what you love
you claim
what you despise
claims you
what you know
and remain indifferent to 
explains you
what you do not know
and others do
reframes you

thus I
learn like mad
have opinions
avoid hating many
and love few

all in an effort to 
surrender little
of myself

stories you tell
of what you see
become what people see
of you

stories you tell
of how you see what
you see become
your angle on what
you are

when pushed to speak
I over-explain
and therefore negate
how little I surrender
of myself so
I am learning
silence and
how to tolerate
the growing lack
of self-delusion
that naturally follows

people who are
indifferent to me
are killing me
by millimeters

I am learning
indifference to them
each lesson a bullet
fired in self-defense

this resultant loneliness
is an expression of
a kind of poverty
much like how after a war
a country
is often in ruins
its people walking dazed
by what was once familiar
having become indifferent
to its former self

they starve eventually
or leave

was grown in an oven

they named me 
residue
ash for short

once swept out of their hearth
was tossed
left traces on everything

was born again in a dustbin

emptied into 
a heap on the curb
blew around a lot

they called me mistake and
stain
though I answered to neither saying

ash, ash I am 

holding a little heat but not to
smolder
like a resentment

would prefer
to warm a garden
blend into fertile soil

unhated 

It’s not my problem, I scream,
not my sad planet to save anymore.

Let others do the work of salvation;
I’m not going to be here long enough

to bask in any light
from a saved world, and in truth

I don’t believe in its salvation:
at best that’s a dim light 

everyone’s scrambling toward.
Again: this isn’t my job — 

I’m over halfway
to my own last days.

I’m mostly racing the darkness
to see which of us falls first; still,

the bedraggled world
keeps coming 

and begging for me
to ease its suffering,

even if just a little.
Did I stutter, I wonder,

when I asked the world
to let me off its hook?

Maybe that was not a stutter.
Maybe that was my voice

pushed through a shiver; perhaps
I have to consider other possibilities — 

cold as the wind is,
perhaps I am colder;

if I am not the peace,
perhaps I am the war.  

I bend back to this work
after days of fire, my feet 
gray with ash; swear that

these tracks, these
proofs of memory, will be more
than grief’s dust, more than tracings

of what was, instead
will become maps, urgings,
soil in which to grow — what?

Sustenance? Tinder
for new fire? Not my place
to know; I bend back 

to work, always
to Work — mindful
of Fire, pushing off

my own need to Burn.

This face, exemplar
of no remorse — its
pale nerve-laced skin
twitching, its stare, 
its thin, sharp nose; 

that fear
in those hollow eyes
brimming over,
spilling onto those lips,
flavoring each word they spill 
with hate
because 
fear becomes hate 
when exposed
to open air,

and once fear
flowers into hate
it cannot easily unbloom
and furl back toward
innocence
from that urgent, ugly
canker-state:

fear
turned to hate dares 
not regret anything
as doing so may expose
how little it ever had to fear
from the beginning — hence

this face, exemplar
of no remorse with unrelenting
stare, almost as if a mirror
were before you unblinking,
but that isn’t your face
in the news — 

it’s something
at once more unsettled
and unsettling:
a face that could be
any face, a face grown
so commonplace
you almost don’t give it
a second glance.

any open door
that can be closed and locked is
a good advisor

in the moment when
it snugs into its frame
I learn what I need

about safety and peace
achieved through insulation
from the other side

(no matter where I
make my stand I stand behind
or before a door)