Let’s all go back to bed
at once.  

Let’s not get up with an alarm
or with the sun.

Let’s stay in bed, alone or accompanied,
for a couple of days.

There will be time allotted for bathroom breaks
and trips to the fridge
but the only people allowed to be up and about
are the fomerly comatose
or otherwise ill.

Sex is not the point, but will no doubt
happen anyway
as it always does when forbidden
or when circumstances are
especially awkward.

Let’s make bed the new revolution
and protest against 
the status quo.
It’s been done before — witness John and Yoko —
can we get an amen?

Let’s prepare for a long time at rest
before we rise again.

Let’s put a bed under every roof
and a roof over every head.

Let’s put clean sheets on every bed,
just in case.

Let’s not argue over who is in which bed
and with whom.

Let’s go back to bed and not think too much
about not being in bed.

Let’s enjoy horizontal peace.

Overheard
early on 
a Saturday:
slow
breathing 
underground.

Animal stirring,
or a human, or

something older
than either of those.

The sages will want to call
what’s happening here
Spring, 
but it’s much larger
than that:

it wants
to be out and away
from explanations
and plantings and 
plowings and such
trivial scrabblings
as we provide.  

It wants
to breathe easy
and here we are,
stuck to its hide.

It’s ready
to scratch.

Traditions say
the use of fire
was given to us by
a coyote,
a wolf, 
a seabird, 
a mantis; they say 
that water fell for us
thanks to the word of
a butterfly,
a worm, 
a snake,
a maple tree; they say
we exist
because of
the will of mud,
stone shards,
spittle,
milkweed feathers.

I don’t know
if any of that is true.
I just know 
it’s what I’ve been told.

I know
for you
the answer is always
science
and maybe science is
more solid, maybe 
it’s truer
than what I know,

but 
don’t pretend
you know anything
about it all,
really;

you take it
all on faith
just as I do.

Inspired by this story:

http://abcnews.go.com/Health/wireStory/pope-reveals-late-confessors-cross-22796088

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The Pope speaks
of how once he lifted a cross
from a corpse’s fingers,

left roses
in its place, and now
carries that theft

with him always
under his clothes.
Those innocent

severed roses
still rot in the dark of the tomb.
Mercy in any amount is nowhere to be found,

and there’s no redemption
or resurrection
to be had

when the crime is revealed.
No one is shocked.
Everything stays the same.

The only thing to do 
in certain situations
is to ask yourself:

“how
is it possible
for us to be
this stupid?”

Suggested uses:

upon seeing
a pipeline burst

when you find
a murdered eagle

after
a war

upon seeing evidence
of a bias based
in vaporware or
with God as an excuse

“how is it possible
for us to be
this stupid?”

say it
upon hearing the news
any news

yell it
when you feel it
itching at your lungs and tongue
in the presence of 
prime examples and

whisper it
loudly enough for the dead to hear
when wiping their blood
from your hands

This God 
the atheists
do not believe in
is nothing like
the Ones I know
who have always been
as numerous as leaves,
slippery
as free mercury,
devoid of faces,
disinclined
to interfere
even when implored
as they are yoked
to larger purposes
than we can know —
purposes
they serve as surely
as we do.  
Omnipotence,
they laugh,
is a child’s dream — 
what God
of Sound Mind
would desire it,
considering how much
needs doing in the 
universe? Having said that
they turn
back to their
appointed tasks,
not caring 
if we follow.

He says it,
she says it:
“if I die…”

As if 
it might not happen.
As if
an individual
could change
the definition
of a life:

that it inevitably
begins, 
progresses,
and ends.  That

it is not 
static.  That
we can see
a closure,
that no matter how blind
we can see

a closure.

“If I die…” There’s
failed magic
in those words.
Fingers crossed,
then broken.
A rabbit foot
that dances away.
A hope that something

blasphemous
will happen.
 

Stop calling it therapy.
I’ve written thousands of lines
and I’m as broken now
as when I started,
maybe more so.

Stop calling therapy
what exists
to spite disorder,
what persists after
breakdowns and
attempts.

Stop calling therapy
what I would do more of
if I were less a mess.
Stop calling therapy
what I call
breathing.
Stop calling therapy
what I call
myself spread out.

Stop calling
triggers on guns
material.  Stop calling
triggers on others’ lips
material. Stop calling
too-blunt knives and weak pills
and slender ropes
and bed restraints
and hours
of paying to talk
around agony

the dark timber of my art.

Stop calling.  Stop
insisting, stop speaking
of therapy.  Stop in fact
your fantasy of why
and what and how
and spout as pressure valve
and verse as surgery.

If it worked,
if it was as you say,
I’d be perfect.

On the day
after my birthday
we slept late
and it was fine
for once
for me
not to jump up
at the trill
of the alarm

as if the next year of my life
was meant to begin
with a symbolic nod
to keeping time safe
from others’ demands

and just
letting happen
what happens
in its own
time and at
its own pace

It is nothing to the radio
that you have wept upon it
whenever it played
a certain song,
that this went on for weeks
and the only reason you stopped
is that you were caught weeping
and then sent away to be healed.

It is nothing to the radio
that when you returned
you did not turn it on
for a long time.

The radio is neither
friend nor foe; 
it simply has
no feelings for you.
In this way it resembles
the One who you see
as the cause
of your weeping

and so one night
not long after
your return, 
you reach out and slay your radio
by hurling it against
the impassive wall;
you are then enveloped
in silence and 
while you want to weep
you hold back.  
You can hear a certain song
in the silence, and crying
would drown it.

we all agree
to say
la di da
we all agree
to party and bullshit

then we no longer say
la di da
we choose to
no longer
party and bullshit

swinging that weight
one side to the other
over and over while
the world stays the same
that’s how we roll

the first time it’s spoken
later on it gets sung
nothing changes
nowadays that’s just
how we roll

while agents of change
find it hard to say
la di da
agents of yelling ’bout change
dig the party and bullshit

throw up your hands
when you dance and shout
la di da
throw up in the alley and mourn
the party and bullshit

swinging that weight
one side to the other
over and over while
the world stays the same
that’s how we roll

the first time it’s spoken
later on it gets sung
the world stays the same
either way and that’s
how we roll

Let us speak briefly
of those moments
when a body known to us
vacates
its physicality.

(Forgive me.  I must speak
clinically of this
to shield my own fear
for I find myself 
susceptible to greater pain

when we grieve in numbers;
although it is scarcely less
a concern when I am alone,
it is enough diminished
to be preferable.)

So let us speak
briefly and clinically of this
even as I am retching 
within, even as I attempt
to master myself.

It’s known that more
than one memory of the missing body 
remains with us and will likely  
haunt us whenever we are
where it once was.

We must endeavor
not to be fooled by this —
not to imagine we see the body
on those stairs, for example,
tucking back a lock of hair.

We must acknowledge 
that gone is gone, that 
what we hold of a gone body
is not the body itself
but our own fright at its departure.

(Forgive me, again, for speaking
so coldly of all of this. I am
not in full control of how 
my body longs to wail
right now, how my body

is absenting itself
from my measured speech and thought,
how it begins to sag
with grief and fear, how my body
admits that it longs also to be gone.)

There will be times
when we are fooled into believing
the hole in space where the body was
is filled with something 
beyond the body…

forgive me for saying
I believe this as well.
Forgive me for believing
I can speak of any of this
and hold my body together

while inside
I quake at the idea
of never seeing someone again
in any way,
shape or form.  Forgive me

for understanding such departure
so well, for still now and then
longing for such departure as well.
Forgive me, I think
I hear her whispering.

Brothers in white
on the sidewalk,
arms linked, deep
eyed, silent.

Sisters in white
behind, before, surrounding,
singing minor, singing anger,
singing rejection hymns.

Children sink to the lawn,
draw in their heads, 
huddle like rocks.
Hiding is the new playtime.

Sky, once shelter,
once cathedral ceiling,
cracks all across, one 
horizon to the next.

We are either ahead of 
the War
by mere 
seconds now 

or we are in it
and still
can’t understand
that it is here.