Originally posted 4/1/2011.

A single bird over the church
at the top of our hill.
His fingered wings
say he’s a buzzard, he of the tribe
of naked head and a taste for death.

Seen from here,
he soars.

I have an urge
to cover the daffodils
that are just emerging
from the snow-compacted mulch
beside my front walk.

It passes.
They’ll be fine.

Later, in the dark apartment,
the fears and concerns of the day
slide around me in bed
like eels — they come close,
my skin pulls back.

I sleep,
and they move away.

In waves upon waves
the disguised and dissembling
cover the earth.  From where I stand
there’s nothing out there but
a danger of drowning.

I bob to the surface
and see the sky every time.

Originally posted 12/10/2012.

I hold great love
for stones:
the ones I climb,
the ones I throw. I try to listen 
to their gray whispers, I try 
to follow their directions.  

Maybe you feel that too.  
Maybe you are meant
to climb the largest ones,
freestyling up
past ever-present death
without making
a mark upon them;

maybe you’re destined to build
garden walls, fortress walls, paved roads;
prisons, temples, or something
that serves as both;

maybe you are supposed to cut them
until they represent another thing
in its heaviest incarnation.  Maybe
you are fated to release
the deities inside them, or maybe 
you were built to hurl them.

Will you recreate 
in your brief life 
all the millions of years
we’ve already spent 
learning to do these things?  
It’s hard to avoid when the big love
we have for stone carries us there.  

For now put your face on the boulder in the path, 
cheek to its cool black nubble.  Pick up
a piece from the ground and slip it 
into your pocket.  

Carry it around with you,
worry it with your thumb and maybe
after a long time it’ll be a touch smoother 
than when you started — and still 
it will look not much different
than when you started.

If you lose it or toss it
it will wait patiently
wherever it lands
for the next pocket,
the next slingshot,
the next place it is needed.

Or it will not. It may disdain us
or ignore us.
It may not have registered much, 
if anything, 
of you or of any of us
who have ever touched it.

It may tell anyone who finds it
nothing about you
that you would recognize
as being your story.

Your story isn’t singular.
Neither is mine.
There’s no grand need
to recall them or us.
We are just part of the story
of Stone, part

of the Record Of Time
that began long before we did
and which will only end long after 
we do 
and are forever forgotten.

Originally posted 12/29/2012.

From the place I buried it all — a deep hole
I never completely filled in — 
I shall pull up the eight balls of blow and the late night breakfasts
that never stayed with me for longer than it took
to get in the car and get moving, drunk and wired,
toward whatever couch was that morning’s home.

I shall pull up the empty little gun I got in trade
for a bag of acid, pull up the skinny tie
and the hospital scrubs, the songs I wrote
when bored, the awful poetry I believed in
so hard I sprained my ego on it, even when there was
no evidence for its quality, no reason for it to exist at all.

Pull up the arrogant fool, the know it all,
the callous junior playboy
up to screw whoever was up for it; 
pull up as well any scrap of memory
any of those partners left behind, that I might
recall a time when I was superficially lovable.

What’s left in there when all that’s come up to the light?

A boy, still a skinny boy then,
though tending toward my later heft.  
A stupid young man
with a bad car
and a jammed tapedeck
and damaged visions of a swift escape from this earth.  

I pull them up, pull it all up,
the way you’d yank a weed that won’t die,
frantically hoping I’ve got it all this time:
every bit of what keeps sprouting in my life
when I least desire it, 
now that it’s inconvenient

and no one thinks
it’s cute
or charming
or melancholy-artist-appropriate anymore. 
I want it poisoned.
I want it gone.  I want to

pull it all up and burn it all down
from the memories of how it began
to the new shoots that expose me,
that nag me, that shout to the world that what I was
is what I am; that no matter how hard I pull,
I am rooted in failure and will always fail.

Originally posted 12/12/2011.

War
can make my blood
sing a little.

I know myself
and the animal somewhere
within.

If I pet it the right rough way
now and then,
it stays quiet  — mostly.

I’m at peace with my bloodsong.
I do not deem it necessary
to pretend I cannot hear it,

and I do not deny
that war is a part of me.
It has settled on my hands

as tightly as skin,
snuggled cozily
in my mouth,

and my blood
bursts scarlet from my wounds
as if it were the chorus of a grand opera,

glorying as much 
in being shed as I do
in my potential to shed it.

Revile me for that
as you will — I will be 
your paradox: at peace

with not becoming
the hypocrite who turns away
from the sludge he carries inside.

Originally posted 4/25/2010.

According to my doctor
I’ve become
a limousine — 

I carry passengers,
and not necessarily
ones I’d choose on my own.

When first I heard I begged the doctor
for a uniform
or a very special hat.

“I’m afraid not,” he said.
“You aren’t the limousine driver,
you are the limousine.”

It was hard to accept at first
that I was no longer a vehicle
for my own journey

but I’ve gotten used to it.
It’s still a life
most of the time.

When the noise in the back
gets to be too much,
I raise the glass and forget it.

Once in a while
a voice will catch me right
and I’ll listen longer than usual,

maybe repeat
what it says
to myself when I’m alone.

These riders don’t care about me
as long as they get where they’re going
and the ride has some style all the way to the end.

I’m a limousine today but I don’t know 
what I’ll call myself
after I’ve worn out at last — 

a box, a rustbucket,
a shadow parked for good
in an unlit space.

Originally posted 6/20/2009.

From the street,
the dense chunk 
of a slammed car door.

A hard, confident summons:

“Hey pendejo –“

Two men speaking.
I can’t hear the words.

Then,
the first big voice again —

“You never know.
When it comes,
it comes.”

After that,
nothing more —

no car door,
no house door,
no words.

I turn off my lights, 
climb into bed,
waiting for something
that never happens.

Whenever it comes,
it seems
it won’t be
tonight.

Originally posted 10/18/2011.

You! You
tower of smart dirt, 
intelligent water,
column of excited minerals, whirling
storm of atoms, chattering prophecy
of the pure light
hidden in the darkest crevices — 
how is it possible
that all you want to talk about
is stopping the end of the world?

Get serious, you.
This world is not going to end.
Our species may shuffle off at some point,
other species will fall with us,
there will be suffering, it’s all a big mess — 
all true, all of
no consequence.

Your atoms are going to keep talking.
In a thousand years
they will come upon better truth
than you ever conceived,
or on to the same truth
you won’t acknowledge now:
we’re an extension of
the pure thoughts of stones.
Nothing’s ever going to stop them
from thinking, no matter how hard
we try to deny them the pleasure.

You! Get serious — 
yes, ease suffering,
redistribute wealth,
play fair,
establish guidelines, even
salvage as much of the planet
as there is in our remaining time
as you can
but do it because

it is in our shared calling
to do it
even though there is in fact
nothing ever lost
and therefore 
nothing to save.

Originally posted 5/31/2011.

Face up in bed,
wide awake,
waiting again to be impaled
like a bug on a pin
upon the memory
of the time I mercy-killed the squirrel
on the front lawn after its mauling
by the neighborhood stray
we all hated.

I pulled a strong knife
and slashed once, then twice,
over its tooth-mashed throat;
saw the spurt, saw it relax at once.
Then I reached for a stone
and nailed that dog in the ribs.

and it took off howling with me howling
after it, running it off, its shallow flanks
pumping ahead of me too fast
to catch.

I do not fear the memory for its horror,
but for its delights —

its promise of deus ex machina,
its flavor of massacres, camps,
and gallows blessed by others — 

its tang of permission.