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.

Tall brick halls echo
every small sound, longing
for how loud it used to be.
Oily floors full of holes,
the spaces where bolts
that held looms
once fitted.
That’s all done now.
The mills are hollow;
some go condo, some
become business centers
full of small hopes, some 
crumble away or burn down.
I grew up in a town
full of these,
a New England town
haunted by ghosts
from its woolen mills.  

Remembering the scent
of the dirt and oil
and the rattlebang nature
of every shift; remembering
long wool-laden walks
pushing through the boiling air
in the card rooms
and dye rooms; the dark docks 
where the raw wool came in
and the blankets went out.
The sub-basements full of rats
and stink and stories of men
who went in as children and 
came out only rarely.  Upstairs
their wives and girlfriends, their daughters
and widows, spun the carded wool,
filled the bobbins, built the warps
the looms would then eat
and shit out as fabric.  

I was there for a while — 
a floor worker, a near-useless
utility boy,
getting through
by getting coked out
and smoked up 
and usually drunk enough

that no one should have trusted me
with knives to cut away scrap wool and cranes
to hoist huge spools wound with wool
to the racks to wait for the looms
to suck them in
and turn them all
to someone else’s profit,
but they did.  Who else
was there to do it
except drunks and kids
on their way to being drunks?

I was a drunk.
I joined the union, drunk.
Got blow jobs drunk
from other drunks
in the back of the shop
or in vans at bars
where I’d dance
to Southern rock drunk
because that is the only way
to dance to it;
I was drunk the first time
I took a line up my nose,
drunk every time
I took a fist to my nose,
and drunk the last time
they laid me off
along with all the other drunks
on a Friday night
not long after Christmas.
We took our penultimate paychecks
to the bars
where we always cashed them 

and laid into drunkenness
and bad sex
and a last eightball of blow
before we turned

to the business
of haunting this town, stepping 
outside for a cigarette,
making drunk money where we can,
catching the scent of ghost wool
on a dead February wind from 1981
that cuts deep
no matter the year or season 
where it finds us.

In my twelve year old hand is a length of pipe
that I took from a corner of my dank cellar
that I’m swinging like a sword in my backyard
that whistles as it flies

I wish it was connecting with someone’s head
I wish it was cracking someone’s skull
I wish it was making a sick impact
I wish it was hurting Him

who needs His head cracked
who needs pain returned to Him
who dealt me some pain
who passed on too much of His own

Be glad I am twelve in this vision
Be glad I never took that pipe to His head
Be glad I’m old and held that murder inside me
Be glad I kept the fractures to myself

as I am glad that I am the last broken one
as I am glad that I did not become a breaker
as I am glad that I am alone in these later years
as I am glad to be without an heir

Remember:

there’s no elevator
to success,
so you’ll have to
throw yourself 
down the stairs.

Lead, follow,
or get your ass 
out of the way 
is the motto here, 
not that you
have any choice:
remember,

success is 
10% inspiration and 
90% flop sweat 
while you’re waiting
to be revealed 
as a fraud
and you’re obviously
soaked through.
Remember

that there’s no “I” 
in “team” but
there is one 
at the beginning
of “isolation,” 
another one buried
in the heart of 
“exile,” one close
to the end of
“rejection.” Remember

that the longest
journey begins
with a single half-aware
solo stumble. Take it.  
Take that step
and only stop 
when you realize 

that you are suddenly
up to your ass in
alligators.  

Remember then that this
is success since
your objective
was to get so deep
in the swamp
that they would never
find your body.