Originally posted 5/30/2013.

Ask me once
what I want from life,
and I usually say
that what I want from life
is to be alive
until it’s more right
that I be dead,
at which point
I will be dead.  

But if you ask the question again
and ask it often enough, 
the answering of it
transforms me
through an obvious,
delighted hysteria
that anyone
would even care to ask,
and I fall into the consideration
of a delicious engagement
with the world — 
how the taste of it
may not at all be that
of ashes on my lips;

how like a first
post-virginal ecstatic sleep
each night could feel;
how like a morning
when a death sentence has been stayed
each awakening might feel.

Ask me, ask me, ask me what
I want from life — ask yourself,
I will ask you the same,
in fact let’s run through
our town asking everyone
what they want from life so many times
that there will be no choice for any of us 
but to laugh and love
and turn the streets into a banquet hall
and our stoops and yards into tables
where we can feast on the question,
reveling in the last meal we’ll ever have
before we take our last, gentle leave
of each other.

Originally posted 6/16/2013.

Upon waking I am an engine
for cobbling together random things
and hoping they are true.

My first thought is of
a landscape
with a football stadium.

My second is of
a scrap of paper bearing these words:
“your prime is seven.”
 
There may be,
suddenly somewhere,
an esoteric cabal

of crushingly huge men
chanting prime numbers.  
I hope so. 

So much depends
on it being true
after I write it.

My next thought
is that I ought
to sit up in bed and see how I feel.

My first action
is to sit up in bed 
and see how I feel.  

I’m still afraid of social media,
angry without cause,
desperately in love.  

It is morning,
I am the new carrier
of the disjointed day, and

my first action upon others
will be to write something.  
It will be angry or loving or based in fear — correction: 

it will be angry 
and loving 
and based in fear,

but it won’t be large. It will not assume
the form of a linebacker.
I’ll be gentle.

Count to seven,
push aside the covers.
The world needs me

and people like me
who are the sand grains
outside the oyster.

We are many, we have
pearl potential.
Some become random irritants

but most likely
we’ll become the bed upon which
beauty happens, mostly in spite of us,

even as the offense
thunders forward, bearing
the irreducible math of living.

Originally posted 6/29/2013.

On more than one occasion
I’ve nearly burst
from imagining that I
was self-sired
and never tired,
on an epic solo flight — 
a great aviator,
all alone.

Self-sired, never tired;
those are my best lies — 

as if I’ve ever been anything
but a lonely son, 
as if I’ve ever been
anything but exhausted. 

As if
the sleep I rise from
hasn’t always been robbed 
from the dark.

As if I
have ever been
formally cleared to land
on my own.

Originally posted 1/26/2011.

You claim
it’s a safe neighborhood.
a good one, trumpet 
that there’s never been
a violent death nearby,
nothing at all in your safe space,
nothing at all seeping from
this ground

that is only yours because
at some point
it was taken by force
and force is what keeps it
yours, even if the blood
was and is spilled
by your proxies,
even if you didn’t know 
it was being spilled.

No matter —
you are you, 
you have no need to pay
any mind to that
so you can pretend to ignore
the black feathers
that have just now appeared
in your hair,
that everyone but you
can see.

When you are home alone,
please —
look in the mirror.

When you finally see them,
pick them out
and place them in a box.

Pull that box out, open it
and stare at those feathers
whenever you feel
a little too divine,
whenever you 
want to remember
how human you are,

then
go lock your doors
and feel a little threat
and a little guilt —

not too much,
no,
but enough.  

Originally posted 8/19/2008.

The natural order: first
we breathe,
then we cry.

Nursing, sleeping,
dreaming, eating,
drinking, elimination — 

the breath is the one constant, 
alternating
between sweet and foul — 

smiling, laughing,
writhing, crawling, walking,
reading, writing, eventually
sex and its attendant foibles;
working,  grieving,
losing, winning,
parenting, 
more of all the above — 

the breathing continues through all 
until it stops for good
when all else does — 

we were built to breathe,
to ride those rails of breath
on a lifelong recovery
from the first sharp cry
after drawing
the ripe tang of the world
into our lungs.

The rest of it, all the rest 
of what we call a life,
is merely a consequence
of breathing — 

we breathe, we cry,
we act, we cry again,
and in the end
when the breathing stops
we fade 
like the whistle of a train
going home.

Originally posted 12/28/2004.   I used to write poems “ripped from the headlines” on occasion.  Most served their purpose — awareness, outrage, release of pressure, etc. — in their moment, while not having much staying power.  I thought this one deserved a second shot.

All day a stream of co-workers have come
to the world map on my cubicle wall,
coming to look for the place where it all happened.

Should I be surprised that on at least five occasions
I’ve had to point at the Indian Ocean
and then do a quick finger tour around the rim?

Or should I be heartened that at least
they came by to look? Or that they even knew
the map was here? It’s evidence, after all, that

the wave in fact reached beyond Aceh, that the wave
hit everything,  though not everything
got wet enough for everyone to feel it.

Here, we use money like paper towels
to keep the damp out, and already we’re bundling up
wads of it to ship overseas and make it all go away.

It’s possible that some come by
because they at least want to see
where their money is going.

“How about that tsunami?” “That one in Indonesia?” 
“Yeah, that one.” “I know!  That sucks.”
“Hey, can we look at your map? I wanna see where it happened.”

I wish I knew if I should cry
or just keep going back to the wall
to point it out again:

here is Phuket, here Aceh,
here Sri Lanka, here Tamil Nadu,
here Pondicherry, here Chennai.

Here is Myanmar, which so far
has been silent. Here we are
in the United States,

and here is everyone else.

Originally posted 9/30/2011.

“they have the father wound”
says the handsome minister
speaking of gangbanging boys
not yet out of their teens

“they have the father wound”
he says again to the interviewer
“fathers take off
or are in prison”

“the father wound”
he says it so gently
candles appear in soft focus 
behind his graying voice

“the father wound”
sounds so deep yet
the minister speaks of how
he thinks he can suture it

as if the killers
off-camera were infants
waiting to be picked up
in their fathers’ hands

and cuddled into health
as if assisting them
into the American dream
would be enough

as if that dream itself
would be enough
to keep them from harm
in this country nestled

at the bottom of a father wound which is
at the bottom of a mother wound which is
awash in the blood of other wounds
named Sand Creek, the Middle Passage, My Lai

Originally posted 10/29/2008, titled “Wet Market.”

A woman stops
at one of the stalls
that offers words for sale
and wonders
what nourishment she can take from 
there is a flower
that grows in plastique
and blooms in blood.

Someone else weighs the possibilities
of 
Valkyrie 
against those of 
Knight Rider Barbie,
tries to choose, fails,
buys both and moves on.

A third rejects all the proffered produce of love,
the red breath, 
the silk finger,
the charred emerald eyes. 
The seller
throws his hands out in disgust.

Modern diamond or heirloom adamantine? 
Is the dusk blue or azure?
Is this a stream or a creek
running under 
sky or heaven or firmament?
People head for home
after hours of haggling,
passing
a small table
outside the bounds of the market
that holds bowls of fresh water,
herbs, fresh spiced fish
soaked in lime juice.  

A sign on the table reads:

Whoever tastes the fresh water
will want to taste the herbs.
Whoever tastes the herbs
will want to taste the fish.
Whoever tastes the fish
will turn from the market
and go home simple and satisfied.

If the sign had advertised
ceviche, or if the sign had advertised
magic for the belly,
this might have been
a different story.
But after too many stands serving 
quick meals, too many ways to overfill
basic needs and answer want with gluttony,
there’s no need to ask
Who will stop there?  
because it’s already clear:

no one.