My raw throat converts
breath to fire: no, not with poems —
I’m sick tonight and

it burns to inhale.
Every third breath
draws a cough

that carves me
up. I’m not ready to
die from a cold, of course, 

but at my age
every illness feels like
a flag for a caution lap;

you can’t shake off
what you used to. Slow down, take
as many laps as needed

before coming back
to the line at full speed.
Where’s that green flag

when you want it? No, not for
poems, not tonight.  I’ll settle
for sleeping then waking up tomorrow

and then we’ll see about changing
the fire in my throat
from breath to words.

this moment, whether seized or released, 
is all that matters.

the sun on the shore, the sun silvering surf,
the sun on your skin, the sun on your mind;

that bouquet, that kick of fruit and wine

mingled with dark smoke;

this one brief pause

in a long climb toward a summit; the

pleasure snatched
from pain’s arms. 

this moment is yours. this moment is you,
is all there is:

a moment of quickened light

where you get to choose

to either forego regret
or let it inform your next breath 

and all the ones 
after that; 

this moment knows you,

knows your answer 

before you can

breathe a word.

— for Betsy, 6/17/2015

Click to hear a recording of this poem with music

A noise inside me seems
to be my natural tongue
struggling to be understood
through my fog of upbringing
and schooled-in language.

I don’t know what to think,
who to thank or blame. All I hear
when I try to tune in to it is
a nagging rattle. I can’t turn it off,
like hail on a tin roof

going on all day and night.
(Hail never lasts that long in real life,
though. It’s more like a storm
of lost marbles falling from charcoal clouds,
slowly wrecking my home.)

Exhausted from trying
first to understand it and then
to block it out, I seek the aid
of anyone who might speak this
natural tongue, translate it for me,

teach me how to respond.  Is it you,
is it you, is it you? I ask everyone
I let get close enough
to hear it echoing from within.
Most look at me

as if every word from my mouth
was hail on their own roofs,
or a storm
of lost marbles tearing 
their own safety down.

The few who stay
don’t understand it either, 
but they understand the nature
of shelter: how temporary any of it
really is, how much we need

to hold onto each other
when we find ourselves together
under those crumbling eaves.
We pull close and speculate
on what it all might mean.

It helps. Sometimes,
when I am not alone with it,
the noise inside me even begins
to sound like music. Together we try,
raggedly, to sing.

Your hate’s
come awake: such
an unreal charmer, such
a hot squirmer writhing
in a breast pocket
you forgot about;
a pocket you now fear
is thinned enough 
to be soon torn open.
If the hole happens,
you just know hate will 
stick in you, hanging
off your chest by its fangs,
sucking you out of your shell,
envenoming you, making you
up again in its image 
as a venal god blooding up
ahead of a long sporting night.

Your hate’s
come awake: a once-small,
once-secret character
in someone else’s fiction
of what’s normal,
squeaking damaged calls
to whatever passes
for your remaining 
morality.  It calls to
the hand, calls it 
to weaponize.  It calls to
the eyes to see through
red mist.  It calls to
the upper gut and the lower
gut and finally to
the genital center of 
your worst. Your hate’s
pretending
to be your lover tonight:
a seduction, a coarse driven
caress of sweat and fear.

Your hate’s come awake
like a rattlesnake wintering
under a hearthstone, roused
by unanticipated fire.
It happens, it does
happen, it will 
happen.

Meanwhile, love,
secure in another pocket,
has been awake this whole time — 
it tires, though not easily
or deeply enough to ever be
absent completely.
All you need do
is look its way
and it will come to you

to unfasten hate from its bite,
massage poison
from your limbs,
mend that torn pocket
and tuck hate back
where it belongs

before settling back in,
purring its peace,
closer to you 
than ever before.

families eat together
and they may starve together
if there’s nothing to eat
but they will not starve alone

if you’re starving alone
come sit down and be
part of 
my family

we don’t have much
but we can’t afford
to be stingy with 
generosity

families need
more than just food
to be healthy
they must be open to allowing

what they hold among themselves
to flow away
trusting that one day
it will flow back

therefore son or daughter
brother, sister, cousin 
in spite of any other blood you carry
I declare that you are my family

so sit and eat and drink
rest and weep
or laugh in relief knowing
you’re home now

Whenever Universe asks me,
after I’ve stubbornly
resisted its direction, 

“Did I stutter?”

the right answer for me
always is
“Yes,” because I find
it always does stutter
and shade its suggestions
before getting straight on making
a clear demand of me,

possibly (I’d like to think) because 
it hopes it doesn’t have to
make a clear demand of me
and hopes that this time
I’ll get it in spite of the subtlety —

and sometimes I do 
but sometimes I don’t,
which leads to Universe
leaning into me
and asking,

“DID I STUTTER?”

and here we are again,
here we both are,
back at the beginning.

I always speak the truth
to Universe
while praying it does not
smite me
for my honesty,
though it smites me 
for my honesty

more often than not.
That’s the right answer too,

as it was
back at the beginning
of the beginning, as it likely
always shall be.

A failure picks up
a few scraps from his wreckage
and puts them into his bag.

When he gets home 
he tosses them onto
the kitchen table.

Tries to explain
where they once fit,
how they once

meant something, but 
“you had to be there.”
There was nobody there

then, of course. There’s
nobody there now either.
He’s talking to nobody

about a disaster nobody
cares about. He’s become
the mainstream media —

in the story, he bleeds
so he leads and no one
even notices because his blood’s

as thin as water. As thin
as excuses and histrionics,
as thin as the wind that’s

gone out of him. He stops talking.
Puts the pieces back in the bag.
Goes to bed. Doesn’t dream a thing.