of the deep
moments that keeps itself
face up in the memory bed,
asleep but ever-stirring, threatening

to open its eyes and fix me
like a bug on its pin:

the time I killed the squirrel
on the front lawn after
its mauling by the big stray mutt
we all hated. I pulled

a good strong knife and slashed
once then twice over the tooth-mashed throat,
saw the spurt, saw it relax at once;

then I reached for a stone
and nailed that dog in the ribs
and it took off howling with me howling
after it, running it off, its shallow flanks
pumping ahead of me too fast
to catch.

I do not fear the memory
for its horror,
but for its delights —
its promise of deus ex machina,
its flavor of massacres, camps,
and gallows blessed by others.

Its tang of permission.

When you pontificate
to your chosen or found audience,
offering advice,
opining that the listener
should “do one thing every day
that scares you,”
you use the statement
to draw the attention away
from your shaking hands.

Getting up scares you.  Coffeemaking
scares you. Being naked in a shower
scares you.  Clothing yourself
post-shower scares you. Conversation
scares you.  Eating with others scares you.
Sex scares you. Sleeping
scares you, until you’re lost to it.

That dark thrill of a catchphrase
offered as entertainment or uplift
disguises how fearful and careful
you’ve become, how little
you can find in your day-to-day
that makes you calm.  

But you keep saying it, doing it.
“Do one thing everyday that scares you.”

What you’re talking about
is unclear.  You mean it, that’s
obvious; you reach for it,
the effort is visible, palpable
to the watchers.
You wrangle
something out of the air
and hold it
till it stops squirming.  
But what is it?
Can you even name it?  
Is it big enough for a label? 

I think all you want
is to be in control of some fleeting thing
in the middle of your steady chaos.
To keep from pissing your pants
long enough to pretend
that this is good enough for now.

It’s a magic spell.
It conjures a drug.
A hospice drug.

On the cliff above Long Pond
standing well back from the edge
to defeat my natural desire to fly
and my natural tendency to fall,

my natural longing to be the next
in the historical record, the next 
big item in the local paper, the next
small article in the regional news section

of the big-city paper,
the next completed form
in the state’s file of recent deaths. 
That’s what I’m protecting myself from —

posterity.  As long as I hang back
I’m safe.  Not a soul will ever know 
I was here.  I’ll be just one more pair
of feet on the trail leaving a small,

near-untraceable trace.  I came here
for the sense of smallness gained
by standing high above the much larger
world.  I came here to forget myself

and now I’m consumed with the threat
of becoming much more; perhaps I can regain
that diminishment by inching closer,
closer…trying to disappear…

Watching the parade
automatically
I mistrust

the clergyman
walking amongst 
a crowd of children
in the parade;

the admiral
speaking of sacrifice 
from the podium;

the policeman
approaching the kids
holding the Puerto Rican flag
on the sidelines;

the politician waving
and shaking hands
along the route.

I’m wrong
to suspect automatically
that nothing is what it seems,
but after all

this is 
an all-American holiday, and I’m
a Yankee Doodle Dandy,

Yankee Doodle
do or die.  I grew up
with an erratic uncle and
I wasn’t born yesterday.

I’m wrong
to automatically suspect
anyone of anything but

isn’t it just as wrong
that mistrust has so often been
well founded, cheapening
my honest Yankee Doodle joy?

Legacy
communicates
through being
entirely what it is:
it has no need to speak
of itself, it does not need
interpreters, it has no desire
to be explained, it stands there 
and says nothing, maybe it beckons
a bit, but no more, stands there mute
demanding nothing except acceptance, 
contains revelation, offers complexity and
shadow along with illumination, tells no story,
the pyramid of its existence is its entire message,
complete, allows entrance without a map, is sturdy, 
is cool to the trembling touch of those who would know more
but will not reveal itself unless they are willing to climb it as it is
from broad base to tip-top view down over what has been scaled,
and then it waits for them to say how terrifying that view is, that they’re
unworthy, will build their own with this knowledge – but first, they need to come down.

You allow the hot stream in you
to tear open trash dams  
and pull blood
out of your clogged
and rubbery vessels —
emptying the blue highways that carry flow
back to the heart, the red arteries
carrying flow away from the heart.

Let it speak as it wishes, let the stream
attack and defend, define defilement
of what’s expected, chide the correct,
offer comfort to the addicted
and perpetually unjustly wronged.

This is how you learn
that what is permitted is also
somehow most forbidden in most places:
the undressed and messy view
of the charcoal body
of a prisoner newly released from fire,
the taste of that same fire in the words
once tangled and now unraveling
out of your head.

Let the stream pour from you
into the dirty streets, your blood
and delicious delirium
spreading and pooling,
staining everywhere as redly
as the insides are stained;

let it reveal the truth,
the large Truth
without compromise in image
or substance…let it show
what has been trapped inside you,
the charcoal prisoner’s body
that is now a gray covenant
between you and the jailors
that you’ll not shut up
at all, ever,
never stop accusing them
of negligent surrealism,
of imposing a small outside world
that imprisons the immense inside world
until no one can believe in it
or begin to understand it
without speaking, however poorly,
of how hot it is in there… 

“”Awake” will appear in the Winter 2012 issue of Amethyst Arsenic, www.amethystarsenic.com.”

can you think your way
into art
while feeling your way
past the artists 

can you hear
a keened note
from Miles’ horn
and not feel it
at least a bit
as the whistle-wind of his hand
cutting through the air
to land on a woman’s cheek

can you read Sexton
and not sense that the lessons of torture
which she rendered so delicately
were learned as much
through her infliction of it
as her suffering from it

can you watch Brando
and marvel at his sensitivity
while forgetting
his dead, stunted children

and can you
see through me through my words
and know I’m
a bad, bad boy
as often as I’m
a full-on man 

if you can answer these questions 
at all
no matter how you answer

please
more than glib is owed
to some questions
more than outbursts of disgust
or simpleton indulgence
for the creative process

please
don’t answer easily 
more than that
is owed to these