Cut me off
because I’m stupidly
long winded at times,
oversensitive, fat with a sense
of my own importance
and centered on the inner eye
of my personal storm.

Cut me off
because I’ve stopped caring
about how much I sound
like parents, like teachers,
like the people I hate to admit
live within.

Cut me off
even if I bleed because
that flow would be
the cleanest thing
to come out of me
in years.

Cut me off
and see what buds
from the scar if I heal.
It may be smaller but stronger.
It may be all the incentive
the healthy core of me needs
to get out there
into the sun
and live.

Let us all have one moment
of clarity for our pasts —
not the catastrophic moments,
not the Big Events, not the tragic
or comic or blissful climaxes
we usually hold close and call
“the past,”

but for the startling moments
when we see a person
in a new light, someone
we’d forgotten who comes back
and opens up school lockers
full of surprising good.

Let us praise unfamous people,
words that should have been recalled, statements
that should have been murmured
and branded and engraved
somewhere inside.

Let us open up.
Let us seize scraps
and set them in lockets.
Let us speak to the small
and the ordinary.

Let us learn that
pain and joy are not our province
alone.  Let us learn
that those we forgot
might have been allies
in the old battle of awkward
had we let them in back then,

and let us not keep them out
a moment longer
once they reenter the room.

Phone calls
from dear friends
buzz through
the line I’ve drawn
around time meant
to be alone, very alone
with the critical work.
Like bees
stinging through denim,
they itch me all over
though I know they’re only
reaching out to me
and reacting badly
when I swat them off.

I may never taste honey again,
but at least I’m completing
important things. So many,
many important things
I can’t remember them,

and there’s no one besides me
who knows of them all.

I can’t follow
pathological curves

too natural
too actual
too much
infinity

such curves
terrify me
to the point of
angelic fervor
possession indistinguishable
from the demonic
to these eyes unaccustomed
to perpetual repetition

pray then as taught
through exponential smoothing

thy form
is immeasurable
through my poor arithmetic
it requires new dimensions
that thou will not allow
my cup runneth over
thy will be done
though it will take me
into the valley
of lost in the curves
forever

My mind: a collection
of useful disasters.

A bundle of arrows
clutched in a dead hand,
made of different woods and heads,
all fletched differently,
all facing
the same target.

A muddy stream
running swiftly
and tainted with blood.

An industrial park
full of small, unknown firms
making small parts
for war machines.

A parked bus
growing cold in the lot,
still holding one passenger
who fell asleep
long before the last stop.

A yearbook
missing one picture.

A worn lucky coin,
a worn worry stone,
a frayed string of prayer beads
lying in dirty snow
fifty paces behind the hole
in the pocket they came from.

I have owned so much
and have so little useful left,
regrettable remnants
of regretted choices.

I live in here
where loop upon loop
of the push broom’s path
cleans up nothing for good,
only makes dirt-curbed tracks
and piles that look the same
no matter where they are left,

no matter how often they’re rearranged.

Useful disasters
only in the sense that they keep me
thinking, always,
of how I might recover, reuse,
remake them to new purposes.

Fire the arrows at last,
hurdle the streams,
bankrupt the factories,
get off the bus,
show up for the photo shoot;

learn, at last, to pray.

Suck it up —
you aren’t anointed.
You shit like anyone else.
More, probably,
you eat so much that’s bad for you —

fuck indiscriminately
(though you won’t admit it)
or base your choice in partners
on the same chemicals
the rest do —

not so hot on the evolution of thought —
you buy the same ideas
your friends bought —

and oh how pretty
your conceits and paradigms
look in the reflected light
from others’ eyes —

Suck it up, all of it,
all you bother with
is as much insult as exaltation —

and the roses
know more than you
and smell better too —

I think I see a prejudice
peeking out, a bias or two
set up to support the lifestyle —

you’re just a
whatever you are
and you measure up about the same
as the rest of them —

I can’t tell you apart
and I’m the same
so this ain’t sour grapes
as much as it is a loving
awareness that feels
like someone took a sledgehammer
to my shell —

all of us do the same damn dances
and there’s not a damn thing
a damn one of us could do
to change a damn step —

granted,

once in a while there’s a genius
who stumbles well
but you won’t know it
till the genius gets copied
and then we name the stumble
as new dance —

and watch us do that same damn dance —

Suck it up,
you obvious,
you clown crown of clones —

admit it:
nothing new here —

because it’s easier that way

Say a mail carrier
delivers a thick envelope to you
from an unknown sender
and you open it to find pages
of closely spaced handwriting
in another language.
Do you keep it or discard it?

You don’t know enough
and you ask the wrong questions.

Say a sheep you glimpse
from your car window
runs toward the fence,
bleating at you.
Do you stop or keep going?

You don’t see the signs
and you don’t get the messages.

Say a woman walks by you
and hisses you filthy beast
without turning her head
or slowing her progress.
Do you take it to heart or ignore it?

You don’t place it in context
and you don’t think you need to.

Say anything at all
happens to you.
An involuntary trip to Senegal,
the corner store
being robbed as you leave,
a curse hurled your way
from an unfamiliar car. 
Do you imagine yourself changed
or forget that change is inevitable?

You don’t like any of this
and make no bones about it.

Say there’s a name for you
and you won’t answer to it
no matter how often you’re called.
Do you recognize it as yours,
or do you simply not care to respond?

In tenth-century Arab Andalusia
under Abd-ar-Rahman the Third,
poetry took the place
of newspapers and poets
sang of everything
from the faces of God
to the price of mutton.
While the rest of Europe lay dark and stony
in thrall to iron Church singularity,
Cordoba rang with Jewish and Christian songs
as the muezzins roused others to prayer
with Arabic.  Spain as we know it today
was being born,
someone was listening to all of this
while looking at an oud
and inventing the guitar,
everywhere the gardens were light
and filled with splashing water,
palaces were cool
and open,
the streets were tingling with ideas…

and now,
it’s all we can do
to look at one another.

Two hours into the daylight
and I’m still hunting A Beast
Apparently Too Stubborn
To Be Taken.

Considering, therefore,
a return to bed for an hour
or two.  There’s potential refreshment
in that casual, temporary death

that may lead to sharper tools.
Certainly, there’s no point
in watching the news and sipping
mediocre coffee; no inspiration

in there for further effort.  The Beast
thrives on a diet of unconsciousness
and rejection.  If I offer these to him
as bait, he may come shyly forward

and lie down that I may take him
and tame him.  That’s such hard work.
While I may appear slothful
to the uninformed,

It takes such measures
to grind away
a pursuit that kills
as much as it enlivens.

It only looks easy
because all most people see
is the tamed Beast.  Only hunters
understand what it takes to tame him.

Often I dream of fetuses:
sentient, amazed at the prospect
of soon having new material to work with
when they themselves dream.

Of their aborted kin they say nothing,
understanding that sometimes,
dreams are not meant
to come true.

They focus instead upon
the dark ocean
that is all they know.
They don’t care for discussions

of genocide or choice, see
such topics as issues for a less
all-encompassing world. 
Particulars, they say; details

we don’t care to address
until we’ve gotten out and lived a little
and had a chance to understand
the meaning of the word “dichotomy.”

If the ones who did not have a chance
to make it to that point were here,
they’d likely say the same.  But they’re gone
and that’s that.  We don’t know about them,

say the fetuses. 
Wherever they’ve gone
they’re probably waiting for their own moment
of emergence, and like us they probably don’t see

the point in debating
the merits of life versus death.  That’s an issue
for later. We’ll let you do the fighting while we float
and until we’re out of here somehow, assume nothing

of what we would say if we could speak.