Surge and shake,
vein in my belly.
I watch you shiver
under skin.

Nothing feels right,
comfort is nothing,
my peace is nothing to me.
If the world works, that’s enough.

I think, often, that I am dying
of any of the diseases
I know I have, or one of the ones
I suspect I have.  Who cares if I do?

Some will be sad, more or less.
I won’t be, though.  I’ll be gone
and maybe the world will be better,
maybe it won’t.  

What one does or does not do
might make up for nothing or everything
that has happened.  But death, now or
tomorrow — what’s to fear

from one event? Big deal, says the mind.
Big deal indeed, says the heart.  And the vein
in my belly says:  coming, dear.  We’re
coming soon, neutral on arrival.  What is, just is. 

In some anger
there is cleansing.  In some rage
there is fire that removes
the ragged, leaves behind the
minimal, leaves behind a site
ready to grow scars and new flesh.

Some of us are born angry
because we’re needed; narrow-boned,
slinky as assassins, assigned
to the fire priests:  the
clean up squad, and while we burn
with the job, scream a little with it,
we mostly don’t complain. 

It would have been nice
to be cool 
and happy,
to learn, for instance, why everyone
likes swimming so much.  But
not all of us were born
to be happy. Some of us 
were born
to live an entire life
ablaze;

you can thank us whenever
you’ve stopped shouting at us.

Test poet, test poem,
test post —

is this thing visible,
audible, there for you?

Am I showing up?
Is there something present?

A small number of words
being sent into the air.  A small man

frantic for impact.  A small poem
typed into a white field on a small screen —

testing this as a connection,
failing in confidence, failing as art

when it’s this desperate, when it matters
too much to me. 

Oh, say I have not
completely forgotten
the lion?  For
there was a lion once,
seated in the supermarket
near the cereal.

I had been shopping
and turned the corner
to find it — yes, this is coming back
to me now —
there was a lion, not raging,
not sleeping, just sitting.
I thought at first
it was some promotion, then realized
only I could see it.   

I looked at the lion a long time 

without being able
to see it completely.
It seemed mostly eyes
and of course teeth.
But color of mane, of fur, of claws —
I could see none of these, or can remember
nothing.  

What is this lion to me 
now?  Reminder
of how we all hunted once
or perhaps of how we were hunted.
Speaker for the wild not found
in the supermarket. Disturbance
in the daily, torn fabric in the mask.

Memory of eyes, mostly.
Of teeth.  And present emotion?
Mostly still fear, but now less of the lion
than of forgetting the lion.

Messy room with too many things?
Don’t panic –all the better to hide yourself.

An ascended master would tell you
to simplify and get rid of all that stuff.

I say, load up, get busy
making and buying toys.

You ain’t no saint and no one
wants to look at you,

so disappear as deep
as you want to in there.

The gurus who tell you to take it easy on
the salt, fat, and inorganic chemistry

you put in your mouth?  How stretched
and unhappy they appear.  Get fat on burgers

and fries if you so desire;
screw the lectures

from the newly Ayurvedic
and embrace what we’ve got here —

a culture staggering toward a new world devoid
of all we’ve grown to assume will last forever.

The righteous scream at you for species die-offs
and cracking glaciers.  They’re right

but they’re mostly upset for themselves.
The planet will die, they holler and shout.

Liars, deceivers, bullshit sellers.
This planet will not die, regardless of what we do.

Species will die, we will die —
but the planet, the great Connector Of All?

The planet won’t die.  It’s getting ready to twitch us off
like a particularly persistent mite.

One flick and — WHOOP —
we’re gone like dodos and moderates.

In five hundred years
it won’t even matter what we polluted or slew.

We’ll be as embarrassing as an old tattoo
to the planet, and just as easy to cover up.

So consume and collect and gorge and retch in the meantime.
You and the gurus are about to get cozy in the grave.

You and your stuff are about to get equally inanimate
and equally forgotten.  Polar bears, honeybees,

the Dalai Lama, and you together at last, finally
in agreement on one thing:  that it was too late

the minute the first of us stuck a head up
over the tall grass of Africa and thought:  mine.

Every day,
I am counted on
to wake up
when every day
what I most want
is for a night’s sleep to become
the Great Sleep,
to move
without knowing I’ve moved
while leaving
the baggage behind.

Those who expect me to rise
must want that more than I want
never to rise again,
and how unfair is that
that I am overruled in that necessity
by others?  

Some say
I speak of this, of my own death and 
departure, too often.
Thye must be some of the ones 
ignorantly blocking my exit,
for if they truly knew me and how I felt
they would know
I speak of it far less often
than I think of it, and think of it 
far less often than the longing for it
courses through me whether I am
awake
or in dreams.

There can be no deviation
where there is no longer
any norm

You are no freak
with your knowledge of special
knots for the neck 

the bowtie, the windsor
the four in hand
the hangman

You belong right here
beside us and we
will shrug off your little murders

because of your sense
of style
and those lovely eyes

This is what we’ve come to
A place of such longing
all contact is welcome and honored

even if we are choking on it

Ah let’s just 
pop and go —
let’s teach the bad guys
a lesson
Let’s go berserker
on them and
watch them curl away from us
as they cower —
Let’s designate some bad guys to damage
Let’s make them close by bad guys
Le’ts find them in our midst
Then — Ah
a warrior time to sing the blood clean
Clean this house of all of them
They won’t see it coming
We will quote Jefferson as to power
deriving from the people and quote
his view of the need for revolution
more than just occasionally and then
we’ll GO — just POP —
secure in the knowledge
that a white gentleman slaveraping forefather
would have our righteous backs
Ah let me tell you the good havoc we could cause
if we just would pop and go
with Jefferson and other smug characters at our backs
Watch the bad guys run so fast 
to an outsider they wouldn’t know
who was running
who was chasing
who was bleeding and dying
who was winning
the right or the left 

too much talk of movement and waking
and sleeping and that other thing,
the surge toward death.  enough of that:

talk instead of standing still
and not doing anything at all.
find some dialect used by stones.

it will likely have lots of words
that mean “there’s nothing happening.”
right now the kids are gone

and summer isn’t.  right now
the living is easy
and the breathing isn’t.  staying still

feels like it’s
the honorable thing to do,
really the only thing to do.

somebody go tell the young ones
that these moments with no action
are worthy of poems too,

that the fat body by the pool
isn’t motionless because it has passed
but because it knows how valuable

a moment without need for action is.
some of us got over dramas
and the frantic dances of connection

long ago.  we’re in a slowing now,
a slow, slower, slowest.  it’s fine —
it’s not death but a settling

into the purity between breaths.
it’s ok to write a poem for that.
it’s ok for a poem not to change a thing.

I must step away from you,
collapsed star,
my red small sun.
I must make enough distance
to reckon from afar.
What now, center?  What now,
former storm? How shall we
orbit?  What rip or slit-scar
shall we choose for our new path —
or is this at last close and depart,  
burn and char?  
I cannot say.  I only know
how far it seems from yesterday to today —
and what brilliant comet once passed this way.

Facing the Fibonacci spiral
in the heart of the sunflower,
in the armor of the nautilus:

call it what you will,
accident or design, something
stirs when we see it.
It’s a sensible pattern, sure,

as are the hexagon
in the honeycomb
and the concentric circles
in the rain-pocked pond.
It’s a beautiful pattern, sure,

and when we have to say “beautiful”
or “inspirational” in the face of something,
when we have no choice,

(except of course as poets
we have to choose and change those words
but that’s
a different theology for another day)

when we have no choice but to gasp
and there’s nothing adaptive indicated
for gasping like this —

it’s a difficult thing, sure,
but what does it matter
what we call it?  It’s math
made flesh, an accounting
under our skin.