With dagger or dirk.
Parang or machete.
Left behind bayonet
or stake fashioned from
old bloody wood.

In their night rises
our broad, bright day.

Still, terrible’s
walking among us.
Debate’s of no use.
Once you smell blood
in your neighborhood
you cannot lose the scent.

In their night rises
our broad, bright day.

No, not with guns;
if we are to remain able
to be human again
we cannot allow ourselves
to do what’s needed
from a distance. We’ll need
to feel the shock of blade on bone
in order to remember
how much better it was to be
who we were before.

An old friend, an unhealed wound,
rose from the road in my headlights.

I cried out and leaned on the horn,
stopped in time, got out and rushed to see
if they were in truth my companion
and I had hurt them more this time
than I had before our parting.
They were not there.

It was just some trick
of light in fog, but it seemed real enough
that I shook all the rest of the way home
and sat in the driveway a long time
before going in. Once inside I went
from room to room looking for others
but the house was, as it always is, empty.

Lying in bed, nerves smoldering, not dreaming:
longing for the road again, hoping a host
would be waiting for me in the mist,
hovering just above my road, just barely ahead;

the threat of possible collisions
just within the threshold of what I could bear
if I could just stop in time
before plowing through them again in spirit
as I had when they were still in flesh.

I go to the river
as others have gone before me
and though it is cold
I enter the water
at the spot on the bank
where anglers have entered
for more years than are known
seeking food and sport
and perhaps a connection
to a wheel turning through time
so I can bring what is there
to the spot on the bank
where more people than are known
have entered for more years
than are known
seeking connection to more
than is known
and once I have pulled myself out
and am high and dry and warm
I turn back to the land
carrying with me more than I can know
yet somehow I do know
I am more full
than before I plunged in
and caught hold
of the wheel

It seems
that I’ve been walking
through a tunnel for
a long time;

one hand on
each damp wall,
pinprick light behind me,
pinhole of hope ahead;

the lights
before and behind
have winked out
and here I am —

cold wet hands,
tearing my fingers open
on stones I cannot see.
I stop for a moment,

listening to dripping water,
listening for something scrambling
through the dark
toward me — and while there’s

nothing at all besides me
in here, I’m certain,
I need to feel fear anyway.
I’ve been told the dark is

terrifying my whole life,
after all. I’ve been told that tunnels
hold danger at their core,
but all I feel here is space.

Perhaps I am the danger?
The stones whisper that to me.
I don’t know if they can be trusted.
I don’t know if I can trust myself,

alone with myself in the dark.

Meanwhile in the meanwhile,
in the mean time, this meanest of
intervals goes humming by
and there on the far edge of it
is a human, someone clinging
who once might have been centered,
might have been the ruler, the slick
dancing ruler, the measure
of the center, how they led
the edge forward before this,
before the year broke loose,
the whole decade in fact
slipping its moorings and now
that human clings for life
as the decade spins off its spine
and all are flung out into space
except for them, and after the mean time
they sit with their head in their hands
wondering if they really needed
to cling so hard to this plane
that now is so utterly changed
it is hard to imagine them ever being
centered again.