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.”

Cat
struck hard and fast,
and that mouse was hers.

She did what a cat does
and then went and sat in the window,
purring easily.  

I did not scold her
for choosing a death-path,
or for manifesting a “negative energy.”

Called it what it was — a killing.
Did what was needed — discarded
the body, gave the cat a pat.

She is here in this house
to give and take delight, to love and be loved;
I also expect her to kill for me

as coldly and swiftly
as she possibly can — as only
she possibly can.  

Not every violent act
is taken out of anger.  Some
we even reward.

Thus, I do not pray
for her eternal soul — I provide 
tuna, warmth, an unalloyed

affection born from a kinship with her,
one reflected in my relative comfort
at seeing every torn, stiffening mouse-corpse

as an affirmation
of each of us doing
what comes
naturally.

A barrage called 
“Everything I’ve Ever Screwed Up”
enters the brain as a tickle
that only later starts exploding,
then never stops;

after
comes
the return fire called 
“Every Excuse.”

“Everything I Could Be” and “That Which I Love Most”
die in the crossfire.

When I am tired
of thinking of metaphors
for my struggle,
I drink.  When I drink,
I reload.  When I am reloaded

I sometimes wait
a whole minute
before ending
the truce.  I decide to call this

“Ending The Truce.”  I shall call this
“Being Myself.”  I call this
“Whatever, I’m Too Old To Change.”

Then,
here and everywhere, again comes
the burp
of cannons.

Just let the firetail go, 
said Papa.  But when I did
it singed me and Jalil
while charging toward freedom
and I screamed and Jalil screamed
and Papa aimed his long rifle
but was not able to strike,

and thus it escaped
never to be seen again
and our fear and pain became
a legend; to this day
people speak of the firetail
with awe, wondering how Jalil and I
caught it in the first place, how it came
to be where we were, how we were able
to approach it, what it looked like;

yes, with only this to go on
they wonder what a firetail was anyway,
is it still a threat or just something
long vanished to recall
and wonder at.