Craving
the cracking sound my back makes
when it’s overloaded,
I pile on rocks and rocks
and more rocks.

Carry them as if they were
wings, despite
their utter lack of lift. 

I can fly
strictly because
if I believed in the harm
I am doing to myself,
it would be
impossible. 

I will fall someday.
Perhaps today —

perhaps that burning, shattering moment
is what I’ve lived for
after all I have said to the contrary.

Hope
takes different forms;

sometimes it is shaped like
the cairn a man
is buried under, the one
he carries with him.

Every time I go to New York City
I always make time for two things:

one, to read poetry before an audience;
two, to eat pizza.

My obvious presence on the stage
attests to the former,

the obvious presence under my shirt
confirms the latter.

There’s something about that burg
that brings out my appetites.

Something about how swiftly
the people move makes me want

to add to it all, stir the air a bit on my own,
and to take something of it back with me

to my slower home.  I shovel in a giant slice
from a hole in a wall and it sticks to me

as close as a brother in arms.  It makes me want
to nourish a sheet of paper in return, to offer

gratitude for what I have received from this place
on the run, filling myself as I walk among the crowd

without a name of my own: just another shlub
doing the New York Thing, taking whatever I can,

leaving whatever I can, and doing it all
at the speed of life.

If what is usually invisible
were to become opaque,
would we ever leave the cover
of our beds?  Would we dare
to immerse ourselves in brown wind
or pale-blue humidity? 

Light would be forgotten at once.
We’d have no need of it,
and we’d have to find new constants.
Everything would be subject
to redefinition. 

Think of us all, for instance,
so certain of the intangible natures
of love and hate.   If we found ourselves plunged
into this new life, suddenly blind, drowning in its indigo
stew, catching only the fire of its
red-streaked highlights, with no certainty
as to what we were feeling, or how it was
happening, I think we would all
go mad for a time.

Until we retrained ourselves to navigate
from one passion to another, we would
fall silent and still. 
Our comas would show
endearment.  Stasis
would indicate a longing for change. 
Language would fail.
We’d be dumbstruck.

Eventually, some genius would realize
that words themselves could be exchanged
for paintbrushes and palette knives. 
We’d learn how to mix colors
and exact our meaning with varied strokes and scrapings.
Every day would be art. All of us would become
artists.  We’d loathe the crippled hands
of the untalented.  We’d come back
to our former lives, throwing back the covers
to greet the day, all our prejudices and pressures
restored to us in a new swirl
of paradise reimagined,
with the essential question unanswered:

how do we draw out Eden
from a cloudy, muddled world?

Stephen
the flint,
a handsome
but somewhat common
sedimentary rock,
could not believe his eyes
when first he saw Sondra,
the girlfriend-shaped
parachute.

God, he said,
and I do mean that,
I love you.

A thermal took them
and they soared,
pendulum and silk,
rocking back and forth
until they landed
with a thump
and a sigh.

Sondra billowed a bit,

and they at once sought a cliff
who could marry them. 

Dearly beloved,
said the cliff.
Gimme a reason,
I dare you, said
the couple in unison,
making
that most formal of vows.

They kissed a lot
and fell over the edge
and they either made it down safely
or they didn’t.   That’s the end
of that story.

That cliff is still there, though,
waiting for a breeze
to bring in the business.
Never has to advertise. 
The oddest shapes
always seem to find each other
and come wanting to take that fall,
hoping
this time
for one soft landing.

Whatever bird
you are

The little one emitting
a slow and steady series of similar chirps

The rockstar melodian
trilling fluidly for hours on end

The sharp jay shocking up the neighborhood
with bully in his voice

Or the guardian laying down smooth tracks
on the perimeter circuit from tree to tree

You ought to consider
the window mounted cat

Who watches everything
and contemplates bringing you to silence

Who imagines you as just another irritation
worth his attention

And after having considered that
for a while

Please —
sing louder

No sir,
no.  I won’t
grow up — I’ll
grow down instead,

into the earth,

drawing in
shadow nutrients,
gritty water.

It is the Goddess of Dirt
that I serve.

I may present to you
a form
that seems
symmetrical
and bright,

but it springs from
the insistent tug
in a holy underground,

and what can be seen, admired,
used for shelter or shade,
logged
and laid out in board feet
or carved into utilitarian
shapes —

what you count as important —

that’s
not the truest part of me,
no,
no sir:

go ahead
and take it.

That stump
you leave behind?
That grip of roots
holding on after
you think you’ve gotten
all of me
that matters?

You come back.
Try grinding me out,
blowing me up,
poisoning me.

I’ll be there, somewhere under
your feet,
well and deeply dug in,
still saying my

"sir, no sir"

to you
with every ring of sucker shoots
I send up around my remains,

a crown for Her dark
and somber head.

I was saddened to see that the search for Craig Arnold has, for the most part, come to a conclusion.

This, obviously, is a very old poem…but if only for the ending, it seemed fitting to repost it here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Radioactive Artist

The radio today
brings me the story
of an artist who builds sculptures
from radioactive waste.

I sit back amazed
and listen to a doomed voice
in full cry
on behalf of his art.

He has
his Nuclear Materials Handler license number
tattooed on the back of his neck.
He has the stuff of his every sculpture in his blood.

He builds his work
from the scraps and tools left behind
in the wake of nuclear weapons manufacturing
and keeps them in a gallery

that will be off limits to critics
for 10,000 years.
Someone has to do this, he says.
Someone has to make these things beautiful.

He says this
and the energy of the earth rises from below his feet
and the energy of the sun closes around him like a sphere
and he stands at the center of our modern storm.

And he will die, sooner rather than later,
having made art that no one will ever see
and considering it a privilege
to have done so.

And his art —
the sculptures
I will never see?

They made me quit my day job.
They make me want to fly low
over volcanoes

to feel that heat
and bring it back with me
on a legal pad.

It makes me weep
to think that I’ve wasted so much time —
to think that we’ve all wasted so much time.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I wrote that poem back in the late 90s.  Somehow, it’s become the piece that people tell me they’ve heard other poets cover most often. And I’ve heard more poets talk to me about this poem than any other I’ve written.  I take my LJ screen name from it.

I’ll forever associate it with Craig now.

RIP, Craig, and thank you.  You’ve earned the rest.

When you have finished
with the art, you will still have
bills to pay, people
you were meant to care for,
and a pile of high-toned words
you are supposed to believe. 

Maybe
you get a free pass on all that
if others learn from your work
and the world changes…

but I don’t know
who’s in charge of handing those out —

do you?

"Shut
the fuck
up, fool,"
she snapped

at the corner boy.

"Ain’t nothing wrong
with having a booty
the same size
as the path you make
in this world."

Old man
I see every day
of the week,
one of the stinky ones
I always try to avoid, is
tapping his toes
on the sidewalk outside
Sunday service at
the Main Street
Baptist Church,

and saying to me
as I try
to hurry by:

"I ain’t no
Christian — not no
more, not since I was
a little kid — but
some one of those singers in there
sure figured out a way
into something I never heard about
back when, back when
I was a kid…"

and he’s right, so right

that when he doesn’t even
hit me up
for change

I put a jumble of silver
into his hands
anyway.

The suicides
gather on the beach,

laughing through holes
in their throats.  Gesturing
with floppy, open wrists.

Weakness
is relative, they sing.
We killed
something we thought
was invincible.

The eye of this beholder
fills with tears — is this beauty?
Is bereavement
just a term of art?

Won’t know, they tell me,
until we meet again. Then
we can talk.  Until
then,

assume
you know nothing.

She
is universal —

every beat
Esperanto, every scratch
a meme coursing
the world.

In the Atlas Mountains
of Morocco
a Berber boy
falls into the arms
of KRS-One,
and north of there, Mick Jagger
kisses an Andorran shepherd
on the ear. 

I can carry the planet
in a sliver of electronics
every time I leave the house…
speak, I say to it.
Tell me how you are,
how we are, that somehow,
this will make it all right.

Break it down for me,
rock of all ages, the simple
tongue of bass and drum
without need of translation.

We can say it all to each other
this way,
talking long into the twilight,
improving the air,
creating a fast wind
that blows over
and ruffles our hair
tenderly,
as our mother would,
as only she can,

with a lullaby on her lips.

at the First Line/Last Line slam at the Asylum, where I took second place.  (Out of three competitors — don’t get too excited…)

Greetings From Worcester       

Greetings from Worcester, 
the Heart Of The Commonwealth!

Unlike Boston it doesn’t sprawl so much as simmer 
like plain old stew in a pot in the hills 
at the head of the Blackstone River.   

It’s a city without a skyline. 
Nothing sticks out much from a distance.
Maybe it’s those hills that keep our thinking contained. 
Maybe that’s why most of our buildings are triple-decked and diner-squat,
and the only towers are in the low sections where they don’t make much of a fuss.

The stew’s made up of people who used to say,
"Greetings From Monrovia, San Juan, Khe Sanh, Port Au Prince, San Jose, Decatur, Attleboro, Uxbridge…"
and then ended up here, so now they say "Greetings From Worcester"
in a more or less resigned tone,
their faces betraying their bemusement
that this is where they’re now from. 

It doesn’t take much to get here or to leave. 
People do it all the time –
splash in and out, and often back in again.
This pot sits on an old gas stove
and never quite comes to a boil,
so the ones whoseek the electricity of bigger places 
go elsewhere when it rolls too quietly.

But there are some who belong here.

We’re the ones who know that though 
the flame is low, it’s blue hot at the center
and if you get down below to where it burns,
it cooks you through to where you taste
the way you were always meant to. 

We’re the good stuff you dig through the bowl
to get at
and we’re the ones you’ll miss
when you’re done.

If you leave
and come back to visit from wherever you’ve landed, 
we’re the ones who look at you,
remind you of the daffy flavors we offer —

our greasy spoons,
our broken streets,
our ravaged trees,
our wintered-in faces of stolen comfort —
and at our center, right in our very heart of hearts,
a sad boy
riding a scared turtle
into improbable ecstasy,
making do just the way we all do.

We’re the ones who say,
without malice,
knowing you’re the same as us: 
it’s good to see you again.

It doesn’t taste the same without you.

Wish you were here.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Moon

The moon,
it is said,
can draw out our aspirations.

After all, 
the earth is mostly water
forever worked on by the moon. 

So we stand 
knee deep in water
to look at the moon. 

We think we can feel it 
urging our momentum 
toward what we desire.

We call the
most active dreamers
"lunatics" to honor that, 

and so we hesitate to dream big. 
That’s an honor
we don’t desire.

We grow black and blue
from where the earth has pounded us
and our skins prune up as we age 

from the long action of the moon upon them. 
But we keep staring
at the moon thinking: if only, if only… 

Listen: men went to the moon once.
They came back when they learned
that our momentum dies there. 

We learned that the moon 
was once as fluid as earth is now, but   
only when it was violently moved from outside. 

Nothing there moved on its own, 
and every step on the moon
just made the visitors rise, weakly, 

back toward the earth.   
Let the lunatics have the moon. 
We can move ourselves more than it can move us. 

Any dream we have 
is an earthly one,
no matter how crazy it seems. 

The moon is what we make it,
not the other way around.
It only changes when it’s struck, 

never strikes of its own accord,
and even the tides
are just following a dead thing. 

All we have to do
to make a life we yearn for
is move toward it on our own. 

The moon is no god.
Let that poor old corpse
sleep.

~~~~~~~~~~

Details of the slam rules here.

Of the distance between actuality
and ideal much has been said,
frequently in the passive voice,
so that we are distanced from
the voices of those who have said it.

I wonder what they were wearing
as they sat and pondered these things.
I imagine them in long robes
devoid of wrinkles and stains.

Of the long tables and the murmured
assents, the polite dissents, nothing
can be known.  The academic discussions
remain themselves undiscussed.

Meanwhile I am staring at the blood I spilled
last night, watching it dry.  My body
is a bleaching hump on the carpet.
I’m hovering in the air above it,

attached to nothing.  Of the nature
of that nothing nothing is known, although
speculations have been raised so often
that we have the illusion of certainty
about it, an illusion that some say
is worth considering the truth, even as they

mark time with learned talk,
waiting to be informed of their accuracy
at the moment they themselves find themselves
hovering with me, looking down at what should be
their own perfect, unspoiled forms,
and finding themselves dismayed.

Back in the saddle:

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If I were offered
the chance to form
a new church, and was told
that I would now be in charge of how
people had to worship,

and then was given one constraint:
that the Faith
had to be built on the lyrics of
one song,

I’d have such ease within
when I made my choice.

Thinking of its angular logic
and exploration of our deepest
questions on identity and free will,

I’d leap to my feet and sing out,
decree the dawning of the Age of

"A-TOM-IC DAWWWG!"

Then I would wonder at the open mouths
among those waiting for
the Revelation…

If ever I was offered
such a chance —
the opportunity to set a new Scripture,
a Gospel to guide everyone’s life,
I’d take it and enforce it to the hilt.

This is why I must chase the cat,
why I must be like that:
like everyone else, I crave
omnipotence.

It ain’t nothing but
the God in me.