our first child
was good, so good,
resolute and private,
brought us our meals on time,
was able to see through a thrown stone
in mid-arc, and then duck,
without a word of censure
for the thrower,
offering no rebuttal, just
"yes sir, sorry ma’am,"
and then moving on. 
those were the days.
 
and oh,  the second child
certainly knew its place:
behind number one. 
could wait and serve when called upon.
the music was a little
loud at times,
full of beats and hoots,
but mostly it was fun
raising that one,
at least for a while. 

we had to work harder
from the start with
number three,
who was possessed
of the crazy idea
that it was number one.
we had to keep it in line
with stern words,
a lot of slapping,
eventually confining it to a room
which we stripped
of all but the barest rations and
creature comforts.
it settled down,
but not completely.
we blame it for
a lot of what was to come,
but we never admit that —
to them, anyway.

we have to admit
that we never did a great job
of understanding number four
and the spice in its constant whining
in that silly rapid fire voice
about being more than the sum
of its arts.  (sneaky bastard.
did we mention that it,
like two and three, was adopted?
no? we had forgotten, almost.)

we took in number five
because of its inscrutability.
it was full of math, good at
simple tasks and a hell of a cook.
we still get along with them, a little.

there have been others,
now that we think about it —
we’ve never stopped to think
that much about them,
maybe when something of theirs struck our palate,
but oh, we think about them now!

we think it’s number two’s fault
that they’ve all become so strident,
even number one,
pointing fingers back at us when we scold.
we starve most days without them.
their stones make hard trajectories through thick air,
leave blue trails in the ether,
and we can’t see who threw what.
we blame them all.
we are nearly blind now,
confused, delicate,
hungry,
and slipping away.
we blame them all.
 
what’s a child
but an egg to be cracked,
dropped on a skillet, 
brought along to our taste,
then swallowed yolky and hot,
with colors clear and defined?
where did they learn to scramble?
what are we supposed to do with this pile
full of peppers and garlic, hot sauce, who knows what?
how will we know which one’s our favorite
if we can’t tell them apart?

what’s an old couple to do
about getting a bite to eat around here?

there’s a blue pilot light
under the stove
and there’s a manchild staring at it
from his spot on the floor

he thinks his own fire’s more golden
than that sapphire
he wonders which glows
hotter

jealous of the blue light’s utility
he imagines blowing it out
living on cold suppers
starving to keep his own spark alive

(or at least unique) within these walls
not paying the bills until
they come to shut it off
and then he’ll shine

the brighter
for sitting in the dark
cold and hungry
this is what he’s been taught

and this is why he’s lying there
with a growl in his center
another boy
not ready to be a man

staring at a gaslight
pilled out and drunk on his kitchen floor
convinced his own inner light
is all he needs to survive

we move among the cities

there are highways to lead us
cars to sleep in
couches and hostels and coffee shops
and there’s
gotta be some internet around here
somewhere

one of them has to be
a place that isn’t
like any other

ghosting our way
from north to south
east to west and back
spirits walking alone
in dirty backpacks

we used to be
other people
we will be
other people
again

if we can be
elsewhere
soon enough

…starring, stage left,
a bass — telling its stories
through a couple of fingers.
Someone laying pipe
for the flow to follow.
The same someone popping the welds on it
when the flow’s gotta get free.

When Shuggie Otis comes on
with an invite to Sparkle City,
that bass shakes me deep and simple:
a friendly hand opening a door,
shuffling me along to comfort,
giving a shout to someone unseen
to break out sweet tea and a good meal,
makes me agree that
"there is no offer
I would refuse…"

It’s not much —
it’s everything.

So give me
that rock steady bottom
any Sunday, because that’s church
softer than any pew,
keeping me warm on an ember
made of Bible pages.

This morning in particular,
it’s a big pillow
for a sad head
and the groove it cuts
holds me like a mother
I never had.

When they scream,
"Kill him!  Off with his head!"

I am appalled.
I would never scream such things.

I only whisper them to my pillow
(or at most, to trusted friends),

and only about people
who actually deserve it.

Take a moment,
he said, and drink from
this spring —

first you have to pump
the handle a few times
and then it’s going to come out fast

so be ready to put your hand
under the spout and catch a handful
of the water, then

hold it to your mouth
and drink — be careful, it’s going
to be cold, colder than what we get

from the tap, cold as snow almost,
just drink it and it will hurt your teeth
a bit but it’ll be worth it.

It was.  It was, and although
the sweat had run down
from under my headband

since we’d started, I forgot about that
and all the hard, sulky work of mowing
and raking four and one half acres

in no time as I pumped and drank
handful after handful until he stopped me
and said, it’ll be here when you need it,

there’s no reason to overdo it,
it was here before we were, it’ll be here
after us, you can always come back.

I do not know it the pump’s still there
but the spring is still, I trust, because
when he spoke of things like that,

he usually told the truth, I could trust him
when it came to things that weren’t
about what was between us, especially when I was thirsty

or hot or lazy; anytime, really,
I wasn’t able to take care of myself.
It’s good that I have outgrown that.

I say "cathedral"
when I want to speak of
a holy place that is dark
when seen from outside
through a door and instead
turns out to be
full of light.  That’s
what a Catholic boy does
when he looks past his lapse,
back at what he once felt.

If I had been born
elsewhere, as another man,
I might instead speak of
the synagogue of Worms, Germany, called
the Rashi Shul, razed twice
and built back to God each time;
might mention
the Blue Mosque of Istanbul,
repurposed long ago
into mosque from cathedral,
and which still can sharpen
any viewer’s inhale. 

I am not any of the men
who still look to brick and mortar,
stone and glass, as a house of God.
I know there are evils buried in their foundations,
I know how the good words spoken inside them
have some times set in motion the chains, whips,
biases, murders, wars…

I am far down a highway
now, one where asphalt and desert
have opened me to spirit and light
I never dreamed of.  I am no Catholic boy,
no chosen man, no hajji any other hajjii
would recognize…

I know enough, though, to understand
that every highway starts somewhere,
and God at the beginning is God at the end,
and where there is God, even a hidden one,
even one masked by profanity,

there is always a story
worth hearing
of a journey
from someplace to
this place.

I was born
open at the joints, soft all over,
more ready to fold
than to break.

When my bones knit
at last, I was left
with lines
on the inside. 

I try to cross them
as often
as possible,
but sometimes

it’s all I can do
even to see them.
Instead, I feel my way along
the fissures in the dark.

The other day,
I came to one I’d thought
had long ago ossified
but which still gave a little

when poked, gently at first,
then more firmly, with
the now rigid length
of my outstretched index.

I forced it then, a little
at a time, until I could step
over the edges and enter
what lay beneath it.

I am still here.  I am
unable to find a light
anywhere, and I’ve stopped
seeking one. 

Instead, I sit on the floor
of a long hall.  There is an altar
at one end, smoking incense,
the sound of voices I can’t name

yet, though I am struggling
to hear them: hawk cry of a celebrant,
sobs of goosedown, breathy chanting
of others who came here before me.

Is it my imagination
or is there now some shine above me
that makes me think I can see reeds
along a riverbank

outside the margins of the hall?
I promise myself
that later,
when I’ve grown to love the dark,

I will step to that water
and float away, navigating
the hushed canyons of my bones
toward places that were peopled

before they fused, before
I stopped folding and bouncing back
whenever I happened to fall — back before
I was taught

that to be solid and brittle
was my lot, was everyone’s lot;
before I forgot
that there is a kind of starlight

that can guide a person
to cities and rivers
if one is willing to push open
what has not, in fact, hardened.

Winter is coming and I’m not ready to go.
Something that should have lasted longer
has faded, spring isn’t anywhere close at hand,
and I’m in the way of the seasonal need.

Leaves that don’t come loose from the tree
are not natural.  They are supposed to die.
When they drift to the ground, they let themselves feed
the next generation.  If they hang on too long
they block the way for the young.

I’ve fed too long on sun
meant for others. I am cracked, mottled,
and impatient for the end, but somehow,
I’m not capable of letting go even as I pray for the fall
to bring me to some rest, to some usefulness
for the ones who come next.  It’s all
I can hope for, and I can’t even let myself
do that when the light up here is so bright,
so lovely, so warm.

There’s no point to doing this. No point
in cobbling breath, interest, and passion
until they congeal. I scrape stuff off plates
that matters more than this. Words

stopped having meaning years ago,
shortly before the advent of television,
shortly before the atom bomb made speech
irrelevant. Now that the planet itself

is boiling before our eyes, why bother with a poem
when a bullet between your brows will move you more?
There’s nothing a poem can do for you
a gun can’t do better.

Your love, your pain, your empathy and rage
make no difference to a tree that’s going to die.
Your heartbreak’s boring, your social conscience
means nothing — the world’s a dead issue, and the faster

humanity and all its conceits disappear, the better off
the world will be. You’d be better served making that happen
if you want a better planet, and forget immortality:
it’s pointless to write a poem when no one will be here to ignore it.

You’ll do it anyway, of course. You’ll do it anyway
because the clinical definition of insanity
is to do the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results.
Poets are humans, humans are insane. Welcome to the asylum:

enjoy it while you can.

The correct thing to say right now is
"swirling."  Swirling. My head’s swirling,
or something in my head’s swirling, or
there’s something that seems the same
as swirling about the way my head feels.
In truth, nothing’s swirling at all up there,
unless you count the blood making a round
through the cortex as "swirling,"
or perhaps the single cells swirl
as they move through the veins and arteries.
I can imagine that they swirl in the tight space
of a capillary while making the exchange of oxygen
and nutrients through the walls. Perhaps
they swirl with joy, and the joy slips into the brain
and covers its membranes, and that fuels my feeling
that my head itself is swirling, or perhaps this is how
the word "swirling" came to be invented — it invented itself
as it pulled letters off of the blood and created the sound
of itself, letting itself echo in me as it shifts among the other words,
words like "responsibility" and "sleep," or whole sentences made of letters
brought to me by the blood, scratched into the folds
by rival neurotransmitters, serotonin waving its glinting switchblade
at the joy that creates the swirling before it disappears too fast into
the walls of the crevices to wait for another chance, and meanwhile
the swirling continues, dervish headspace, holy spring dance, name it
as you will, a pleasure I will pay for in dizziness as I imagine
how to say the things that will make the good part of the spin last
while letting the darkness that always follows it swirl off into
a place where it will lie, still and stolid, for as long as I can keep it there.

I’m sleeping
in the Philadelphia Navy Yard
tonight. 

There’s a rusting aircraft carrier
hulking in the dark outside the window.
It reminds me of childhood,
of Vietnam on TV,
of spacecraft splashdowns.

When I was eight
I went on a field trip
to an aircraft carrier
whose name was "USS Essex,"
big enough to fill my head for years,
and I wanted to be a sailor,
a soldier, a warrior of any kind.

Tonight 
I’m that kid again, no longer the pacifist
even when faced with how stark and ruined
my dream has become,
and still I love it, yes,
I want to scale the fence and climb this one,
whispering its name: "USS Ranger,
USS Ranger, Ranger, Ranger…"

Somewhere in the Persian Gulf
or Arabian Sea, my niece is afloat
on a ship like these, helping planes
rise from the flight deck.

If I can stay up till midnight,
find a mirror,
stare into it
and say her name
three times,
will she come home? 

If she does,
who will she be,
that woman who has gone
to war?

Rewrite of an old piece.  I resurrected this last week at the Ship, and it went over well, so it’s gone through some tweaks.

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

I want you
the way an aged priest
falls to his knees without understanding
to praise his God, not thinking of the ramifications
of his years of blind faith.  The choir sings
pure and clear, his evening service goes off
as planned, and he lies down at night certain
of the blessings, never imagining  that such things
come with contradictions and illogic
subsumed to the drive to
fit everything
into a single frame of grace. 

That’s the way
I want you: uncomplicated
by the difficulties.

I want you
the way a cathedral breathes when no one’s around.
The gargoyles and saints wish themselves pliable
and stroll the aisles speaking in low voices of everything they’ve seen.
In the morning they settle back onto pedestals knowing so much more
of the lives that move through here —

and again, that’s the way I want you:
with unexpected sources of hidden knowledge
at my back, whispering truth
and calming me
as I approach.

I want you
with a prayer and a sacrifice. 

I want you
the way salvation wraps itself around a leg
and holds tight even as the suicide climbs toward the rail.

I want you the way a sword burns on watch before Paradise.

Somewhere under the closed mouth of the sea
lie the bones of unbelievers. 

I want you the way
the ocean closed over them
as they stared up at the overwhelming evidence
of something greater than they were.

I could write a gospel or more tonight.
Scriptures have been written for less.

I want you the way a hermit pores over the texts
searching for a new name for God,
something to conjure with:

give me one word,
one syllable to pray with,
and we will remake Creation tonight.

There are such good words
out there, things written and spoken
in ways that pierce armor and break walls,
things written by alleged heroes,
that it is hard to believe
that they grew in the same manure
that gives rise to fungi, mold,
and wild cancerous weeds that sting
and lift heinous welts on the skin
of the unwary and those innocent
of the scent that has lingered
for too long unnoticed or unremarked
by those in thrall to the words.

There was a time before we grew up enough
to understand that evil is inherent
in everyone, to understand how much shit
there is under the lovely flowers,
and we would let a friend go in a snap
when the scent reached us in a cloud that rose
from a treacherous mouth. After all,
there were always more friends out there —
a simple shift was easy in grade school, in
high school. One week, we had these friends;
the next week, we had others.

And now, all we want
is to be back where it was simple again;
where shit was shit, and words covered nothing,
and all the vision you needed to live a good life
was a sense of smell.

I can smell you from here.
I can’t decide if the flowers
you hold out to me
are worth the way
my gut is churning.
For the first time in my adult life,
I want to be back in high school again —
close my locker, turn my back on you,
pretend I’ll never run into you in English class,
pretend I don’t recognize that smell
from the times I’ve put my hand
before my own mouth
and inhaled before opening it
to speak to the unknowing. I want
a bell to ring, and I want to run
all the way home.