Joe the Cancer
was preparing a hot meal
to eat off my belly, as if I was
his table, or perhaps
a paper plate to be discarded
when his meal was done.

I pushed him off and 
thought I had done
enough for all time when
from the corner near the house
I heard him hooting out
his longing for my lungs,

and now I think about Joe the Cancer
more often than I think about
love or baseball, listening for his
hardly subtle song of yearning

and ignoring the now irrelevant
snap of a ball into a leather glove
that used to be, for me,
the perfected sound of triumph.

This gargantuan blood stain 
that we call a nation
covers a landscape of long-ago love and sex,
generations working through sorrow and laughter.

By this rock someone once offered a prayer
for forgiveness for the hurt they’d given to another.

That prayer is still here, drowned in blood.
Some of us are trying to clean it off and let it fly
and add our own prayers for what we’ve done
and what’s been done in our name,

using words so browned and hardened
they can barely rise; but still, we try. It’s that, or die.

Two voices
asking me ordinary questions
at the same time
while I’m trying to check
the status of this
ordinary dinner and keep myself
ordinary till it’s over.

I fail.

Twin storms suddenly
in here with me,
one by each side, beating
blue light out of me
until each breath
tastes like lightning
and sets extraordinary fire
all around. 

To want is to break. 
If you are broken already, 
if you’ve been broken before,
to want is then to seek healing 
through wanting 
and once you are healed,  
to want is then to break
once again.

Don’t you feel at times
that endlessly chasing desire
is an ambulance ride 
taken over and over again 
to a hospital where every time 
a different doctor
just shakes their head 
and mutters about
fools never learning  
as you’re wheeled in? 

To want is to break. 
You’ve been broken before
so often that what you mostly want 
is permanent healing,
but there you are, 
as boringly broken as ever
and once you are healed 
it doesn’t last;
to want is to break
again and again; how often
does this have to be said? 

Don’t you feel at times
that this pursuit of desire
is cutting off your cast
from previous breaks too soon,
pushing recent atrophy 
to its limit and beyond 
until you fall again,
unable to walk,
resigned to your pain, 
just as you always have?

To breathe is to want
and to want, you tell yourself,
is to break, so you break. 
To keep breathing is to admit
you want healing for your wanting.

To catch your breath for a moment
and imagine what it will be like
when you stop wanting permanently
is to break eventually,
gasp, bend back into breathing
and wanting; it’s an unfamiliar
form of healing,
something unlike what happens 
in an ambulance on your way
to a shrug of dismissal 
and your chagrinned ride home
after that.

To break a cycle
of wanting
and healing from want
is to lie down broken
and refuse attention
until you’re alone
with your fracture
and see at last
how far you’ve come
on your once-fragile,
now-bolstered limbs. On your
forever-being-splinted bones. 
On whatever this is
that your desire 
has made of you. 

My day begins in the dark,
stumbling from bed to
bath, trying to avoid 
the small ghosts crossing
the kitchen, white streaks
only I can see
as they speed through
on their way to
wherever they stay in daylight.
It’s an old house,
with a tilted floor made
for crooked dancing;
they run past me
with and against
the slant. I suspect
they’ve been up all night.
I used to fear they were 
dread insects until I realized
they were taller and whispered 
as they ran. My two
nonchalant cats never pay them
any mind; I think they are all
gaslighting me and are in 
cahoots to make me see
how silly I am to believe
anything this early in the morning
such as

they’re the ghosts
of all the cats who’ve been here
in the century since this place was built

or 

those are the words
I must pin down today
when I get to my desk at last

or

to discover something
magical in the wreck of 
living here 
is what I was born to do

but when I come out of the bathroom
to turn on the coffee maker
they’re gone, and now I have to feed
the real cats and begin to sink
toward suffering as I do daily,
eventually ending up on my knees,
blind, broke, and broken,
sobbing over my failures,
wondering how any of this
will get repaired before I pass;
thinking that perhaps
I might become
a shrunken spirit myself,
trapped here 
fighting the tilt
of this ruined kitchen floor
before dawn every morning
till even the building itself
is only someone else’s bad memory
darting through their day
before it begins.

I’ve been burglarized — 
not my house, my Self.
This dwelling has been
ransacked. Even after
a full inventory, I can feel
new empty space and 
have no idea what was once
there. I just know I was stronger
with it, whatever it was, and now
I’m constantly seeking it
or some reminder of what it is
or was — some trace of it
left in the wiring of
my sad electricity, my 
heartbroken pipes,
my grimy corners,
the unfamiliar tracks
in the dust of the bedroom floor.

The dirty window 
wears a story in fly specks
and spatter-stains from
soil tossed there by heavy rain.

Read the story
before you wash the window
as you seek transparency
and light. 

Some stories
are a mess by nature
and design. Some stories
only exist in filth.

The next time you see me,
remember this. 

How much there is still held inside me
after all these decades of allowing
my supposed best and worst out to be 
criticized and praised out loud.

People say self-care
is more important 
than the Work. Rest and be well, 
they say. What you’ve done,

what you could do, matter less
than the resistance you offer
by being healthy and secure. 
Teach the demons, inner and outer,

that they cannot win. Somehow
they ignore the fact
that any battle has casualties.
If I do not survive in body and spirit

because I’ve put body and spirit
into the Work, who dares to say I was wrong?
Even if no one knows who I am
a year after I’m gone, I will have done my part,

and the part I leave behind
ought to be enough for all who remain here
to say I did what I had no choice but to do,
and that is how I will be fulfilled.