Present the same information
twice and you are either crazy
or a gemcutter opening new roads
into a perfect stone. Bother us
with something too often and
you’re either a bore or a prophet,
but don’t try to sell us on the latter
unless we blink when you mention the former.

Grow up, baby. Grow up
and smell the bitter herbs. Stick a hand
out the window and tell yourself that’s not rain.
Anywhere you look there will be someone
who doesn’t care if the flood’s come again,
or who doesn’t believe in water. Let the animals
come to your call and we might scratch our heads
for a few, but then we’ll be back to the daily whirl
and you’ll be all alone to herd the creatures indoors.

Present the same information twice
and you’ll either be a bore or a stonemason
stacking up the cruel bricks. Don’t try to make us
believe that those are different things. Cut the blocks,
cut the diamond, cut and run while there’s time,
while wormwood is on the breeze
and the boat’s begun to float.

henry when you’re
done digging down there
you can come up and eat something

no ma no
there’s no time

in the corner
of the basement
a basket of tiny skulls
empty pumpkin pie crusts
henry’s slayer t-shirt

when you’re done down there
come up ya gotta eat

no ma no

that tunnel ain’t
going nowhere
come up and eat

ma there’s something in there
i gotta go

clink of thin bone against thin bone
a second basket dragged into reach

ma you never said
there’d be so many of them

come up henry
come up

I spotted the olive branch
and ignored it. It was not
my concern. Freedom
and disobedience went
hand in hand for me
back then.

I think most of you
believe I must have died
out there, tired
and partnerless above the water.
If that were the case,
how could it be that you still know me?

If you look around,
you’ll see my children everywhere.
This is how it happened:
I found my place
anyway, far from
the safety of the ark,

and there was another
of us there, one who’d been
flying for days, exhausted,
bedraggled, another
escapee. I comforted him
and soon we began the race again.

You do not often see us
alone now — sometimes
we travel in pairs, sometimes
in trios, sometimes in flocks.
We know the value of large numbers.
We will not live at anyone’s mercy

ever again. Freedom
and disobedience yet go hand in hand for us.
If you don’t believe me,
consider this: God kept me going,
gave me a mate, gave us a future,
and the doves are rarer than we are.

I have come to believe
that this is my one true place:
lying still in the dark, then leaving bed
to seize another few moments
of tapping fingers
and poisonous inhales, digging for
things to say when no one
is listening, hoping
someone will wake up
and respond. If you choose
to call it a pathology or
a yearning for love, I can’t stop you;
call it as you see it as long as you say it
directly to me. That way we can each sit
in our respective shelters, staring at light,
waiting for an answer.

I’ve spent all these years writing
and still haven’t found a good way
to work the word “walnut” into a poem.
Oh, I’ve written poems and had the word in place
but it never makes magic. I still try
but every poem with the word “walnut” in it
feels like the last one I wrote.

When I get on stage, I’m up there
saying “walnut” and it falls out of me
like a Christmas bow on New Year’s Day.
The people in front of me nod sagely
and tell me afterward how much they respect me,
but I still can’t work “walnut” into a poem
that will make me young in their eyes again.

I could say: I walk a walnut mile
every time I step into a poem,
I smell walnut on the butt of the pen,
I see walnut sides on my big guitar,
a walnut tree in the yard beyond my own,
but “walnut” as a conjure word
is beyond me.

Perhaps I should be glad
“walnut” resists my poetry, preferring not to be
a metaphor, preferring to be
a wood, a brain nut, a milk chocolate swirl
bent to an hourglass shape. Perhaps
I was never meant to make “walnut”
a magic word.
But I live in hope that someone’s
going to do it,
and that on that day,
I will die
exalting, a walnut stake
through my heart, my head
on a pillow of nutmeats,
brown leaves for a shroud,
my dry words blowing across the neighbor’s yard.

you never told me
how you met mom, why you married,
why you won’t tell me the date
you were married.

(oh, i think i can guess. but i’ll never
know for sure if you don’t say it.
and i don’t care, by the way. the way i see it
once you’re here, you’re here,

and it doesn’t matter much
what others call you because
you’re a bastard sometimes
no matter who you are most of the time.)

i grew up smart, and i was cool, i was everything
except what i wanted to be. i wanted
the stereotype — the feathers, the stern and stolid face.
then i gave up and tried to be you, and all i want now

is to know
at last
who you thought
i was.

what did you call me on the day I was born?
did you whisper
a potent name in my ear
that i never remembered, or that

you never said out loud again? should i be
thanking you or shaking you for the name? will it
kill me or make me feel better than i’ve ever felt?
did my fantasy have a root?

come on, dad. spit it out
if you know what my life
meant to you.
give me my footing before you go.

Onerous
as it may be to admit it,
I’ve got to allow
that inadequacy
has been my greatest strength.

It feels like everyone in the world
is better than me
at anything at which
I’m halfway good.
I wake up as a slouch

all the time, walk my sidewalk
with a dirty shuffle,
snicker when I should laugh
and sniffle when I should cry.
I think it’s because I’m old

and in the way. Overstayed
my welcome, became just good enough
to bother people without stirring them.
My pockets are lined with love notes
I never sent, full of bad grammar and diffidence.

Despite all that, I’ve got something in me
that likes this. I love biting on tinfoil.
I chew it up and spit it out and figure next time
I’ll swallow. All I’ve ever wanted is to be perfect,
and every failure has made me want it even more.

But here it is: the moment when I know
I’ll never be a star, never be a gadfly,
never be anything besides the old man
with bad hair and a decent vocabulary.
I used to trust my weaknesses to keep me strong

and wanting. I’ve got no reason
for that now. I’m winding my self up
in a torn blanket tonight, burning
the notebooks, falling asleep hoping I won’t
wake up — but I will, I’m sure.

“An elephant grows, loses, and regrows five sets of teeth in a lifetime. When the sixth set is regrown and then lost, the elephant starves to death.”

— random fact found on the Internet

The circus elephant
had thought about it
for years, imagining
the last tooth falling from her head
while she stood absurdly balanced
on some red white and blue footstool.

When it finally happened,
in a railroad car trundling between
one three-day stand and the next,
she barely noticed. One minute
it was there and the next — gone.
She missed the tiny clink of it
hitting the shit-stained floor.

Walking down the ramp
to the holding yard, she felt hungry
but kept her mind off that
by calculating the hours
and the number of shows
she had left in her — soon enough there’d be
no more footstools and foofy feathers,
no more chain around the leg, no more
patience needed.

She knew the bullet
would come first, well before
she fell wasted to her knees and rolled over into
the savanna sleep she’d wanted
for so long, but she didn’t mind:

any savior is welcome
to a circus elephant
who (for much of her life)
stood on one leg
and danced for children
in the stink of a tent for hours at a time
waiting for the next train ride, the next
dull meal, the next illusion of home
glimpsed through the slats of a boxcar
moving through Kansas.

Drawn to light,
away from light,
toward food and away —

dividing constantly
but (in my case) never completely
splitting, what is inside me boils in upon itself.

I am defined by my edges because
there are so many smaller definitions
within me —

and I never thought
my edges could be
so distant from my center.

I know there is a center.
Every time I split
it’s in two, so somewhere

inside there must be space
that does not belong to
one of them.

Perhaps there, where there is
nothing at all, is where I am.
It’s crowded enough in here

without having to claim an identity,
and the prospect of having myself
be the empty space as far from my margins

as can be is comforting —
let me be somewhere away from
the things that the world touches —

let the light die and let me starve,
let the others in here waste away.
I will go with them, and that is how

I should be remembered:
he who was hollow
at the center,

he who was lost among his
portions, he who was nonetheless
in there, somewhere.

When the factory workers
lifted Yevgeny Yevtushenko
onto a workbench to read his poetry,
no one made them turn their machines off,
but they did and then filled the air
with their own words alongside his.

When Ken Saro-Wiwa died
against pollution and exploitation
no one came to his death reading without
carrying a scream with them.

When Federico Garcia Lorca died his blood
made the whole landscape his poem, echoing
longer than the rifles could ever hope to do.

Tonight, you open your mouth
and hope the moths in there
don’t fly out into a dark room,
but you’ve forgotten that it’s your job
to light the lamp.

Nothing is owed to you.
You owe so much.
Remember those machines clunking
to a stop. Remember those bullets
clunking to a stop. Remember
those words that are today remembered
not because they were uttered in silence,
but because they found their own way
amidst the noises of life, and followed it
no matter where it led.

Every hawk
loves a poet —

always soaring those circles
and then diving
upon a detail

all those crow thoughts
that come nipping in
from all angles

Every hawk
loves a poet —

the sitting and
watching
the terrible mouths

the solitude
broken now and again
in public

as two or more
fly around each other
over the same ground

Consider these paperclips
and rubber bands strewn here like casualties, which
they are if this desk is a battlefield, and it so often is:

the rubble of art and commerce covers it like a mustard gas shroud.
Anything under there barely stands a chance. Sometimes
it feels as though explosions are dancing

across the dark wood, spending their last pops
decimating entire nights of clarity. If someone
were to write at such a desk he might often stare heavily

out the window or into the blank wall,
a sentry on watch for something that might never come.
In a moment of boredom he might call a truce, put down his pen

to reach for a rubber band, a paperclip,
trying to get back to a better time
by launching one from the other, firing

a crude dart into the far wall and almost
losing an eye when it bounced back, just as he’d always
been told it would happen. Then he might turn back

to the front line, the blank paper (or worse,
a yet-incomplete sentence whose original thread
vanished about the time he noticed that paperclip)

and think about this war again. Is it worth it
to fight a war you both lose and win every time
you begin?

He will not know the answer.
But he will lift that pen
again.

She just broke my English
and since I don’t know her language
I have nothing to say. Yet.

EDIT TO ABOVE:

Her eyes just broke my English
and I don’t know her language so
I’ve no way to respond — yet.

I don’t care
if he’s dead —
I want Samuel Beckett.
I want to keep him in my pocket.

I want them all — get me
Kerouac and Shaw, Hemingway
and Wilde, Adam Smith and Descartes,
John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham
(even mummified
as he is) — give them to me.

I want them all, all the dead
white male thinkers
who remade this world
in their images and left it to me.

Give them to me — I want
them, lust for them, I want them seething
in my pockets —

so I can pull them out
and kiss them on their cold lips
and beg for understanding
when I am unable to understand —

ask them what they were thinking
to leave me like this, at sea, twisting
in oily waves, gasping for breath
in clouds of cordite and radium,
drowned before breaking
the surface even once —

when I thought
if I loved them enough
they would open up
and tell me what I need to know.
Do you think I can yet learn to think
as a thinker thinks —
living a Western life
completely in my head?

I want to save the world.
If I can’t do it with them,
then maybe I can do it if I take them
with me, their icy bodies
swirling down to Neptune
with me, their
once upon a time best lover,
their former die-hard disciple, their
hope to be, wanna be
whiter than they are
candidate for perfect man.

When he walked away
from Son House’s knee
into a sticky night, he knew just
where to go.

At the crossroad
he met someone blue.
There was no contract
and no soul for sale.

Robert Johnson
wrestled the angel
and threw him
into the weeds.

He stole his color
and turned back
to the jook joints,
thinking that everything

would be different.
His first clue that he was right
came when he discovered he’d
been gone for months

instead of overnight
as he’d thought.
When he stepped to the stage
everyone shut up,

just like he’d hoped, but
he saw that he was
just out of sync. Notes he thought
were dead on quavered like fear.

People didn’t seem to
hear him right and there was too often
silence when he spoke. When Son House
said “you done good, son,” he felt

nothing. For the rest of his life
he tried to wipe the blue from his hands
onto his guitar and give back
the gift of the angel:

the holy stinging of the strings,
the memory of the night
of struggle, the way the laughter of the old men
turned to awe instead of welcome.