did you, walls and all,
grow up here on your own?
none of you castles look built.
you seem more carved, or 
cultivated. natural part of the world.

maybe that’s a tell that we,
also, were grown to be 
the colonizers of war homes,
the warriors who make fortifications
live, symbiotes within the halls.

maybe this species is made,
irresistibly, to kill. 

I am not old
but I am older
It counts a bit 
(or it should)

I have been and done a thing
or two
you have either never been
done wrong or
have not yet been or done

I have some answers and
have decided to live within
some unanswered questions

I have some regrets and some success
(and some success I regret)

I am sometimes not at my best anymore
but in some things I am still
a good goddamn sight better
than other people are

all this to say
your ignoring me
and patronizing me
and laughing at me
and being cavalier with me

leads me to decide that your professed respect
for me
is of no value

Your application of
the elder statesman label to me
is your idea of a second childhood’s pacifier

I can tell you see a cartoon
and not a person
when you look at me

Please therefore remember this
for a time coming soon
You’ll need it
but then again
you will probably write it again yourself
and call it an original

Some people are changing
the world,
dropping their pens
to make a fist.

Some people are
writing poems to change the world,
poems
built around a fist.

Uncontained
in this fat block of words
is anything as wholesome
as a soul-solid righteous
punch in the jaw:

oh, I was clenching my fist
as I wrote it,
I could see that target jaw,
just one of so many…
but then I saw

that while I too have a fist and a pen
it’s an aimless fist
and an empty pen.

I wanted to punch this poem
for being
unconvicted!
For draining my pen
and opening my hand.  I told myself
coward,
has been…

but you know, it’s morning
and the warriors will be home soon.
Maybe this is exactly
what they will want
when they get here.

There are facts which are not known to be facts
except by some deep apprehension of their truth
long before they become true —

as in, for instance, there’s no evidence yet
for the truth of my conviction that I shall never
return to Venice, or that how it vanished, slowly,

as I stared back at it from the stern of the motoscafi 
that took me to the airport for the trip home
will be my permanent last memory of the city.

It’s not a fact yet that I will never see Venice again.
But I know it to be true as solidly as I know anything.
It’s as true as the scar in my foot from the time I stepped

on broken Murano glass.  As true as
the smell of the crematorium on San Michele.  As true
as the Albanian refugees begging wordlessly on bridges. 

Someday you will be able to say that I visited Venice just once in my life,
that it left a scar upon me I can feel whenever I walk.  Every step
I’ve taken since I left has carried me further away from Venice. 

This won’t be a fact for years yet, only blooming fully as such
on the day I die. But I know a fact when I conceal one,
and daily I do my best to conceal this,

a thing I know to be unalterably true. 

A mirror for a battle map.
A diary page for orders.

WAR upon
WAR among
the gang of love
the gang of snoot
the gang of overburden
the gang of falling. 

All in all a free for all,
all in all hands on hilts and handles.  
All inside within
and contained.

How much
expected blood is lacking —
nowhere to run,
no gutter showing
but a gutter is there
and it is full,
making 
drowning
equivalent to
draining.

What harm would there be 
in my falling face down
into a plate of cocaine

if I create just one thing
something sublime, something
world-grabbing, something God-gilded?

If I do end up face down in a plate of blow,
ask why before you shake
your fandom-crippled head.

Maybe the Work took everything
out of me and I was just trying
to blow a hole into the chamber

to make refilling myself easier, 
or doing the last horrible thing  
relieved the pressure of knowing

I would never do a thing again
as wonderful
as the wonderful thing.  Imagine 

that Art stopped working,
and I hurt.  (Truth is, the art 
never really works; it just makes the cocaine

possible.)  Maybe the last high
was the best joy I ever had
and I can finally kiss

the obsessions of Work goodbye knowing
you have the Work.  Enough. I’m content.  
To me it looks like no harm, no foul,

so stop waiting to see what my face looks like
when they gently lift my head.
You’ll not learn anything more from that frozen smile.

In the repeated notes
of a droning folk tune
there is clarity.  

In the
blocked harmony of doo-wop
there is a settlement of old arguments
through nostalgia and a striving
for harmony.  

In the rising tsunami
of a metal song 
there is jubilation.  

Hard as a blues can come, there is often
in the bent frame of it
a reassurance that becomes
a giving up
that leads to a getting up
and a moving along.

I have been repaired by music so often
I cannot breathe for long in its absence,
until I remind myself of the drumming
that is always within and the songs
I can create at any moment I choose.
“Every vessel holds healing.”  That’s
what and why I am always humming.  

We seek to embrace the scientists,
embrace the clean stainfighting sweep of the science itself. 
We long for a theory that can become a law
and crush the last theory, the one that has brought us to the Brink.
We want to be in the presence of the Breakthrough Guild.

We want to embrace the quirk-haunted musicians
of the desert ghost towns
who moved out there to keep their ears pure.
We seek to embrace the death-sipping musicians,
the slim-clothed bands of small eyed boys and large eyed girls,
the men and the women of the worn stages.

We need from these professions three things:
technologies strong enough to mystify us as we use them;
a sound track for that using;
answers to all our problems pouring out of their machines and amplifiers.

So arms open, all, as we pry the lab and studio doors open.
Arms up and open as we pour through the doors
to see the shining magicians and wizards,
the hard physicians
and chemists,
whose formulas and songs
will absolve us from how the world is
while we stand by. 

I have become everything I am
as a reaction to a memory of a missing girl
I only ever knew through her picture 
blistering on a milk carton I saw roasting
in Dad’s trash barrel back when they used to let us
burn our trash in backyard barrels,
back when I used to love to stare
into the chemical hues of the flames.

She sputtered in green and sick-blue
as the fire kissed and ate her from outside;
then, a feather of flame tore out from within.
I lost her full face to the heat and learned so much:

the missing become famous, the missing
are multicolored, even the blisters of the missing
are beautiful, and if you can’t go missing for real
then just be silent. Just keep your mouth shut,
smile permanently, wait your turn.

Escape notice long enough,
and you can let yourself burn from inside
and that will be memorable for all.
That, after all, is where all the toxins collect.
That is what becomes a painter’s fuel.

I took the sacred quartz crystals you left behind.
I took them to the basement.

I broke them many times with a hammer.  
I put the shards in a flower pot 
for holy drainage of my philodendron.  

I put the powder
in my salt shaker and had my eggs with quartz this AM.
My teeth hurt a little but I am, I think, fine.  
Fine as the power that leached out upon my delivering the first blow.  

I put the power into the words I used to describe
this little vandalism.  

I put the power into
this broken angel of a poem.  

It still
isn’t getting up from where it lies.  It still wishes
for its former belly,
full of refracted light.

Memory says

once upon a time
I was rocking out on the Cape
and saw Carly Simon hitchhiking

Picked her up of course
She and James Taylor
had just had a brutal fight
She walked away and stuck out a thumb
and now here she was in my Porsche…so I

will be polite and non-descriptive
except to say she paid for bed and breakfast

If memory serves I wrecked that Porsche
trying for one last kiss or feel

I remember it all perfectly —
it was a silver 911S
She was wearing the floppy hat
from the No Secrets album cover
and that slip dress thing from Playing Possum

But for the fact that I have never owned a Porsche
and have never slept with Carly Simon
it was the greatest night of my life

See
I heard this story a long time ago
from a woman who claimed
that it happened to her
except
it was James Taylor
who picked HER up
in HIS silver Porsche

and I said
if only that were me
so memory said
we can fix that
and now
I think the song is about me

Accusatory glance.
Something I said.
I do not know her.  Does she know me?
Maybe I’m just another man who appears
dismissive.  Maybe I am,
and don’t realize it.  Don’t believe
it’s so — right now she
has all my complete and fearful attention
but listening is hard
when the language between us is this
fractured.  One word, two words, three and then
there are fifteen different meanings for each
and we are not communicating,
it’s a jaw clap fest at best. So,
I shut up and down.  Crawl into
the snail house inside, as far up
as I can go head-first.  Run away,
away, stay alive, alive-oh, alive, alive-oh;
crying cockles and mussels…maybe I am
being dismissive.  What is common ground anyway —
apparently not a song, not a folk song, not a good old
classic folk song, maybe there’s nothing at all —
when every bit of the culture has long smelled this bad to one
and has started to smell this bad to the other
maybe it is fine that we don’t speak.  I’d like
to think it is curable but I might be too dismissive.
Maybe it is fine if I crawl up in there and die.

Early fall window open 
means 
a fly gets in.

It may be the last big bluebottle
of the season with a droning voice like 
a Dangerbee.  Should look
twice to be sure it’s not
but no time —

kll it with one smack
of a carefully selected
heavy, already read, soon to be recycled
magazine.  Done.  And lo —

learn it was
Honeybee.  How did it seem
so huge?  Tiny, golden thing.  

Quick: brush it into the gutter of the window
and then lift the screen to push it out

onto the ground
with some small regret.

Lie to us, saying
this would have been done
differently
had you recognized
what this was.

My endless boyhood game: try to say something
around Dad without him coming back
with a homespun cliche.  

I’d say, “Well…”
and he’d say, “Deep subject for
such a shallow mind.”  

I’d say “I wish…”and he’d say,
“Wish in one hand, spit in the other,
see which one fills up first.”

“If only…” always led to
“If only a frog had wings, he wouldn’t
bump his ass when he jumped.”

Or my favorite, the all-purpose
“Shut up and give me
that Philips-head.”  In other words:

“Son, you’re better seen than heard,
keep that imagination on simmer,
hand me the damn screwdriver.

There’s real work to be done
for a real man who is busier
than a one-armed paperhanger

with an itch and madder than a sore tailed tomcat
in a room full of rocking chairs.
Real men live in a real world

where we don’t waste time
wishing or dreaming or coming up with weird ways 
of saying the obvious.  That’s

not work.  That’s not real.
Quit thinking of poetry, son.
I don’t know where you get that from.”