This is what the lack of pills does to me.

Swollen with useless potential
from my lips
straight through the top of my backbone,
I wake up hungry, wanting something,
something like whipped cream on a steak.

This is how it works.

Novels appear in sand
piled up in the gutters after a deadly winter.
The brass eagle on the flagpole can smell me,
mouselike, ready to roar at slights
not intended for me.  There’s a moon
in my waistband and wait for tides
to storm me erect.  I soften for seconds
at a time, then imagine the bread of past flesh.

This is the beginning of knowing.

The skull contains.  The mouth
releases.  The ears wash over with dimunition
of words important to speech, matterless truth,
illusory tinkling of breaking, reforming.
Nostrils, ultimately untwinned, pull in the idea
of opposites and return them damp and salty.

This, a full knowing.

There are required distances splintered into steps
that sink and fluff back once the feet are lifted.
There is an end in sight, scirocco mirage,
blend of stolen bones on grit wings.

There is night when moon is not enough.
A taste in the mouth that was never desired,
no matter how I once wished for it.

Eastwood’s on TV right now
in the usual role where his name matters less than the fact
that it’s Him
and I know the climactic gunfight’s coming up
after the commercial break

There will be impossible shots and trajectories
and justice for all

but first they cut away to a spot
highlighting a woman "making a difference"
in the South Bronx
where she trains "urban youth"
for "green collar jobs"

I don’t catch what they’re selling

When we return it’s business as usual
for The Man With No Name
His Navy Colts blaze with low-footprint accuracy
When all the bad guys are done
(one hanging himself in fear when his ammo runs out)
our hero forgives the last dying outlaw
saying "I don’t blame you for what happened"

Later he drops his badge on an emblematic mahogany desk
and rides away from the corrupt territorial boss
who’s going to get re-elected on a law and order platform
who has the railroad’s blessing
to hang ’em high
if it makes money

Maybe Clint’s off to plant trees somewhere
with the same skill he once used for killing
targeting the right places to put the holes
as carefully as the kids in the South Bronx
who have no names anyone’s telling us
who are being used to further something else

Our heroes have always
had to be careful

I claim, again and again, that it is not enough
to be a bag of hopeful skin waiting for a red dawn
to excite me into action; that it is futile
to lie awake a few minutes before the alarm sounds
and think about rising early to stand at the window
choosing to go outside and feel the first pulse of day;
that every potential carries its own failure…

and every day, despite my desperate position
on these matters, the sun comes up; every day
I may lie there a long time after the clock sounds, but I get up too,
rubbing my hide to get warm as I head for the coffee pot,
rubbing my eyes to clear them of night, deciding how I will get through
to the next moment of dreary necessity — the laundry, the bills.
the phone calls, the shower; how to carry forward
my half of the conversation.

Rilke was wrong; it’s not we
who are terrible,
but our wings.

In life, I always slept
on my back so I could look up
all night and imagine this place;

now I’m stuck
on my belly, and all my dreams
are about from where I came.

I got home early
this afternoon
from my unanticipated
last day
on the job.

My mother,
who’s fought the creep of dementia
for a while now,
was startled
when I came through the door.

She looked me in the eye
and couldn’t speak,
having at last lost my name
the way I lost the burrs and edges
I cut from incomplete miniatures
one at a time
eight hours a day
five days a week
for fifteen years,

perfecting
the visions of men
who had to look down at a paper
to address me
when they told me
to disappear.

A river
has banks that close it in,

canyons along its length perhaps,
coves, eddies, sandbars, drowned trees.

It can be marked on a map.
It can be named.  It can be dammed,

at which point the old path
is hidden but at low times

it may be seen, mourned,
recalled.

But mostly, it flows. Swiftly now, slowly now, it flows.
You may swim in it again and again,

but a river is never
the same place twice.  A trip upstream

sees what is, not what was, and never
what could have been.  All you can ever do

is swim in the river
now.

A violet turtle,
rarely expected and even more rarely mentioned,
bellies his way up the path
to the place where you will meet him

at a spot that physics, if worked
diligently enough,
could predict to the exact minute.
Fortunately, your brain doesn’t allow for that.

If it did, you’d either rush to meet him
or step off the trail entirely
to hide from him, and miss
so much.

When you meet, your attention
will be drawn to that perfect shell,
his brontosaur eyes, his morose appetite.
He will be steady and slow.

You’ll suspend disbelief for one second,
less perhaps.  You’ll marvel at the revealed
nature of azure-red and steel-indigo.  You’ll never
let a rabbit claim your life again.

twenty five, coked out, driving away from my life
with my skewed eyes stuck on the needle
buried at 120 on state road 140  — the snakepath
from the cape to the stubby hills north of Worcester

south of the basalt shadows of New Hampshire
that are full of whatever Lovecraft adored
i strand the Firebird on a leafmold bank
and get out

there’s a puritan darkness under these trees
that still hasn’t lifted
and the inbred imp in charge of hating the different
still sits on the bones of the old farm walls

once you get past the Kennedy mask
and the self-congratulation inside 128
where the Cabots and the Lodges used to play at benevolence
this state’s as redneck as any media slander against the South

in fact there’s a quote from 2 Jeremiah
hanging outside the house across from where I’ve landed
"…your own sword hath devoured your prophets,
like a destroying lion"

some lay ministry of warning
carved with a router into brown stained wood
just like all the other
bed and breakfast signs around here

this state looks pretty as hell
in October from inside a minivan
or even from inside a muscle car
at 120 miles an hour

so people come and gawk from buses
stay over to buy trinkets and maple sap
then go back home to sigh and say
"we love New England in the fall"

but now it’s high summer
and all those not-yet-red leaves
are barely rustling under the moonless sky
they shade God and his devil and the ancient blood in the soil

where the colonists beheaded algonquin children
and brown people still keep to themselves in fear
whenever a boy grows up looking like he wants to break away
or maybe wants to deny how good and right the kingdom is

when he gets to a certain age they start to whisper
he’s gonna end up bad
not gonna make it
often he falls from the prophecies

but sometimes he gets older
and can’t escape the feeling that he’s lived too long
goes looking for the sword in the trees
and keeps offering himself to the lion long after he should have settled down

tonight i’m your boy, simba
i’m your snowfaced speeding bullet
and i’m stumbling into your face full of misery
give me the sharp and set me free

not too far from here
is redemption rock
where the natives once gave a hostage back
and later got themselves killed for their trouble

who am i tonight?
hostage or hostage taker?
colonist or colonized?
prophecy or prophet?

i bleed at the very thought of me
and i bet Lovecraft is thinking
of changing his name from beyond the grave
just because i love him

so i’m on the side of the road
and the car’s idling rough
as I kneel in the gravel on the pavement’s fringe
and listen as hard as I can for the lion’s roar

if you bury a needle deep in these woods
the local ghosts will use it to sew your shroud
and you’ll join them in being
just another sword to wave at unbelievers

i don’t wanna wreck this car
but if there was any light out here tonight
i’d find a shard of glass in the sand
and maybe then i’d take the snakepath of least resistance

turning my head back toward where i started
reminds me that every vehicle has a steering wheel
and a way out might be in no place you ever imagined
and i’ve got a fast car

so i get back in and turn around
i thought i saw a sign somewhere back there
that said there is a highway going somewhere not here
somewhere not in massachusetts

bury that needle
run the pride of horror ravening back into their dens
with an rpm scream and the high beams on
as fast as i can toward bright lights big city anywhere but here

i’ll be up for a while yet
there’s always two directions
to any road
let’s see what this baby can do

My best friend Stash
likes to say life around here
needs to be
"fiction-enhanced."

He couples that now and then
with talk about us being raised
"fact-poor."

The way he sees it,
his cock and ball conquest stories
and personal legends
about wild swings at bikers
are just due compensation
for having grown up
in gray houses
on sooty streets
in our dim little town. 

"If you’re gonna live,
you oughta live big.
If you never lived big,
at least claim you did."

Stash sucks down
the High Life
and fingers the label
he’s peeled from the bottle.

He’s been sitting here
for twenty years
and none of us believe
a word he says about
all the good times that happened

"this one time" in
"this bar I usedta hang out in,"

because we were here the whole time
and we could swear he’s never moved,
but sometimes we can feel the wind
from that mighty blow he laid on the Vandal’s chin,
and sometimes, our fleeting hookups
seem indeed to be the bucking frenzy
that Stash described again for us all
just last night. 

Stash lies to us.
We know he lies.
Bless him. 
Otherwise,
how could we ever
go on?

We claimed
we didn’t know anything
about how this would be
right up to the day

the dragon,
the one we’d been watching stir for ages,

the one whose back had been humping up
the earth like a monstrous gopher as long as we could recall,
the one whose scales had been landing on us
like scalding flowers for eons,
the one whose breath had tanned us so raw
that warm drizzle felt like an alcohol bath,
the one with eyes like star sapphires
that dazzled us into inaction,

until the day the dragon rose into
full and awesome view
and demanded our firstborn, our secondborn;
demanded that he be slaked and satisfied
with all our legacies; demanded nothing explicit
because his sheer sudden command of the common sky
told us all we needed to know then and evermore;

and then we ran about like cinders
jerking crazily in the general cloud of destruction,

sparks that vanished even as we flew,
lost in the heat of a moment
we’d known was coming for years
and yet
had denied as easily as any other god
we’d ever taken on casual terms…

of course,
since we had made this one ourselves,
we still believed we could remake it
right up to the second
that we fell, consumed,
back to the black ground
as fodder for whatever folly
followed us.

after years of having
too much hard living
shoved down her throat

it had become so steep
any word weaker than a sherpa
couldn’t get out of her

and they all carried
heavy loads
and left a lot of debris

when they reached the summit
and stopped to plant
a triumphant red flag

so it was no surprise
that a lot of people
started taking roads

around her
through
flatter lands

and left her there
in the rarefied air
she couldn’t help breathing

folk wisdom says
a hole dug under a waxing moon
will never take back all the dirt

a hole dug under a waning moon
will always leave a depression
no matter what’s been buried there

clean cut men and women
are coming home with murders in their minds
to stand under moons fogged by city lights

or moons as clear
as broken promises
in the dark skies of small towns

thinking of shallow graves
dug in stony sand
and perfect corners cut in cemetery sod

they stumble through the moonlight
tripping on dips
in the ground before them

some move more unsteadily than others
some fall
face down in overgrown lawns

where the grass grows
longer and lighter
over old holes

some regain
their balance
and go inside

kiss their lovers
hold their children
try to even up the footing

always watching
where
they step

on the moon
holes are
virtually eternal

so few changes
once they’re dug
visible for all to see

no matter the waxing
or waning
of earth

every night
clean cut men and women
stand in the streets

thinking of war on earth
and dreaming of walking
on the moon

faithful, faithful

that radio is
like they show in the news
a muezzin
calling me to prayer
towers out there stand
electric
calling

faithful, faithful

from town to town different voices
call it out the same

faithful, faithful

a guy can drive across this land
from strong signal
to crossfading channels
and then to static
punch the scan button
then hear it grow again
from the next city’s near fringe
to the far side of its suburbs

faithful, faithful

and the message
changes but never changes really

you gotta love somebody
you used to love somebody
you need to love somebody
I used to love somebody
somebody come love me
nobody’s gonna love me like you
like her like him
I’ll never love nobody like you
like him like her
shake the body you’ve got
move the body you’ve got
work the body you’ve got
give me a body to love
I’m gonna love your body
you’re gonna love my body
I’m always gonna be true to some body
I was hurt by somebody
I am somebody
I am the only somebody
you’re ever gonna need
and I’ll always be

faithful, faithful

scripture
is what that is
gospel of longing
borne like adhan
like salat
through dry heat
through storm-wet soaking
through the night and the morning drive

to lonely truckers in shirtsleeves
with their brown arms out their windows

to frazzled carpool parents
brushing back sweaty hair
deliberately not hearing their dearest brats
at war in the seat behind them

to teenage smartasses
imagining their own heartbreaks
lifted from their private karaoke mouths
to God’s ear
the words of the kid star of the moment
that (wonder of wonders!) mirror their own

to veteran couples,
widows, widowers
caught on the wave
of the call of long-thought dead crooners raised up like Lazarus
to say that yes, there is a way
to move and be whole again
when all is thought lost

to the workers
pushing boxes at behest of pushers
into slots and crates for shipping
pushing pencils and keys at behest of pushers
into hours and hours of dull eyed barely conscious faked verve

to everyone who remains

faithful, faithful

the call comes to them
softly so as not to break the uneasy peace of the cubicle farm
loudly to drown the boredom and the strain of the factory line
to pierce the steampunk sludging of traffic along the highways

but still
it comes

faithful, faithful

and before you say it
and i know you will
before you do it
and I know you want to

don’t bother holding up
that solid state sliver in your pocket
with its forked thread and earbuds
and try to tell me that is the true light and the only path

because the muezzin knows the way of faith
is the way of surprises
and you chose every verse that’s in there
so any surprise you get from that thing
is one you set in motion yourself
any verse you cock your ear to
is a verse you already knew

the call going out over open air
may always be one of the wrestling for love
but a new voice will always rise to chant it anew
and how you gonna know when to dance to it
if you don’t see your neighbors
start to move
because your ears are all stopped up
with what you already know?

turn it up
turn it up

faithful, faithful

AM
FM
satellite
stream

the minarets are ringing
with the call

waiting for you
to respond

it’s a cool tape
someone’s gonna put it on the Web

there’s a lot of silence
punched up with sick sounds once in a while

that’s me yelling "abort abort abort"
by now you’ll know if I heard