The cat demands that I open his window
no matter how cold it is outside.

Lying on his shelf, his limbs
tucked underneath, he looks like a furry meatloaf.

Birds, commuters, the squirrels too busy at this hour:
every one is working! (Him, too. After all, this is his job

— and mine too, I guess, huddled into the couch with the blanket and laptop warm upon me.)
I’m not even looking to see why he’s smiling, thinking instead

that I might be smiling too if he hadn’t gotten me up.
I plot against him, decide he’d fit in the microwave if I pushed.

The street chatters and beeps and growls but he isn’t even watching now,
damn him. His eyes slit down to slivers of green

while his nose works the morning air and he turns back toward me
to say thank you, to say that’s enough, to say it’s bedtime now.

She woke up last Tuesday
and found that she’d become
a myth: not a lie,
not a falsehood or even a statistic, but a myth.
Her entire biography apparently explained
something cosmic.

Her steps from the bed
to the bathroom echoed; her new toothbrush
was a relic by the time
she’d finished her molars,
and she heard a coterie of acolytes gathering on the patio,
chanting her name as she opened her yogurt.

The train had become a pilgrimage that morning
with saffron robes and smoking censers all around. She saw
her name carved into the vinyl of a forward coach seat
and when she ran her hand over the cuts, passengers all around
held their breath. A conductor roped it off
after she moved away. The crowds hung behind her as she walked to the office

from the station. She kept thinking that this was crazy,
couldn’t they see she was ordinary, a blender and not a standout?
Who could think this was anything sacred, this mess of spreadsheets
and meetings where, even today, nothing was getting done (although
she noticed her boss sneaking looks at her as if she was made of gold
and the room hummed like Delphi every time she spoke)?

That night, while her husband slept, she opened her childhood book
of Greek stories and read for hours of doings that made sense of the world.
Gods coupled with humans, walls of iron warriors rose from the teeth of dragons,
and people were torn apart and rebuilt in the name of bringing order to chaos.
Chaos himself was an actor too, and she thought of him as she read. Thought of
numbers pulled from the air and wrestled into place. Thought of wounds held secret

to prove strength when they were finally revealed.
She began to shine around the third hour
of reading. Her arms were strong against the old current in the air.
She left the house, its daily altars, its offerings; outside
the crowds had thinned but the strongest believers remained true
and hovered below her, watching her rise.

Stepped up
Saw that the faces inside
didn’t see him

Put one hand on either side
of the thick antique window and
pushed

Heard the glazing give
Heard the old wood crackle free
Saw the faces inside
turn and stare
Had the Thought —

so what?

Pushed harder
Shook his head as he pushed
Rocked back
Banged back in and was
Through

Fell forward into the party
Landed on a pile of paper
Knocked it into the fireplace
while getting up

Looked around at the ring
of jewelry and silk
Looked around at tables and chairs
Thrones and risers and tumblers
Jesters and a harem
Soldiers and police
Bishops and judges

Turned back toward the cold air and shouted
to the masses behind him

COME ON

and they came

No Blue Bloods blinking
just a Redtide unblinkered
No Sleepy Hollow legacies
just the Van Winkle casualties
all coming over that busted sill
all wide awake again and ready to wake the Rest

This was The Night Time Right Time
Barging in on Daylight Tradition
This was The Wrong So Wrong
making war on The Stuff Of Legend

COME ON

and what happened next was

born again fiesta pouring over the fat rug into the heart of a drawing room star chamber
anti zombie head busting blackbox waving dog soldiers swarming up online through burned wires
threaded through jimcrack marble and oilsoaked rumors of scriptural falsehood disguised as Godhead
filigree scimitar barks with oars made of sandblasted virgin eponymous rhymewood cut from mythforests
rowing into the shallow end of pools of too warm water scented with the weak piss of old news
dark eyed lovely and bleach pirate plain gong tuning misfits dancing artlessly on slippered wings
while staid children stuck hands into the new air around them and felt orange razor wind
though their now free fingers

COME ON

that was how it started

it always begins
when someone presses just a tad harder
against a window that looks like a wall
till it’s pushed

The dance is simple:
two-step
from bed to work,
work to couch,
couch
to bed, bed
to work…

On weekends
we might break into a brief waltz:
bed to chores or play to bed
to church to chores or couch
to bed,

but always
we come back to
bed to work,
work to couch,
couch
to bed, bed
to work…

There was a movie once
I never saw
about dance marathons. It was called
“They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”
I was a kid but I remember the trailer
showed couples draped and struggling
on each other while dulled music dragged them
around a dark floor and
I remember I thought it was strange
because dancing was supposed to be fun,
wasn’t it?

on the days when honors come
he stops for a minute and imagines
that it could feel this way all the time:
trusted, believed, safe in a hold on the way
to a home that will allow him
to have a room of his own where he can look around
at beloved items carefully arranged in a new setting.

on the days when honors are given
he recognizes himself again. he touches the mirror.
he decides to believe that that reflection of crow’s feet,
gray temples, odd hairs in unfamiliar places is temporary.
he pulls himself out of the bathroom and goes out into the street
walking a little more carelessly.

on the days when honors come
he reminds himself that in the moment of his death
what he has been will vanish. he will forget himself,
and whether it becomes black or light in the next moment
the things he knew of himself will be gone forever. it will be good,
he thinks, that someone who remains will be able to say:
he did this, though. we won’t forget that he did this.

on the days when honors come, he is cast in concrete. he will decay
eventually, but it will not be his concern then.

i can’t help it.
my ability to overhear
and then to recombine what i’ve heard
into something else is at once a curse
and a mechanical puzzle.

my ear and mind
just bend to the task
not quite at hand.
i hear what i hear and make of it
what there is to be made.

take the case of a man i know
with a flame tattoo on his head
who lives, apparently, on his friends’ couches. take the way
he comes to me for a cigarette. when I ask how he is feeling
he tells me that he is unspeakably angry.

he walks over to the curb
in front of the corner store, sits down, and talks.
you must believe me when i say
i am not trying to hear him speaking to —
who? not me. someone inside, perhaps to himself, who knows.

but i hear him anyway. he tells that listener
that he hasn’t had sex in years.
he tells that listener,
you can’t play god with me because i’m already dead.
they broke in and stole my balls.

a few days later in a foreign airport
i hear a woman on the phone
telling the listener that she IS a woman
and he IS a man goddamn it
and she is sick of it not being clear.

i am certain that somehow i have found
the source of the voice in flame guy’s head. if i had never
overheard the first conversation i would not know
how to interpret this second one but
it rings true: the man is impotent, on fire,

unspeakably angry, especially at them, but at least he can speak to her.
she is tired of how unclear he has become, and sick of trying
to make him clear from her side of the border. all the while,
some crazy man is listening to them both
and stealing from them for his own needs.

yes. i am the thief they know is there but never see.
i steal from them and everyone, conspirator,
poisoned ears openly looting even as i wonder
how much of what is beyond them is really mine.
is anything i say anything more than what i’ve overheard?

i won’t answer that, but you can whisper your own opinion
on the matter if you want. i’ll know in a second
what you think of me, what i should think of me. and if two of you
should disagree, i’ll take that argument too and make it my own.
you wonder why i eavesdrop. i wonder why you think of me at all.

burned, all burned.

dragged from their homes, pilloried,
made to stand trial in rooms
where the air did not bend toward their truths,
no matter how honest they were.
taken from places of power
once they had been judged. burned,
and though the smoke lifted away from their bubbling torment
and settled onto the skin of those who had judged them,
it took them just moments
to wipe the obvious stains away.

and after that,
the burning again, and again,
for it is heat that makes the engines go.
what fuel is used is unimportant.
it will change every time a source is exhausted.
it will not matter to the tenders what new shape it takes,
or how the burning happens…through wood
or atom or zyklon-b, through poverty’s slow
coal seam smolder or in the death by tiny sparks
that comes from daily denial.

all fuel burns the same.
look into any ashes
and you will see yourself there.
do not pretend that if you were fuel once,
you are not now.
do not pretend that if you were a fire tender,
you can never burn.
do not pretend that they see a difference among you.
to them there is drought
and kindling
enough to keep this world
on fire forever,
as long as one man
with one match
can be made
to strike it.

so come.

come to the place of burning.
come as water this time.
come in the name of everyone once burned.
come up
from the unjust ashes
and drown that match. come up
from the wet of soaked old pyres
and drown it. come up
from the freezing graves of the middle passage
and drown it. come up
from sand creek’s shoals
and drown it. come up
from memory’s camps,
from the chimneys of horror,
from the alleys of walled remainder,
from the forests of hidden famine,
from the conflagrations of invasion,
colony, assimilation, genocide,
and every other firestarter,
come together to drown it…

but do not come with lightning
when you come.
bring no fire of your own.
come as rain only,
joining with stream and spring,
come a little at a time
until we build,
long and soaking,
to a steady downpour
swollen
with a billion times
a billion drops.

no end can come to this blaze
until we believe in our watery hearts
that every scrap of fuel
tastes the same to the tongue of a flame,
and that nothing left dry
will ever be proof
against it.

wrong finger
in the air —
stop testing the idiot wind
and start rejecting it

As far as I can discover, it doesn’t exist —
there is no Sweetwater, NY.

So the dream that ended there,
the dream in which I drove all the way to Sweetwater while asleep
has to be symbolic, as does the extra steering wheel
I spent an afternoon installing while parked in a driveway
on a farm where no one was home while the sun fell lower and lower
off to my left as I pulled unfamiliar things from the glove box:
the disc camera, the grey gloves covered in soot, the baby toys.

And the family that came home and were remarkably unperturbed
to find the shaggy man flat on his back in their driveway
must represent something, perhaps some forgotten obligation
to settlement and peace, as they welcomed me in and offered me cornbread
as if I was an old friend. When I finally recognized the mother
as someone I’d known years ago and we hugged so comfortably,
when I finally kissed them all farewell with their address
on a postcard tucked into my pocket (and I would know that handwriting
if I saw it now, awake now as I am) so I could find them again
if I came that way, it must have meant something, and I drove home
certain of all these things, steering from the passenger seat with the setting sun
behind me, cruising home through a flat landscape
that looked like gold spread all around me.

I choose to believe in the meaning of this,
just as I choose to believe
that the beginning of the dream
was of no importance, was just an introduction,
was just some experience translated
from the room around me as I slept: the waking up in terror,
still driving but not on the road anymore,
straight out across flat stubbled fields,
forcing myself to turn back toward that road that would lead me
to the farm in Sweetwater where the rest of the vision would unfold —

I can still taste
the cornbread, sweet and crumbly with fresh butter;
I have nearly forgotten
the sound of the shattered cornstalks
under my wheels
as I drove.

she announces that finally she can say out loud
some things she’s been waiting to say
now that both of her parents
have passed

I think I have said
those things already
so what will I say
when mine have gone

will I give up war
focus on peace
will I give up
entirely

shall I be the one
to come back
to the subject
clean things up

or will everything remain
as it is now but with me at last
standing under my own precarious sword
now that they are no longer game

I have nothing to announce here
for the moment
but in the way her shoulders have risen
from their customary slump

I suspect that there will be
work for me to do
long after I am in a position
to decide how to react to the same thing

we once fantasized
that we were
born feathered

always saw ourselves
with wings
with layers and wisps aflutter
all around
as we lifted off

assumed
that we could take with us
everything we always carried
expected our bones
to remain solid

forgetting how hollow
a bird actually is

and none of us noticed
that all birds land
eventually

today I saw you
still in flight
but with plumage rough as a wet hen
as you nattered on to the nestlings
that live on inside you

we were too young
to fly
when we laid the pills
upon our tongues and swallowed
with our heads raised toward
mother sky

in all these years
you have managed not
to come down to where we are

and you’re so tired now
I almost want to draw a bead
upon you and
fire

in the hope of offering some rest
hoping that your last feathers
will give you their long withheld comfort
as they fall soft around you
when you stretch out upon
hard and inevitable ground

in this new world, the one we attend
upon arriving from our funerals,
it becomes clear that we are not
unified on how we choose our passions:

at times in our lives we were guided to things
that were in and of themselves pleasurable to us,
while sometimes we were taken by the comfort
of filling holes in ourselves, and the things

with which we filled a hole meant less to us
than that the hole was filled, even for a moment,
even though we knew we would be empty again,
and that we’d look for that filling again.

so, while the love of food for some was honest love for
the oil of cured olives fat on our lips, or for the rosemary sprig
pulled through the teeth and savored for its burned
and its bitter, for some of us all that mattered

was how eating capped the dry well inside us, and the flavor
of anything was secondary to how feeding
forced hunger back into its cave, so we fed often
and unwisely, not heeding the taste or the joy in tasting.

each of those backward passions often led to another:
the yearning for sex stopped up our lust, the lust was a way
to stop the indifference to our own lives, indifference a stop to loneliness,
loneliness a way to hold off surrender to the larger urge to bond.

in the new world we are not that fragile, not as subject
to the whim of the vacant moment. we see the others as admirable,
complete before now, brought here to validate the holy pleasing
of pleasure as its own end. the first good day of wholeness has come for us —

but in the remnants of our old minds we wonder: was there something
to be said for those of us who were never full, always expecting the next best thing
to come and make us whole while still in full life, and did we learn something
in that search that the others did not see? did we not fill them

with the fruits of our searching? we made the things that made them
happy — the books, the songs, even the food. we were the people
who they met and loved without imagining the depth of our desire
to just roll over and fall asleep, content not just for once but for always.

it doesn’t matter now. in the new world, we do not invent reasons
to seek what is in front of us. we pull grapes into our mouths and
are happy to settle for just one, believing that perfection is always present…
still, to some of us it is unfortunate that the next one cannot possibly be better.

I’m not left handed but I wish I was
so everyone could envy me my special-
ness and my cool factor and how
I play the guitar the same way Jimi Hendrix did
or that I’m so good to have spent so much time
creating my own adaptation to life in the
righty world. Right? Right! Righty-right, righty-right,
the whole world seems so righty-right that I grow tired of it
more and more often and I reach for the door knob
with my left hand once in a while just to feel better.

I’m not a happy man but I wish I was
so everyone could envy me my special-
ness and my uncoolness as a happy man
would be suddenly cool the way I worked it
with a steady smile and a glad hand playing
the breaks the way no one else does, as if I expected
them and just did the opposite of what was customary.
Happy now, Tony? No? Then, GET HAPPY!! Let me once get joyful
as a hymn in a whitebread church or a public television cartoon,
and while I’m not a happy man I can imagine myself having a moment
once in a while where I could fake it well enough
to capture that smile on my own face.

I’m not much to look at, have no distinguishing
features other than a big gut, a grey beard, and a petty gift
for making the sound of my voice stick in a head
for more than a second or two past the end of
a conversation, but if I could be the handsome God
of someone’s religion, if the real God could let them love my own special-
ness more than I can love it, I’d be so glad to be their poster boy
I’d even cut my left hand off to spite my smile.
Give me one jealous bone of my own to gnaw and I’ll find a scrap to sustain me.
Give me one of your leftovers and I’ll warm it up for you.
Give me anything that isn’t mine and I’ll make it my own.

My cat loves his window perch,
but only when it’s bright out there.

He watches the neighbors leave for work,
then pads off to more food and more bed.

At regular intervals, he will come forward
and demand attention before returning to his slumbers.

If something isn’t to his liking, he lets me know
with a whine not commensurate with his size and age.

All day he either sleeps or fusses.
I don’t know where he gets that from.

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

*tip of the hat to Christopher Smart …

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/for-i-will-consider-my-cat-jeoffry-excerpt-jubil/

Another night in the coffee house
among hordes of worshipful
classic rock T-shirts burnt thin
from pre-sale washings
in foreign laundries…

I bet no one here understands
how it worked back then:
we either wore the shirts to threads because
we loved them to death, or hated to see
the silkscreen chip away and stored them
when they started to look like this
until we could get to the next stadium show
and get the next one.

It wasn’t style. It wasn’t fashion.
It was a medal for love
and death by tinnitus
or misadventuring among the rows, tongue twisting
under the seats with the new friend
and the new shirt tied over the old
and hoping no one found the stuff in the cigarette pack.
It was the way out blazoned on a 60-40 blend.
We’d compare them
at school next day
and envy each other swearing
we’d never miss another tour,

until a day came
when we looked in the rear view mirror,
kissed off all the expensive devotion,
and proceeded straight on to mortgages
and beer guts unconcealable by any shirt.

I’ve found T. Rex on the radio tonight and
can see Bolan’s big platforms and rainbow swirl
on black across my chest, big ass chunky music
gonging in my head for two days and the shirt
telling everyone I’d gone to see The Man.
I saw that same shirt earlier tonight on a kid
as skinny as I used to be except
it was grey as a post and scraped evenly clean
in all the right places.

I don’t know what he saw in it:
how you buy damaged goods
and call it fair trade
without putting your own time
into the wear,
I’ll never know.