It’s an orange day
rage or warmth
could go either way

and that indigo
behind my eyes
is waiting to see what’s next

waiting to change
or remain the same
in the face of ambiguous blaze

there are people
(so I’m told)
who can steady themselves

with little effort
naming their colors
as they desire

such choice is a deity
I fear I’ll never be able
to worship

without a wet offering
on sun-hot stones reddening
then drying to brown

rust across the surface
of a mundane altar —
all I have to go on is that

the way I play on an orange day
leads me by the eyes
toward night or dawn

and I don’t ever know
what I’ll see because
I don’t know whether I’ll end there

you try to live a life
that will let you sleep
on a stormy night.

do whatever you will
to be comfortable
and something will still
poke into your back
through the mattress
as you lie awake at night
wondering,

what was that sound?

roll over,
slip your hand
under the pillow —
what’s there
and how long has it
been yours? where did it
come from?

do you think you’d use it
if you had to?

you’re positive
that someone’s looking for it.
you fear a lot
from both the haves
and have-nots,
but the most dangerous people
in any society
are the built-upons
and the used-to-haves.

so —

which are you?
are you either?
are you neither?
are you both?
are you a danger to anyone?
would everyone seeing you
agree? and —

what are you building?
what are you building it with?
who will you let through the door
when you’re done?

no matter the answers,
you’re always gonna wonder
about that sound.

lock up.

When she crossed Mott Street
toward me, her blonde-gone-to-gray hair
straying back in the evening wind,
I thought I might have known her once.

I thought I might have known her
when she was named Sandra
and she lived near me for a year or two.
We waited together
at the bus stop for school. Puberty
was just a morning hint then,
the kissing years were a year or two away.
I never really had
a full on crush upon her
(and she moved away soon after)
but many mornings kissing her seemed
all but inevitable,
I didn’t know exactly how
but suspected that
I’d kiss her someday at a party
because there were parties all the time
where older kids kissed,
the neighborhood was flooded with kissing
back then.

And now here she was on Mott Street
crossing toward me
again. We did look at each other
but it was evening.
She kept going.

I stayed on the corner
for one moment more
then turned and walked back
toward the Bowery,
turned down Elizabeth Street
past the few shops still open and the
impossible women who waited
to pour out onto the sidewalks,
heading for the bus stops,
ready to be kissed now
in the last warm rain of autumn.

We come, then go.
We gawk, we stare,
absorb it though

there’s nothing there.
No damage left.
It’s clean and spare.

When a planet shifts
we want to see.
We come, we lift

our cameras high.
We strike a pose.
We mourn, we sigh.

We were not here.
We’re glad we weren’t.
We wish our fear

gone with the dirt
and all the ash.
We feel so hurt

that all this passed
but then convert
our awe to cash

and buy a shirt,
a flag, a book.
We dare to flirt

with second looks
and our recall.
We think: we shook,

we cried, that’s all.
The hole is huge.
We did not fall.

you
bastard
hear me

you
who never bends this beam
enough to break it
only warping it
enough to make it
useless to anyone else

somehow
you must find the curve
of this discard
of some interest
considering how often
you weigh it down

you must be a gambler
the way you make book
on this timber holding
fast

how you must love the lines
that can be traced along the shape
of its stress

and that’s it
isn’t it
it’s not about the wood
is it
it’s all about you
isn’t it

well then
load it on
you
son of hell
you fat august reverend
assclown
add another pound
hundredweight
ton

we both know
it’s gonna go
someday
but heaven be damned
if it breaks
until it’s bent almost
over
on itself

until a pencil
dragged against
its boundaries
describes
a divine
trajectory

It understands that it isn’t enough to be beautiful.
It knows that it’s not enough to be true.
It’s able to move when it’s threatened.
It knows how to run.

It has a regret or two every minute.
It allows them to speak then forgets them.
It has a motto it will not merchandize.
It models itself on its history.

It ought to have been born later.
It should have spent more time outdoors.
It should have been aware of its unlimited scope.
It needed more teeth in its mouth.

It chews what it can as much as it can before it swallows.
It makes do.
It learns incrementally.
It is at peace with what it has become.

Left over boy thinks his face ought to be
darker by now, hands should be
more gnarled, tongue
more supple. He hates
his easy aging, despises
the leisure in his eyes.
On a Thursday night he slips
his cigarettes into his jacket
and heads for a bar, a dive bar, first
cruising the main drag for a hooker
even though he would never, would never…
a left over boy would never, instead
the women would fall onto him, pay him,
give up their lives for him. Left over girls,
he thinks, know guys like him are good for
a cigarette and a soft shoulder. All that darkness
makes him a good listener, he thinks,
he thinks…At the bar
there are dangerous men who look
the way he thinks he should look. Forget
his own arms lengthened by years of carrying briefcases —
these guys have been stunted and strengthened
by what they do for a living.
He thinks he could have been one of them. He knows
he is one of them, he thinks,
he thinks…

he thinks about his high school, the awards
for math and science, how he mounted the stage
with a pistol under his jacket, not that he’d have used it
that day, but the thought of it made the hours
under the desk lamp palatable, the cheap old crime novels
under the bed that made the stolen gun sacred, the sacred
that made the grind worth grinding, the taunts of the jocks
that made the sacred necessary. Every time
he opened a book he thought of opening a vein
in someone who made him think too hard. He wanted
a life full of hard feeling, hard life borne well
by a brilliant mind gone fungal in the fertile dark…

he thinks he should have fired the gun at least once.

At the end of the night
he goes home alone,
sways while he pets the cat,
then stays up late
in clean underwear
over a few more cigarettes,
watching a police show.
He’d have gotten away with it
if it had been him, he thinks, he thinks…

flay any one of us and you’ll get
roughly 18 square feet of skin
to do with what you want

as we will be dead
it will not matter then
how you treat it

but until then
we get to decide
how to live in it

this lump of mine
still moves according to plan
but any thought it might have had
is long gone

what did my heart think about
back when it still could

for so long i couldn’t recall
and so had given up trying
— although there have been times
when i have had a glimpse of some motion
(breeze in a poplar
a skirt wrapping around a leg in mid stride
tears trickling on a man’s hard cheek)
and my mind has called up
what i thought was only
a poltergeist ache —

it always seemed to settle in my chest
but only because I thought
atrophy had made room for it

but now
even when I still cannot easily believe
in a lazarus dawn

there is something
I cannot deny

that comes early in the morning
when I turn toward the breath beside me
something directed outward
something that thinks it ought to be
visible to all

a knocking in the tomb

Sometimes a work of art
is just a work of art — lovely
of course, even perhaps fraught
with transcendence — but there are times
when even I hold my breath at what I’ve wrought.
The blue jay is a good example, at least to me;
I blended a loud scrape with a royal robe
and got something more, an elegance
with a voice of arrogant pain. Or the jellyfish
I placed in the southern ocean, the one
that learned on its own how to make clouds
by banding with its billion fellows — never saw that coming,
thought I had the cloud thing knocked without any help
and here comes this simple thing
(not a throwaway exactly but not a strong effort —
more of a sketch really)
and it teaches me how numbers in concert
can do so much more than one simple existence
can muster. Things like that –it makes this
worthwhile, this constant churn in me
to make and make.

When the baby came out shining,
not yet formed but ready to open his eyes
and hold the sky inside him even before he could speak,
I was not surprised — yet. It took years for him
to find the Other that taught him how to make me
visible. I never intended that, of course, but
when it happened — oh, that first moment
when he set down words that turned my pockets
inside out so that everyone could see what I carried
close to me, so that everyone could see the tools and trinkets
with which I adorned this world! He said a little more
and the reeds I thought were already so complete, so simple,
came alive and drew my toil up through their hollow stems
so anyone could suck the marrow of my intent
with a simple recitation — this was it:
the God I always knew lived inside me had stepped out of me.
He was there before me, gentle hands
first making a palace of the stones underfoot,
then framing heaven anew.
I knew at last I’d never been alone,
and all the birds in the sky
and all the creepers on the land, all the trees and wind,
all the flowing monsters
of the sea, all the things I thought I’d made and let go,
were with me, in me, were me.
Here, at last, was the masterpiece
I’d always known was possible.