Tall thin rack of man
in a cheap dark suit
glides around the room,
ice skater on wood,
not on surface but above.

Fire outside.
Maybe the whole house,
or the whole world.
But I’m cold anyway.

You think this is
“just a nightmare?”

Who’s watching you
at night?  Are you sure
things are not ash
when you sleep
and solid when you wake?
And why are you so attached
to only walking on the floor?

Here, the people abide
by a strict rule of conduct:
“Do whatever you like,
but do not show your work.”

It’s a lovely place,
although the palates of the people
are limited:

the only media allowed for art
are C4
and saccharine.

Observe the homes linked
on a web of cables
and satellite signals.

Between the explosions
and cloying aftertastes,
and with all the enervation
of constant hiding
in spite of relentless connection,
it’s a wonder
anyone’s still able
to move.

At night, one can drive
for hours, listening
to televisions muting
the sound of weeping.

Once in a while,
a child grows up
to break free for a while.
Most of them come back
eventually.  The fates
of the ones who do not
are a mystery to the inhabitants,
even if the kids become famous.

You don’t know the dog show
has been staged for your benefit
and all these dogs represent
people you’ve forgotten to thank
for their contributions to your life.

You don’t see that the handlers
in their odd and dowdy suits
are the teachers who brought you
the lessons you needed to learn
and paraded them before you.

You don’t recognize that those shiny coats
and brushed out fur and white hard teeth
are signifiers of crucial junctures
when you worshipped style over substance
and feared the honest chomp of a deserved bite.

All you know is the vague preferences
that stir you. You like the Westie,
the Skye, the Bearded Collie;
you are indifferent to the Toys;
you feel love for the Scottish Deerhound,

and that Viszla reminds you of
moments you were just ahead of Death,
who coursed behind you snapping at your heels
and guiding you to this moment where you
are the dog show watcher. 

You are fur, and breath, and memory.
You are observing effort that you’d never make yourself.
You are badly dressed and amazed and squealing
over animals that seem perfect and at ease when they move.
You wish you’d done something like this with your life.

Forty years of careful use
of a razor down the drain:
one bad swipe took the tiny birthmark
off my jaw, flush with the skin.
It bled for hours, it hurt like hell,
but the worst was yet to come:

the scar that replaced it came back
white and angry and tall, like a whitehead
gone rogue, screaming to all:
“Unclean! Adolescent! This one
killed his birthright with a blade!
This one has no skill! Ask him
about it! Make him explain it!”

I’d grow my full beard back
and hide it in there
if I thought it would help, but
I know I’d just hear it calling out
that it had been silenced. I’d walk around
mumbling, “shut up! SHUT UP! It was
an accident!” and poking at it buried deep
in the beard. Besides —
the beard these days
would come in full gray
and likely screaming about its own issues,
and one problem like that is quite enough.

So I let the scar stand out there on my jaw
for all to see. I have no idea what others think
it is. To me, it’s a badge, or a dodge
to convince myself I’m not so vain
as to care what others think. But I do.
Oh, I do. And I hate that in me,
how afraid I am of the voice in my jaw
that tells the world I screwed up. It was just a birthmark
but when I think about how that slip
has changed the way I see myself in the mirror,

it might as well have been an eye.

What do you mean,
your country?
I live here, it’s mine too…

then you explain how the borders of your country
are underground hip-hop and authors
I’ve never heard of.

Ridiculous, I say —
this country is Brit-fueled blues rock
layered in martial arts films —
and out at the border, they’re showing a spaghetti Western.

An eavesdropper says we’re both wrong

and this country smells
like a manger at its heart
with a general store owner
sweeping the borders daily
to keep them nice and clean.

Another says it’s a renovated storefront
full of screaming bands who have put meat
off their plates and out on the border
to rot where the sun can fall upon it.

Wrong, says a patient woman;
this is the country of betrayed pigments
and all its borders converge
on the Middle Passage.

A man who might be Indian, might be Latino,
maybe both, is raising his hand to speak
but he’s clearly from beyond another set of borders
so we don’t recognize him
although he protests that he’s been waiting and waving
for a very long time.

On the television there’s a woman who proclaims
that the border is right here, right outside
the studio, and her country is mint truffles
and Merlot, and sweet tunes from a Broadway stage.

A neighborhood warden says he never watches television
and that is perfection, since the borders keep spilling
through the screen.

And someone says: this is not my country
yet, I carry mine everywhere with me
and the borders are no more distant
than the edges of his pockets.

Your country, I hiss at them all,
is no country.  That echoes longer
than I would have thought it might;

how loud those words seem,
how much they stand out in the conversation,
as if they’ve never been uttered before
although it seems like it’s all anyone is saying.

Space

is mentioned in a conversation.

As in, “I need space.”
As in, “Give me space.”

As in the room will be expanding
to hold a continent
and incredibly powerful telescopes
will be needed to see
each other when we’re in
the same room.

As in voices
needing to build
to supervolcano
to be heard.

As in the stars
over there where
the television
used to be.

As in no air,
gamma rays,
asteroids
and absolute zero.

As in
how far away
other life
may be, if
it exists at all.

Ninety minutes into
a prairie, a desert,
an ocean.
Found
in the middle of each:
safety, a breach
in the routine protocols
of fear.  Out there,
it’s one fear all at once,
one fear of losing
oneself in such space —
such a relief from
daily death by small
cuts.

I can’t climb
so I stay away from mountains,
can’t fly
so I stay away from sky —

but I can plod
and I can drift
so I go ninety minutes
into a prairie, a desert,
a sea

and bask in One Fear
until all others
are lost, burned,
or drowned.

The guitar I took from Grandpa’s closet
is nearly 80 years old. The strings
can’t be much newer; I never saw
or heard him play, what with the
arthritis and all.

Guitars are not like violins:
they peak and fail after a time.
There’s no such thing
as a three hundred year old
perfect player; their voices fall
into wisps of their former roar.

Gramps was like that too, or so I’m told;
numbers runner, bookie, bootlegger
in the secret room downstairs. We found
a small revolver flocked green with corrosion
in a grape crate after he was gone, pulled
strips of paper with forgotten debts
from crannies in the stone walls. Hard to imagine
what he must have been like, since all I knew of him
was the wheelchair, the voice so crusted with emphysema
he was barely intelligible, the branch-crooked fingers
and the bottle of Old Grandad next to his bed.

I check out the instrument, get it close to tune,
draw a G-chord from the fragile box. Surprise myself
when the tears come to my eyes. Surprise myself
when I try to recall the melody to “Stagger Lee”
and try to play it though I knew the strings might snap
and cut me if they fly unbridled through the air
into the wet skin of my cheek. Surprise myself
when I say to myself, “I don’t care,” and
keep on puzzling out that old outlaw song.

She
is at last upon
the throne of
comfortable
new.
Formerly
abraded
by wind
and steady
insult, she
imagined
a lotion
that soothed
below skin-
deep, and
it happened.
Others wanted
it, she held it
for her own,
and now she
is on the throne
of comfortable
new skin.
Sometimes,
selfish
heals. Some-
times, it
is not selfish
at all.

All I desired was stuck
in the craw of an angel
masquerading as Crow.
Chased it down, forced Crow
to cough it up, it fell
slippery from my hands
and rolled under an abandoned,
jacked-up car on a seedy side street.
Crawled in on hands and knees to seize it
and it bit me. I recoiled
from blood and pain and watched it
scuttle off toward a church
on the corner. Followed it
at a careful distance
and saw it climb the altar
singing. Fell to my belly
before it and it leaped onto my back
howling in flow and rhyme of
my ignorance. I rolled over
and saw it flee laughing
into the mouth of a thunderbird
and lightning issued from
behind the teeth of the deity.
I despaired of it then
and turned back toward job
and family but it came out
and tugged on my pants leg,
saying, “Have you never understood
that the chase itself
is all you seek?” And it ran
and I ran and ran and it’s always
ahead of me and I am become
the thing itself, that which has been
inside the angel, Crow,
church, fiery bird; a swallowed
transmission from this profane
and sacred earth.

1.
Capture what’s needed, what ingredients you’ll want:

the whisper willow, the ugly bayonet, the atrocity hollow, the blank armor, the stirred charnelhouse floor,
the scent of dandelion leaves rubbed into your own prepubescent skin, the darkling charm of pockets,
the rejected lift in a ballet of sweet arms, the last time you saw home and called it home.

2.
Choose the tool:

the whip, the plow blade, the helicopter, the shotgun, the scalpel, the lion-skin shield, the sextant, the spoon.

3.
Describe the path:

the long, the hop, the stride, the stumble, the windblown, the straightedge, the safecrack, the stonecutter, the sprint,
the border flirt, the beach hike, the pilgrimage, the forced march, the leftover journey, the lost scramble, the armchair.

4.
With tool in hand or mouth,
with ingredients in bowl or pouch,
with path certainly not complete,
with detours assured,
with eyes squinting,
with feet blistered,
with car towed,
with bedtime iffy,
with funds humorous,
with credit stolen,
with distress signal singing in your left lung,
with glory in a hole,
with partner on the sly,

cover ground
until it falls away from you
and all you’ve collected is consumed
in the compost of the miles behind you,

each item having been bent crooked
then hidden from you:

inserted into crevices,
buried in mass graves,
handed off to momentary hobos,
sold for meals,
sent to family for safekeeping;

descriptions carved into stone
and marked for aging
until you are forgotten
and all you carried is all
that anyone recalls when they speak your name.

Sunrise
a mistake, again.

Instant coffee in an old cup —
dishwater taste, faded designs.

Make a taut face in the bathroom,
a blade against my throat.

See this long line in my hand?
A lie, I suspect.

The door a puzzle.
Getting out today?  Perhaps.

Sleep all the way
through the deadly commute.

Ashes on the sleeve.
In exile in the smoking cold.

What did the book say
about my expectations? No matter now.

Tomorrow?
I’m not laughing. I won’t be.