from 2017
In the middle of the night you wake
and in your mouth is the word
that will save everything
currently in peril,
and you cannot pronounce it,
and soon enough you forget it,
but not the knowledge
that you once knew it.
It poisons your magic for a long time.
Today is January 11
and I woke up before 6
with little to do but
accept that I’m not a man
I know it’s not true
and that even the words
“I’m not a man” are suspect
and reek of Whitestench
except that when I look at
myself and all the failures
that even I call failures
it’s hard to argue that the ‘Stench
is just covering up a good person
instead of adding its flavor to
the general reek of my
utter incompetence at being alive
I mean of course I’m breathing and
excreting and God knows I eat
but how will I escape the way
I fail to prosper and no
it’s not just the lack of money
it’s the utter insignificance of
my work when I think I’m
doing so well and it’s brushed aside
without so much as a thought
It’s the reduction of my once-keen edge
to a pinprick the barely draws blood
It’s the shame of slowly recognizing
the mistakes and looming disasters
have not gone away overnight
as they rise to the top like old bodies
in the pool of darkness in my brain
as I wake up daily before six
slightly happy until I see them
and drag myself out of bed into
the cloud of chores that each day brings
And at last it’s the knowledge
that in a better world built
without Whitestench or Manstench
or Moneystench it might have been
different but in the long run
I’m here now on January 11
already up and regardless of society
it’s still my fault that I was and am unable
to get away from all that smell
breathe some fresh air
take one deep breath and plunge
back in to do what I can and must do
on January 12 and beyond
“Lose ten pounds now! In
your first week! You
deserve it!” screams the
commercial that appears
every seven minutes or so
on this channel and everyone
or at least all the people who
deserve it can hear
the monetization of
their fears and how
those ten pounds are
the ticket to their security and
frankly humanity once they conform
to the shape demanded by
this joint so full of
screaming and insistence
In fact I’ve got ten pounds
sitting on my ass right now
that I will gladly keep
to myself thank you
along with my meager money
and my preference for
allowing myself to decide
what I deserve so shut up
Originally written 2007.
1.
The brain
knows many things.
Some of them you know.
Some you do not.
2.
If the brain
is a flower,
you are
its scent.
3.
Perhaps the brain
is a flower,
starving for light, reaching out
through your eyes
for its sustenance.
4.
If you plucked
your brain
and held it to the light,
would you find the mind?
5.
The mind lives
in the brain and
hides in its petals.
The mind is the dark
among colors.
6.
When you sleep
the brain corrals
the mind. They talk all night,
pretending they are
you. In the morning
you are nearly deaf
from the echoes of their
conversation.
7.
It’s not part of the scheme
that you should understand
everything they were discussing.
There are things shoring up
the brain and mind
that would terrify you
if you knew them.
8.
The brain opens its bloom
long after you close your eyes.
The mind rises from its nooks and folds
to escape, moving past you,
playing in the meadows.
9.
The mind drifts back
in the hot late afternoon.
Your head grows heavy
with pollen. You open your mouth
and bees fly in
to take their fill while the mind
avoids being stung
by the danger in the commerce.
10.
When you sleep
the mind and brain bear ideas.
You pretend they are your own fruit.
The brain laughs at you. The mind
strokes you softly, saying,
“There, there…”
11.
You are the scent.
Something plucks your brain
and you die slowly. Maybe
another brain and another mind
recall you for a while, but
you’ll certainly fade.
12.
Anything
fed long enough
on vision, scent, touch,
sound, taste will double back
on its own surety. The brain
makes you sleepy. The mind
makes you frightened. You
make yourself believe
there are reasons for everything.
13.
A night blooming flower
holds its beauty
until first light, collapsing
at the first touch of your hand,
staining your memory
with a scent you can never name.
Do not say how horrible
this world has become for you
without speaking as well of how horrible
it has always been to others.
If you are surprised to feel at last
its downward slant and how
you now struggle to walk anywhere
when every destination is now somehow uphill all the way,
imagine lifetimes of doing this; imagine
the millions now alive and millions now passed
who have needed to be ceaselessly wary,
clutching their hearts, guarding their footsteps.
I’m going to tell you a secret
that’s really never been a secret:
your prior ease was grounded
in the uneasiness of those others.
I’m going to tell you a secret
that’s really never been a secret:
your recognizing it today and calling it new
feels vaguely insulting to those vast crowds.
I’m going to tell you a secret
that’s really no secret at all:
some of what you wail about, what ails you
now, what hurts your back and strains your lungs?
Some of what feels so new to you
is age-old and so common
that your shock and anguish
look at least a little like a lie.
Did you imagine any of this correctly
back when you lay in your room
before dawn and school and first love
and tried to foresee your life? If you did,
did you get the background right as well,
never mind the foreground and the bad business
offstage that clouded the formal dialogue
and gave it a layer of unease you could taste —
if you did, if you got any or all of it right, why
are you here now trying to survive all of this?
Unless you thought it would fade by the time
you got here, or perhaps that you’d be among those
who would vanquish all the awfulness? Maybe you are
still at it, still making it better on center stage;
maybe you’re part of the problem; maybe
you never believed it would happen at all
and you trusted your childhood vision was going to be
wrong. Maybe you can’t even say why you pushed on
and persevered but now that you’re here
and the decay and rot of the world is so evident,
you look back and imagine how it should have been
so clear, considering how far you’ve come from
dawn and school and first love
and how none of any of that
came to be or stayed true.
To restring a guitar
on the morning of a snowstorm
is to convene a seminar
on the joys of knowing very little.
To restring a guitar
is to open a familiar door
and find familiar things
have been moved to a new room.
To restring a guitar
is to pull the pushpins
from a bulletin board
and throw away the outdated notes.
To restring a guitar
is to understand nothing again
and find something else
has been made clear again.
To restring a guitar
when the weather is bad
is to declare that last night’s forecast
was incomplete.
Haul wood,
chop water.
Do the hard work of
reversal.
How far
there is to go,
how futile the effort
seems to be.
The wood yet to be moved
doesn’t diminish.
The water refuses
to stay split.
Maybe it’s best
to return to
the desert where
there’s little of either.
Once there, though, visible
beyond the dry horizon
are the forests
and now and then, the rain.
Stand outside
and go through
the motions: swinging,
preparing to clutch.
Become a readiness,
a consciousness:
a hauler of weight,
a cleaver of flood.
Did your bogeyman tell you
there was just one villain
to blame for all pain?
Did your bogeyman tell you
that everything wrong trailed
from one leading edge?
Did your bogeyman sell you
a volume of such misdirections,
then eat your liver?
Put your bogeyman
in a capitalist hat.
Paint your bogeyman
as a white cat with perfect teeth.
Dress your bogeyman
in an able bodied suit.
Cast your bogeyman
in a heterosexual play.
Mask your bogeyman
behind a bottle full of money.
I don’t believe your bogeyman
has stopped laughing at you yet.
I don’t believe your bogeyman
adds anything fresh to fear.
I don’t believe your bogeyman
can never show their face to you.
I don’t believe you own
the necessary mirror.
It has been more than a few days
when I come back with some reluctance
to the dance from the outer room,
stopping for a moment
on the threshold to watch others
whirl around like teacups
on a theme park ride.
I stand there wondering
if it’s worth it to begin again,
to pay the fare and join in;
then I recall the joys
of uncertainty, the worry
and the planning
for where things might go
if the ride breaks down
at the height of the swirling;
I think of the dancers,
of the dance itself
leaping and careening
into a stomp from a waltz,
the orchestra shifting gears
from decorum to abandon.
How can I not join in
when it seems
that all I have resisted
has begun to change
and who I am
and what I have been
will settle at last into
the music yet to come?
I believe that if you are riding a unicorn
and said unicorn bucks you off,
you get yourself a plain old horse
and get back up.
I believe you then ride after that unicorn,
lasso it, hold it still while you ask it
how it became so trendy and why
that whole virgin myth got started.
I suspect it will shrug, if unicorns
can indeed shrug. I suspect someone
started that cockamamie story as a way
to get virgins to sit out in the woods
for hours waiting for something to happen.
Meanwhile, perfectly good horses
sit lonely in their stalls back at the stable
and despite all the stories they play a role in
they’re considered too common
for the magical bandwagon these days.
Everyone loves a unicorn, so much so
they don’t think enough about
the horses and narwhals
who made them happen.
(Don’t get me started on narwhals.
I’ve roped a few in my time
and with that whole lack of shoulders
they shrug even less obviously
than unicorns do.)
You’re shaking your head
at all of this. After all,
you are currently riding a unicorn
that shits rainbows wherever you pass.
You live as if you’ve haven’t been
repeatedly betrayed
by the rest of the mythology
which gave us unicorns
as it formed us.
It’s an apocalypse out there.
Soon enough
you’re going to need a horse
to get somewhere
because once the narwhals
go extinct, the slow forgetting
of unicorns shall begin
and the only thing to do then
will be to create
some new chimeras to ride.
You might as well start now. After all,
none of us are virgins any more.
This is a message
from oatmeal and cinnamon
From blueberries and
dark amber agave nectar
It reads
You keep hope alive sport
All this will be worth it
one of these days
And then there’s a message
from a walk through the swamp
From trash below the boardwalk
and the sight of a fox not far off
It reads
Nothing is easy but restoration is possible
and what is worth restoring
is wary — but it is nearby
Finally a message
from the bed you so want to replace
full of lumps and bad springs
that eclipse all the wholesome memories
It reads
Get your rest while you can sport
You will need it
in the coming good times
if indeed
they come in their own good time
In cars drivers
clothed for mistakes
they made years before
grip steering wheels
they barely need as
the cars work
those same routes
every workday.
After years of
dressing and driving
like this, they
know in their
bones that to imagine
different roads
would tear them
to shreds.
They clench
the steering wheels,
their teeth; they clench
their buttocks
as their cars go
where they always go.
There by the roadside,
a steering wheel.
The sound of
someone screaming,
or cheering.
Moved to dance
in the hallway of
my childhood home
as it is empty now
and the echoes of
feet on the floor
will disturb no one
Trying to choose
a beat to work
from among
the memories of all
the songs I tried
to listen to here
but was told to turn down
People who know me today
can’t hear the caterwauling
that goes on within for my denied past
Symphony of what I never had
when I lived here
If they did they’d understand
but perhaps if they did they’d flee
Moved to dance
but unable to
Frozen in remembrance
of all that glory unused
I settle myself back into stillness
as it is easier than trying
to choose
When you are uncertain
about where that nearby
car alarm is going off
and your own car is out of sight
and you can’t say for certain
what your alarm sounds like
you might want to pull
some pants on before
stepping into the cold
to see if you are responsible
for your own awakening
and any others out there
When you are sure that
it’s not you but
the silver Acura parked
across the street and up
the block in the driveway
of the only single family home
around here
The one whose occupants
you’ve never even seen
you step back into the foyer
and wait to see who comes out
but no one does
You cannot go back to sleep
wondering if it shut off by itself
after what seemed like an hour
or did it get shut off
by someone inside using
a remote
Someone remote and
unseen who lives among us
putting forth disruptions
like small bombs that will trouble
our sleep until the day
we no longer hear them at all
and thus will be destroyed
Dark Matter 