To relax and
let my mind wander
is to trust it will 
eventually find its way
to a bright somewhere
instead of 
becoming lost
in this darker wilderness
where I started,
marveling as whatever
path it takes 
dips and reveals 
creatures in my shadows
who are unfamiliar and 
whose motives are unclear;

yet still feeling certain
that this journey
will be worthwhile even if
it merely affirms my desire
to soak in as much gloom
as I can find before I go,

preparing me to be comfortable
should there indeed be
only a void beyond this life.

Done for the day
with trying to choose 
how to hold this earth
safe. The only world
we have is in danger
and I need sleep. I’m

a failure, I guess.
I should be burning down
a factory or torturing
someone who makes 
plastic straws but 
I need sleep. I’m 

a slacker, I guess.
I should be beating 
a beef farmer
or stepping to a guy 
at a gas station
waving a piece 
of my mind in his face
while he tries to fill
an eighty gallon tank
in his work truck
but I need sleep. I’m

a hypocrite, I guess. 
Staring at screens when 
I ought to be enraged.
Spending money 
when I ought to be 
foraging. Refusing
to dance to their music
but I need sleep. I ought
to be abolishing work

but I need sleep. I ought 
not to participate, I ought
to withdraw. It might be
why I sleep as well as why
I always wake up
longing for sleep.

A line on a blank page:
now is the time to recover. 

Whose fault it is
that you never became
the artist you thought you’d be

is unimportant. Unless
it’s your fault. After all, you took

the meds that kicked you over
like a traffic cone and now
conventional wisdom says

you’re too okay to make art.
Then you took the courses and now

you make enough money to live
paycheck to paycheck. School
got you here and art stayed behind. 

You lie nightly next to your partner,
screw enough to fall asleep, share life

and love and ease enough
to make the art seem dimmer
every time. You did it all.

Here you sit before sunrise
with one line on a blank page 

in front of you. The house is quiet
but for the grinding of teeth.
Now is the time to recover.

An ever-moving stone
at the bottom of a stream
rounds itself into sand,
loses itself in time. 

The stream loses itself
as it cuts into stone
to make more sand and thus
becomes a river in time.

Sit beside it a while.
In time you’ll also lose
enough of yourself
to become a new thing.

Will you carry the same name
you’ve always used
back from the riverbank
into your former world?

Do you believe
that world,
alone among all others,
will be the same when you return?

You will now hear a story
with the usual opening
and closing words,
but in between? There is

a stairway in there.
We see the stairs
and hear the emptiness
of the stairwell and how it echoes

when the climber is done,
but none of that is in 
the space
we call the story.

The story tells us just enough
of the climber’s life to feel 
we know them but of name
or face there is nothing in the story.

We find a single orange peel
on the landing between floors
and all we know of that
is that the story was written

to hide the rest. If there’s
a moral, it’s unknown. If there’s
a lesson, it’s hidden except for
what we already know about how

what we are told conceals
the why of the untold parts: why
the sweetness of the orange and
the strain upon the body of the hero

are left unremarked. Why we are allowed
to see so little and yet become
so engaged, to pretend that once 
upon a time we all lived happily ever after,

even the people in the stories we tell
who lived mostly in the gap between 
the seen and the unseen and did not in fact
tell us anything they did not want us to know. 

We never learned
this story of the Garden:

how someone whose name
is unknown now,

whose existence itself
has been erased,

stepped up after the Expulsion
to steal a kiss from one leaf

of the Tree.  Did not gnaw 
on the Fruit or lick 

the smooth hard Bark;
simply laid one small kiss

upon one Leaf. Wanted to be
able to say that they

had tasted the source
of Knowledge and then went on

through their life without
any consequence for knowing

just enough to get by;
to have a hint of Truth

linger on their lips without it changing 
anything inside them. Then they’d sneer

at Adam and Eve for being
so willing to go so far in on the Truth

that it ran them out of Paradise
and into the Wild.

We never learned this story of the Garden
because it was kept from us

so we would never dare to question
if they were right

and so we would never know enough
to be sure they weren’t.

All we have is a view of that sword over there
and the genes we carry that

keep us afraid
even as they tell us to try

and get by the flames
to see what we might be willing to do

for even a small taste of something
that will assure us of the way home. 

Fire, also known as
an expanded demonstration
of how quickly things may change 
when exposed to the right spark.

Water, a case
for how slow wear carves
such canyons that anyone
could lose themselves in awe.

Air, remonstrance
of solidity, the case for
flitting to and fro instead
of hanging on for dear life.

And earth, where it all
happens. Where blaze 
and flood and hurricane close in
upon your well-planted feet.

The mission? To live
as part of this elemental,
ancient, startling world, buffeted 
and altered by known and unknown.

To maintain or fall stale.
To factor damage into
the swinging of your intimate pendulum
and shift as your time shifts to match its pace.

To adapt or die
before your physical life
stops altogether without you
having known what it means to live.