I’ve been told
I could make this place beautiful
by poets and 
realtors and
rarely by lovers
but I have always thought
that’s too much to ask and
the wrong kind of work to demand
of someone like me. 

It would take
a lifetime of bone sacrifice
and blood-bathing
for me to get this place
past acceptable. 

I could make this place tolerable; perhaps
with an act of God or two
could clear away everything else
so comparison becomes impossible.

If I ever find myself 
in a land without mirrors
or morals I might fall into
some default called 
until something better
comes along
but until the improbable happens
this place won’t be made beautiful.

The realtors and the lovers
and most of all the poets
will have to make do
with this: that I will make the place
less wretched than it was
when I found it, and then others
will have to take it, leave it,
or do their part to make of it
whatever they can.

City
is still quiet,
not yet ready
to accept bustle. 

Out beyond here
small towns,
home towns,
sleep on and on.

All those people
are allegedly my people.
They aren’t 
here right now.

Instead
are elsewhere;
in more desirable
lands, in their heads.

I’m not in there
with them, nor am I
in my own head. Instead
I am trying

to understand
why their peace
has never been contiguous
with my own,

trying to understand
how I do not have
dreams anything like
theirs, no shared definitions

of what awake
should mean, of what
that life
should be. 

Five days later.
I’m trying again.

Morning, again;
keyboard, again.

Silence — well,
almost. Space heater

and occasion cat noises
from elsewhere. Otherwise

it is just me and
a runny nose

simply relating this note
that has been repeated

and repeated and five days
later, nothing new to say.

I will not call this writer’s block.
That would imply that I think

I am still a writer, some kind
of artist at least. Beware

this self-identification,
I say.  It can trap you.

Look at me: five days since
I last tried to live up to 

my label and I hear nothing
but moving air and impatience

from a hungry cat. On social media
my friends are either cheering

their way through good lives
or dying from a case of

being America. I am 
increasingly doing neither.

I disappear instead. Five days 
from now you should stop looking for me.

Five days from now this will be
all I will have left behind.

For our future
we ought to dance more — 
cranes at courtship,
swords at friendly play.

You live longer
with a little banter,
a little back and forth;
when our eyes meet across

proving grounds
with a moment of
uncertainty that fuels
right action, wrong action;

any action, really. Inaction
can suck breath and blood away;
we will go to our graves 
wishing we’d done more

with each other. As good
as it can be to sit by a river
and dream, we have to get up
sometime if only to find

events about which to dream.
So let’s do it — shake a leg, do that
primal bop, bring good swords
to this big dance. Let’s play.

Winter moths 
have begun to show up
on our entry way
and it’s only October first.

Maybe ten tomatoes 
across every variety 
I planted hang out
on my yellowing plants. 

Early birds and stragglers
make for stability — bookends
hold stories to account, keep
a tendency to ramble in check.

I wish I could take back
everything I’ve said 
to honor chaos and excuse
dysfunction. There is neither.

Instead there is 
unfathomable order.
Instead there is
late harvest. Moths

congregate, reminding us
this too shall come and go
and come again. Every little thing
repeated in my lifetime.

A man folds himself
into a bass drum
and rolls down a hill. 

He expects to die 
and does not. Instead,
he emerges rhythmically
into battered new life
once he stops, bruised
and deafened, in
a broad valley.

There is a village 
not far away, its chimneys
smoking as if this were
The Home of
The Fairytale Ending.
He begins to walk toward it.

Waking up today
from this. Paradise, he thinks.

Last night instead of this
he was at
his childhood drive-in seafood place.
A tumble of bad actors
from his whole life till now
poured out of
a rusted white Cadillac
parked in front
to jeer him as he ordered
fish and chips
for his whole family
just like every Friday before.

Woke up
from that yesterday.
Damnation, he thinks.

It is
not yet dawn.
Knowing that nothing
in daylight can either
delight or terrify him,
he goes forward
as a blank from here
with no rhythm left,
no vision of future;
no taste for what is passed
and gone; waiting
for night and what 
that may bring. Hoping
for nothing. Praying
for sleep without dreams.