He announces that the poem
he’ll be reading is a gift
from the ancient ones
unveiling the dangers of the coming
ultrafascism.
Then he begins in German
and if he could speak German
at anything more
than a freshman level
we might find
less menace to his voice.
Instead the elementary cadence
marches uninflected
over art into history.
We catch snips of words
and phrases, some in English:
holy war,
Taleban,
Allah,
Jehovah,
Freemasons,
KGB.
We shift in our seats,
startle when he reaches
under his shirt. Nothing
is forthcoming but no one
relaxes. His voice rises
to a near shout. He concludes
with English: “man cannot destroy
the earth, he is of the earth.” We
are not comforted, we who are in
this room full of smart people terrified by
a strange man reading a bad poem
in halting German. But when he is done
we applaud, looking around to see
who is applauding, who is not, who sees us
applauding.

after much thinking
i have determined
that knowing things
is impossible

all there is
is feeling things

i thought i knew
how to move forward
and i see now
it was fear driving flight

i thought i knew
my guitar and my flute
now i see
i was yearning to reproduce
memories

residue
is what
i build on
stacking bricks one upon another
to create what i think is solid
and grounded

though every brick
is hollow

the woman
raised her T-shirt
behind the poet

everyone saw it
no one
said a word

it didn’t matter — after all
there was more nakedness
onstage than off

I left the radio on
and who knows
what songs I missed
while I was in the shower?

What songs
does the President sing
when he sings
in the shower?

What things
did the soldier think of
before dying in the evening’s
rocket shower?

What did last night’s groupie
do when she got home
and washed off the evening
with a long, bitter shower?

And who knows
what fell from the Douglas fir
when the lightning struck it
during the thundershower?

There is so much
in this world that happens
without remark, remarkable things
sloughed off like dirt in a shower.

my memories
screw me out of peace
more often than not.
they bring me back to such odd times.

every morning reminds me
of childhood cocoa at night.
every night reminds me
of warm college beers in the morning,

but i never recall much of anything at noontime
and that’s likely for the best. it’s a merciless hour.
anything that comes up then could be immediately fatal,
unlike the slow toxins of dark and dawn,

and if i died in the light of day
i would be forgotten at once.
noontime creates
such small shadows.

no, give me the dark hour memories,
bastard children unwanted but accepted
strictly because they’re so obscure. waking memory
is so hard to endure

because there
is so little
shade there
to shelter in.

He looks out the window.
“What a beautiful day,”
he thinks —
“first the full sun, then
the full moon.”

A cat’s demanding love in the neighbor’s yard.
He would be too, except the woman in his bed
is sound asleep and he won’t wake her. Instead
he’ll take his love from the sound of breathing
that is not his own, and from seeing

her hip under the sheet,
so like that white moon. The sun’s
hours away yet, but its time is coming
and he can wait for it, certain of this:
that there are two sides to every day.

For the fourth time in as many days,
I wake up with no more sleep in sight for the night.
I leave the bed and sit shirtless on the porch,
omnipresent cigarettes at hand
to give me those moments of visible proof
that I am still breathing.

At this hour of the dark morning
there are, finally, no other lights on in the neighborhood,
and the last noisy kids have long since passed out.
The war in the downstairs apartment has calmed down,
no one is fist fighting in the driveway, the string of skinny girls
who come in and out at all hours has ended, and no clouds of reefer
rise up the stairwell to remind me that
if I had it to do all over again
I would likely do it the same way:
the same triumphs, all the mistakes,
the fumbling plays for love,
holding the gun to my head
while wondering what it would feel like
to just pull and go, the decision
to leave that decision alone, the sunsets and dumbass jokes
and the poems in piles everywhere I look.

I’m the same person I was when I was young and stupid.
I still like my music loud and simple. I still think kissing
is the best way to pray. I still hold my head down
when I walk by myself thinking of what to say.
I still like a beer, an occasional shot, a random toke or two,
arresting eyes and the curve of a perfect hip.

A car pulls into the street with hip-hop bending
its windows, and I recognize the words “Rompe!
Rompe!” I think it’s Spanish for “broken,”
and if it’s not, it will be for me, at least for tonight.

At my age, I finally know I’m irreparably broken,
broken
the way an egg is broken after the chick’s moved on.
I’m broken
the way the clock is broken, holding steady at one moment
which will come around again. I’m broken
the way a ripple breaks over a rock
it will eventually wear down.

In this dark hour of the morning, after the last kids
have fallen asleep, after the last cars have been parked,
all I have to separate me from everyone else on this street
are my raw lungs, my drifts of writing, my scars and tattoos,
my illnesses both transitory and permanent, and the fact
that tonight, I am awake.

To be awake at 3:30 is to be
smoking and cold and buried in thoughts
of all my cracks and chips, until I see my mending
in the light at the end of the cigarette:

to be alive is to be broken.
To get older is to understand
that every break leaves an opening.
To be whole is to walk through
the opening, and only then
to know which cracks to seal,
and which to let alone.

If I spend enough hours
playing guitar under this tree
I’ll meet a woman
who will take me away.

Given enough time in the wilderness
every troubador imagines her.
Old tales tell of her: she’s the queen
of some fool place and can be

alternately ugly and gorgeous
like pretty much everyone else.
Rumor has it that if she chooses you
you’ve got to stay with her until

you learn her lessons — again,
pretty much like anything else.
In fact, everything about the story
sounds like an everyday life,

which makes sense if you think
myths are all about explanation
and not magic. In the story, the singer
comes back and can see the future,

but I suspect the truth is
that the singer comes back
and so much time has passed
that everyday things look so new

that he understands
what’s in front of him better
than the rest of us can who have been buried
in the details for all our lives.

So: a woman comes
and holds you just long enough
to make it seem that time stands still
and you can take advantage of that

to reinvent the way you are in the world.
It doesn’t sound odd to me. It has happened to me
a dozen times or more. It’s why I’m still sitting
under this tree.

every pill, no matter how
familiar, is a mystery until it is
consumed. i live within
a fence of such mysteries.
things change
often enough that surprises
still occur.

take tonight
when you were leaving
and i became sad. i never expected
a pill to make it all better, but still
there was a deluge in me
when your car pulled
away. i went back upstairs
and decided not to take another pill
until morning, letting the natural sadness
wash me.

it will be no surprise
in the morning when i wake up alone.
the next pill may ease that,
or it may not. i’ll only exhale again
when you return, either way.

1.
i open every night with a prayer: sleep, come sooner than the flood.

then, the lifting faces.

julie’s blonde hair floating out. paul robichaux’s rockabilly daring submerged in white. grandmother’s dear severe wrinkles. grandfather’s mean low brow. eddie with his broken head still full of tar. blue glaze of paul gentile holding a gun up to a temple. mysteries upon cellar stairs: blood stars, whimpering, sticks breaking underfoot.

there in a corner, impossible things happening: my own head, my own hands on my own ears. worlds built of centipedes. sharp stones in the back of a baby.

in europe they have gargoyles for things like this. in bali there are chants for things like this. in new england we just do not allow things like this, so when they come we keep them under our scalps.

the lifting faces.

george and jerry barone rise from the shell of their Volkswagen. the twins died angry. wayne king never knew me but i knew him and he was everywhere after he died and now he’s here again. the man died surprised that he was the only one.

in the corner my hands fling my head to the cement mouth first. i spit a tooth out and it lands and grows into the next piece of me to be terrified.

the myth of the hydra explains everything: a horror killed begets more horror.

and still, those lifting faces: stricky the flying head, veech the forlorn missile, carole the rolling bag of bones, jacob the ghost before he even passed, martin the bisected prince of the railroad track.

all that sleep that has lasted to this day, and i am still awake.

those lifting faces.

that’s me in the center, my eyes shut, squeezed tight, knowing what is coming…

2.
i have every site on the internet bookmarked.

everything is in my hands. conspiracy? i know who to talk to. davinci code? i’ve got the ring.

i know everything to know about out there. in here is unfound.

3.
some sounds will not go away: a woman’s voice saying slink, dove, scrap, green face, sun on a gourd, crumbs on a dragon, coupons, carver, slide, rumble, escapement, cliffed, stolen, pulse, penlight, painting, clips, bands, pickup, relate, lard, gungrease, quillon, medallion…

then words appear that mean themselves and no other thing: unspecific twoolyala, skevot, abbredient briest…if they could be translated they might fall in love and breed absolution.

no word means nothing. deny that and the clock stops.

4.
god allows me to pretend that god’s existence is as i wish it to be. when faces float up to see me i pretend to understand heaven and hell, perhaps even purgatory, buying my peace from my parent’s store.

when i shrug it off god laughs like a train whistle.

5.
again, the lifting faces: who understands why they never quite break the surface? who understands why they do not speak? why the random soundtrack? why the words i don’t hear well enough to force them into service?

i sink myself in the clouded pool and dig into my ears with my eyes closed. i know how much more there is to come.

if i told you
the worst thing i’ve
ever done, you would
dig both hands into my eyes
and push until i fell backwards
into the carpet. you would
kick me and then sob out loud
as i rose blinded and contrite
from the floor.

then i would tell you: i would do it again, but for you alone,

and then you might step toward me
as if i was a spotlight
you could stand in for one moment —
and perhaps i would see again
or perhaps not, see you before you were
illuminated by false hope —

and then i would do it again, just as i promised.

In a dark room a poet
stands at a microphone
and pins a melody
onto the front end of a slogan.
We all know the tune.
We stir vaguely at the sound.
We remember being told
that this was the sound
of the door slamming shut on this side
of the Middle Passage. We remember
being told to care.

We know we should want
to cross over Jordan, long for the chariot,
strain to hear Gabriel’s horn.
We feel embarrassed
that we don’t,
so we applaud to cover it up.

Far away in a South Carolina swamp
a ghost joins in on the song
and hums the North Star
into the sky.
The ghost knows
we do not understand how that happens —
oh, believe me, he has always known —
and he sings it with or without us.

You do not know
what will stir
when you take a spiritual
for your own.
If you sing one, if you
hear one, be prepared
to greet the ghost.