We’ve spent our entire lives
looking at scenes that will someday disappear
and yet we are happy much of the time,
centered on the illusion of permanence.

Every house, every church, every factory
or office we’ve ever been thrilled or angry
or bored in is going to fall to pieces eventually.
Maybe we’ll live to see it, maybe we will be

the ones to do it by fire or dynamite,
with sledgehammers or through simple neglect,
but it’s going to happen with or without us
and until it does, we will pretend it will never happen.

More than once I’ve had the joy of shifting
a public view — I put hammer and crowbar 
into play, slamming down old boards and pulling up
rotted floors, changing what was once a fact

into a memory of fact. Life went on without
the shed and the garage. I can see them if I squint
at the spaces where they were, but there are people
who never knew they were there and for them things

are just fine as they are now. 
Things were just fine as they once were, too.
Nothing is permanent, and every thing is fine that way.
Things change. We change. Things don’t matter much.

What matters is us changing ourselves
to fit into the changing nature of things.
We move into impermanence while clinging to things.
We pretend about things, and hem and haw and fight and weep over things;

things that will inevitably disappear just as we will inevitably
disappear from the sight of others, through fire or dynamite,
by our own neglect or choice, by the sheer force of time
if by nothing else; yet somehow we are content

to pretend otherwise much of the time
as we look at scenes from which we will 
someday disappear, scenes that will someday
disappear: the central illusion of permanence.

A thin man takes off a diamond-paved mask.
Another releases a white horse in an empty palace.

A man slumps against a lit, street-level window.
He goes on to levitate above a roof ledge, then settles back to safety.

Ah — there’s a woman in this one, behind the wheel of a muscle car.
A painting of the same woman, blindfolded and bound, is resting on an easel.

You see the oddest, fanciest people at an Old West wedding.
You see them again at a funeral on the day after the wedding.

A downcast man sits on a roof ledge with another downcast man.
A woman strokes another man’s hair; someone here might be an angel.

Those shoes, that hair, that coat, that long walk in a desert without dust.
That hatchet, that payphone, that Jeep, that briefcase paved in diamonds, full of water balloons.

And now more Jeeps, more muscle cars, more deserts and angelic nights and grand clothes.
There is an obvious way to end the endless but I’m afraid of what world I’ll find if I turn this off. 

I really don’t have
anything pretty
to say. This
is a problem.

I’m supposed to drag
the good words out
almost on demand, 
certainly at my own command.

I don’t put much stock
in the idea of a Muse.
I don’t channel
anything, am no conduit.

Still, right now
the moments that get me in gear
to pull a stunner out
are just not happening.

I will not blame
anything or anyone for this.
I will not blame the President
or dark weather.

Instead, I will melt down
the rough lead I’ve been pouring
into molds for bullets and sinkers
and make from it instead

a dull gray god. An idol
for a religion of beauty
I used to follow, but cannot
put current faith in. 

Once cast I will set it up
and pray to it. I’ll ask it
to make my hand strong
and show me how to forge ahead.

I will wrestle up a vision
unlike past visions. It will not
be beautiful, but it will be 
true. I do not care what Emily said:

they are not always the same
but it’s possible
that they know each other
and that they talk;

I hope they do and when they do,
I hope they discover
that they both know
my name.

Daylight arriving:
too much of a thing,

neither bad nor good,
that inserts its presence

without asking.
Dusk and dark:

blankets only, 
fixes for nothing.

Day or night
the air smells like fear, like

blue lights
in my rear view.

I am broken,
I’ve been told.

I’ve been told
I’m in the process

of healing. Terrifying words,
broken, healing; broken

for how I’ve been
and how I am seen;

healing for its reminder that
I have not only not

been repaired fully,
but that I may never be.

What I do daily, nightly,
is pretend the healing is working.

I sit in the scent of fear
and bathe myself.

I call it a treatment.
I treat myself to 

immersion in what you call
healing, which for me is

a rough massage
of broken parts

that is alleged to make me
better, but really 

just moves fractures
into hiding under my skin.

The hurt never changes
and I can’t escape the smell.

I am more broken than
healing. This is my life.

I live it and have lived it
but I will not pretend

to have liked 
much of it. 

Sweet Boy took 
one in the chest.
Miraculous moment,
he did not die there;
instead he walked
across the street to 
do it. That’s where they
found him looking up
at the stars, eyes fixed
on the zenith.

Sweet Boy,
sang the heavens, welcome
to you. Welcome to you
from the world of difficulty
and miracles that should not
be needed. 

Another boy,
not so sweet, not so 
boyish, falls in another
street, this time cut;
he passes at once.
Rough Boy, miracle of 
miracles, rises up from the blood
on a song like
Sweet Boy’s song,

though it’s daylight 
and he’s not going to be
as missed as Sweet Boy and
it’s a different world more in need
of miracles than the first

so the song shifts in key
but they name him Sweet Boy too
because that’s a name
heaven can sing for dead boys;

and Sweet Girl dies in song,
and Sweet Man, and Sweet Woman,
and Sweeties 
who refuse the other songs
until they get their own
just as sweet as those;

miraculous songs, songs 
for the dead that do not
choose or blame, that only 
welcome and lament,
that offer sweetness to 
this bitter world.

On behalf of my left leg
and its limber history
I’d like to apologize 
for how it has kicked
and lashed out on occasion
for reasons gone dim
and mostly forgotten, which
may have seemed vital at the time
but now are nothing, nothing at all.

On behalf of my right hand
and its misshapen grasp
of importance and digging in
when things get tough
I’d like to do penance 
for those times I held fast
to what I should have released
and let go of those I should have
held close. I truly believed 
in myself when I did those things
and now that I know how untrustworthy
I was and still am, I cannot look
down at my arm without shuddering.

On behalf of my genitals,
I am sorry I listened to them 
as often as I did. On behalf
of my eyes, I am sorry I did not
see what was plain. On behalf 
of my skin, I apologize for
not paying attention to how
the hairs stood up on my neck
around some and how they did not
around others, and for how often 
I got it wrong — more often
than not, more often than seldom.

On behalf of the body, I lay myself
down and say no more. On behalf
of what the body did and did not do,
on behalf of how I drove it and dragged it
and how it took me and pushed me
in turn, I say sorry and my fault and
agree to every accusation and complaint
lodged against it and against me, 
even the ones only I know enough to make;

I see now how the body and I
colluded in this festival of indifference
and poor choices called a life, and 
on behalf of the body, on behalf
of myself within, though I know
I cannot offer enough
of what’s left of us
to justice or mercy,

I say
take what there is,
and let us be done.