i wouldn’t
know joy
if it drowned me.
these are words. 
i use to call these
joy,
breathing them was paradise. 
no need
for a substitute,
as with these anything
could melt into joy. joy
had no division.
it’s been so long,
i can only describe that,
not recall that —
what was joy?
it was
words creating envelopment
out of the spinning of life.
i wrote that.  don’t know
if i felt that ever. 
don’t feel it now,
even though
i never shut up.

did you find this tedious?
as much as i did, i bet.

That coat
on the door
isn’t mine, really.
I bought it at
a thrift store,
thought of it
as costume — long,
multi-hued tweedy woven
shapeless bag of a thing,
thought it’d pass for
turn of the century
or hipster, perhaps
artsy in a shambling,
mumbling poet way,
covering a similar and
hated body to that
it had once covered.
Coupled with any of a number
of equally secondhand hats,
I thought it might make me seem
a bit more legit, too odd
to be anything but credible
in the persona I’d chosen.
The coat, not bought new
but used, isn’t mine really:
another owned it once, wore it
all fall and winter most likely,
tried to wrap it tight against
revealing, spinning wind
that lifted his cover
and sealed me into mine.

Pleased with the tightness
and the resultant heat
of my fists, I shone hard
as a youth — could have had
my picture in the dictionary
next to “righteous,” my growl
remixed as a viral
undertone to public events;
deep into middle age now,
I open my hands
but no one’s rushing up
to clasp them.  This is,
I suppose, what I get
for dimming the fire within:
I may last longer
but will also feel colder —

I suppose I have to consider
that my life’s always been this cold
and that I never knew that
because of how long and hot
I’ve been burning;
still,
I’ll be damned
if I’ll start fighting again
just to get warm.

don’t you feel a sort of sad awe
for the first light man
who denied that he’d found himself in thrall
to a dark man’s baritone?

can’t you give a half-felt shout-out
for the first woman whose head just about fell off
when she saw how people loved her more
when she just gave in and kneeled?

haven’t you expected this
for most of your time here —
an instant of realization
that nothing’s easy sometimes

except the acceptance
of untenable events?
that sometimes ending up end-up
is the only way to survive,

if not thrive?  how hard is it
to put off thriving for an unknown while
and fall in, tow the line,
even if you rot a little bit while it goes on?

will you muster a shamefaced pat on the back
for these hypocrites now?  a second of acclaim
for their failures? a startled, stifled gasp of recognition
that they must have felt what you feel now —

you’ll never be completely aligned
with everything you claim to honor.
that’s obvious now.  you know too much
about what you’re not capable of —

so now, at last, don’t you sorta envy
that dwarf with the unguessable name
and his ability to (when all else was lost)
tear himself in half and disappear?

we will all wash together
down a gully soon enough
and all the particulars of our lives
will come with us
so we won’t be known afterward
by our dreams
but by our dreck

the piling on
of dirt and crust
as we roll in the thick flood
toward the lowest point
in the stream

thinking of us all at once
in that moment
undifferentiated
at last
hidden under
gum wrappers and twigs
adhering to our broken bodies
through the cleansing power
of mud and water

makes me long for the storm to come
soon

now,
with a quick second to look
back,
he takes the book
from the shelf,
leafs through to the
page she signed,
and re-reads the first paragraph
on the page

which
seems now to be
meaningless (not that
the words have lost
coherence, but that context
having changed their charge
has lessened to being
no more than a tingle) and
he closes the book
quickly,

replaces it
so that only
a drag-trail through
the months-old dust
is there to testify

to this second of
suddenly soured nostalgia.

The storm freed you.

It left the house and car destroyed;
soon enough, you had to leave the job as well.

Then, unexpected as a late love
when you’d abandoned the thought
of such a thing,
came two fat insurance checks
to replace the wreckage,
and a wild idea: sell the lot,
get a decent but cheaper replacement car
and clear out to live on what was left
for as far along the road as you could go,
running over everything wrong
in your life,
pressing the gas pedal
down on its head.

People dream of lottery tickets
and inhertances.  People dream
of lawsuits and windfalls.  You
never bothered to dream,
yet there you were — modestly rich,
clean and clear with nothing
to hold you.  Every bill paid, every string
cut, all as unexpected as a late love —
and like a late love, unlikely to be anything
but a last chance.

The last postcard came six months ago,
from Omaha.  “Thinking of you all
back there,” is all it said.  Back here,
all we think about
is you.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Watching
“New Jack City”
for the first time
since the first time
I watched it, I’m compelled
to ask why
I felt the need to watch it
again —

then again,
I am watching it again.

Some stories
just feel like
a pistol in your hand
or a knife in your pocket.

You carry them
convinced of their utility
even though it was bad dialogue
that talked you into
picking them up
in the first place. 

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

Since I’ve run out of stories to tell,
I go at last to the cupboard
and pull out the bag of walnuts
and a hammer.

Laid out before me on the floor,
lined up on butcher paper,
points facing away so there will be no
projectile damage from the blows,

they await my creativity.  I raise the tool
and bring it down on the one to the far left,
choosing the order in which I would read
a book if a book required violence of me.

Inside is the whole meat, which predictably
looks to me like a brain.  I see the walnut
as a brain, meaning that my brain
sees itself in the walnut, as we are creatures

of comparison.  Yet I did not think at once
of the whole nuts as skulls, curiously.  Despite
the all-encompassing violence of the process,
there’s a break in the perception.  Perhaps

I can find a source in literature which will illuminate
the source of the dissonance.  I go at once to the bookcase
to seek examples in literature of walnuts being compared
to skulls, and find (of course) many with a brain metaphor

and none with a skull metaphor.  I go back to the nuts
and stare at the next one, trying to see a face, a reflection
of humanity, something to hang a meaning on…nothing.
Nothing at all comes to mind.  Now, I’ve got a dilemma:

should I continue cracking these walnuts
if I have no social, existential, philosophical,
grounds to work from when I observe them?
I’m just a man, after all; how will I know anything

about the walnuts if I can’t see myself in them?

1.
I like the muscles
in words.  I like
how they move.  I like
how it’s not even work
when they move,
how different work is
from that.

2.
Ripple
in still water: a line
from some old song.

You can buy lines these days
from any songs
you want. 
This one suits me fine:

I’m the ripple sometimes,
the water sometimes;
doesn’t matter,
I always hum along.  I paid
for it, after all.  The moment
can always be made to fit.

3.
Don’t want these
hands or cornfields anymore.
Don’t want
to hold things
or be well-fed.
That would be too American of me.
I’m trying to be a citizen
of the world.

4.
Forever, the blue
and the red
for this white.  Forever
the straining for the anthem’s
penultimate note,
keening as did the heart
torn from the captive’s
chest.

5.
If I still listened
to new songs, or wrote them;
if I needed these hands
for what might be held,
then there might be hope.

6.
I’ve not left this home soil
once in the last twenty years.
I was born here
as were all my genes.
The only time I left
was to go and kill
elsewhere, and all that happened
was that I came home certain
that all the creation stories
my little nation ever believed in
were literally true.  Coyote
brought us fire, the snakes
were postal carriers to the gods.
I was fashioned a warrior,
and someday, the vast occupation
will fall head first into our villages
slain.  It has to be true:
every brown person I killed
told me the same story.

7.
This house is a perfect shade
of rose.  It’s clothed
in vinyl.  It’s air conditioned,
well-heated,
and it smells of mountain spring
in the dead of winter.  It chases me
when I try to flee, and when I tire
and fall, I crawl right in
and fall back to sleep.

More than once
I’ve mistaken my current self
for a teenager. 
I’ve answered incorrectly
on my official biography. 
I’ve wondered
who the hell that is in the mirror,
on the license,
in others’ eyes.

I’ve ruthlessly cut me as if I were cane,
looking for sweetness.  Cooked myself,
hoping for a square meal.  Woven myself
into doormats.  Welded myself
to juggernauts.  Stapled myself
to manuscripts, glued myself
to the TV thinking I might
be better off inside. 

Ah, division,
myth of the shadow self,
delusion of persona.

In fact
I’m easily explained:
every face I’ve assumed
or been assigned,
any self I’ve come to believe
is hidden under the surface,
has functioned
as a cover
for escaping
what I am:

coward,
liar,
cheat,
lazy fox too smart to be
foxy,
spineless hedgehog rolling into
a futile ball.

It’s a lie when anyone says,
“that’s not the man
I thought I knew.”

Listen,
they say,
it’s OK. 

We know
you couldn’t help
being born this way.

Your color’s
your color, your gender’s
your gender.  That accent’s

a marker, but that’s all
we hear there.  No reason
to believe it matters,

really.  We know
the biology, the genetics,
your body’s opinion

of what your body
should be.  What’s
the hurry?  All’s

forgiven, all’s forgotten
if you will do the same.
It’s not like we need

to name the past, right?
We’re blind to it, we figure
you’ll thank us for

our blindness.  So buck up
and c’mon, don’t be that way —
and so we can

move forward.  Forward,
down that path over there,
we take such pride in.

Just step back a bit,
and let us go first — after all,
we know what we’re doing,

and we’d hate to see you, so tender
and new, get hurt
on the way.