I never said this out loud
but I have always called it
her lonely dress

because whenever she entered the bar with it on I knew
at some point in the evening
she’d be telling tell her beau of the moment
she was lonely,
so lonely,
with a slow wriggle
as she spoke.

You can guess how I knew this.

My friends called her
horsefaced,
crazy,
said she dipped into the pills
at her nursing job,
was wild, 
predatory, 
too much for me.

Yes.
And when she told me
she was only three years older
than me
and later related a passionate story
of seeing Janis Joplin
in concert, 
I did the math
and said to myself,

oh, she’s a liar too.

Let me tell you things, though:
I regret nothing,
and I still smile when I think of her
and

the pills.
All the drinks I bought her.
Piggybacking her out of the woods
because she couldn’t walk
after we’d stuck her battered Nova
deep in a bog at 4 AM.
Hearing her cry
the whole way out about her car.
Pills spilling from a pocket
and having to stop and gather them for her.
Driving her home at 7 AM
the unexpected fifty miles to her apartment.
Staying there with her,
holding her, not sleeping,
thrashing, blood on the sheets,
bites, welts, movement
I had never called out of myself,
tenderness, listening, barking insane
morning and afternoon
of something beyond lovemaking
for seven straight hours
before climbing out
to head home —

this story,
still hot and heavy on me,
this story of being twenty and 
contained in her fury
and strapped into her ride
by the sight of her Lonely Dress
and the slow dance wriggle
that took her
almost all the way to the floor —
yes,
having this story now
makes it all OK.

Her hands,
otters smoothwrithing
over one another.

Her eyes,
cracked shells
of bleary blue. 

Her entire wardrobe
worn at once, layered
cake of threadbare grime.

Sparse hair
that might recall blonde
through the gray.

Her words 
a barked aria of 
alien post-meaning.

Stop staring, stop 
listening; she won’t stop
being.

This morning
I restrung my oldest guitar
and recognized shifts in her tone
that might herald an imminent end
to her sweet singing: old wood
drying out, joints beginning to give,
intonation falling away into slight discord;
all I could say was,
“Well, there goes her pleasure,
in parallel to my own.” 

There are other guitars to be played.
What lifetime we shared
is nearly over.
No sorrow,
no tears, no panic; no regrets.
It’s just the way it is —

a great paradox
of growing old
is that you will be so bothered
by realizing how many things
don’t bother you anymore.

I play her anyway,
my thick fingers missing notes
I used to catch with ease,
her second string buzzing ever so slightly
when left open to ring,

barely noticing the quickening decay
at all. 

I watch a moth
strike repeatedly
at a candle flame
until she falls
in ruins.

I shudder
because that,
I suspect,
is how the future
begins and ends:

in attraction,
obsession,
entrapment,
and at last
a release
that costs you
everything you have.

The apostrophe,
growing desperate
at the state of affairs,
has fled.

Welcome to this new world; speak clearly,
be clear on who owns what.
If we get it right, someday
we’ll barely miss the apostrophe.

More than once I have seen the world
in a face.

More than once I have twirled the world
on the tip of my ring finger.

As it spun the world changed 
from a face to a bonfire.

The eyes in the fire
continued to spin.

Small though it was
it still had the gravity of the world.

I fell into the fire
poised for a kiss.

I am falling still
again and again.

I fall and am burned
then I come back and tell the story.

It seems I can’t say enough
about this.

Not in five minutes.
Not in three hours.

Not in the remaining years I have
will I be able to say enough.

Eyes burning, perhaps from wind
through open window,
eighty miles an hour
past the power plant. 

Cars peel off behind me,
exiting until the highway’s
empty. No one
is going my way. 

The city,
still forty miles ahead,
painting the sky orange
over deepest black.

We’ve been hearing
rumors of riot and fire all day.  
It’s the end of the world, some say.
But no one wants proof,

it seems, except me.
How foolish, how
odd that is — how can you
just curl into a ball and die

or hide in the boondocks
without seeing for yourself
that it is indeed the world ending?
In fact, how can you even flee

such a thing when you consider
the world we’re in?  Maybe
that’s the best of all possible
pyres up ahead.

I gun it.  I go.
I’ve always been the one
who has to know. Stuck my fingers
into wounds once to prove to myself

that the world wasn’t ending
after all, so why wouldn’t I
do this considering how well
it worked out last time?

homeless stories
float the streets
looking for a tongue
to tell them. 

you’re passed out on the couch,
though, television on,
with your mouth closed
for once.

when you don’t wake up
they go on to the next house,
the next street, the next town.
someone will open the door

eventually, and make them
into shows you can watch
at night before you fall asleep.
aren’t you chastened now

that you weren’t awake?
you could have avoided
wasting time later on
passing out on the couch

with a vague sense of envy
for those who give you
such marvelous
second hand tales.

Sipping fine coffee with an old friend; talking,
new ideas pop up —

frog eyes emerging from behind the lilypads
of a long-neglected pond.

I can’t wait for
their deep singing to begin…

the music of the moment,
or maybe it will be made to last;

either way, I’ve not been near this water
in far too long.

When you watch a real person die it’s rather unremarkable, or it can be.
It can be slow and drive you to a feeling like impatience but less self-centered.
It can be counting breaths per minute and saying is that it? was that it? no, not yet.
It can be wondering if it’s always this boring to say goodbye.
It can be wondering if you said goodbye before the slipping had progressed too far.
Did the goodbye take, as if its envelope had not been sealed and it had slipped out?
You search the floor with one eye for it, even as the last breath goes pillowy out the door.

Of course for variety there are the violent and sudden deaths which are not boring.
Really, how many of those do you really see, depending of course on your residence?
We shouldn’t count the theater deaths of media in considering this.
But seriously, how many?
Admit it, there was one, wasn’t there?
Maybe two?
A car crash you couldn’t take your eye from?
A knifing that you happened upon and looked away from?
Maybe one you had a hand in?
It has certainly most likely not been a huge number in any case.

Unless, perhaps, you were a soldier?
Were there so many then that you were bored even with those?

You may be now a expert, an aficonado, of these things.
You may understand many, many flavors.

Perhaps you’ve watched one of those boring, long deaths since?
Perhaps you said as no one but you watched that expiration,

“Go, then…Easy…There you go.”

in a brand new episode
of television’s latest show
about picking through visions
abandoned by the newly strapped

a pair of businessmen purchase
a half-restored Harley-Davidson
with a Wild One era frame
and a brand new engine

if you want to talk America
you can’t go wrong
waxing lyrical over an old softail
coupled to something sleek
and easy to tweak
that was left for the vultures to pick

the whole affair’s broadcast
for your amusement
to buffer your worry

onward then
with your own dreams
of a highway
laid out before you
all yours
after your own big score

I am occupying
your empty house
on your city’s south side

I am occupying
the seashell collection
you left behind

Occupying the mold
that’s creeping over
the saturated walls
the photo albums
from the ski trip and
the junior prom

I am occupying
the leftovers
of the feast

Occupying the soggy lawn
that was overgrown
before winter
and is now pressed flat
from the weight of snow

I am occupying
the weight of emptiness
that moved in when you left
and the footsteps you left behind

I am occupied
with the state of mind of those
who moved you out

I am occupied
with their justification
through seven deadly sins
seven cardinal virtues
seven Roman candles
seven seals and seven stars
a percentage of the gross profits
a fraction of fractionalized effort
the portion rendered
unto Caesar
and the remnant offered
unto God
by the purple robed emissaries
of the King
and all of these are empty
as all the ruined houses
that were once homes

I am occupying the Everywhere
of the New Battleground
Staring into the orange eye
of Monolith
as it claims
it is anything but
Monolith

If I am rejected
forced out or sold out
pushed to the margins
there are always
the foundation cracks
to be occupied
pushed upon
frozen open with water
and blood

made into chasms
wide enough for you
to shelter in
as Monolith
shatters

You’ve been proclaimed
one of that ilk,
the Big Ilk. The sucklers
of The Even Bigger Ilk’s
poison milk who then
soak smaller ilk
with whatever stings.

You’re in all the pictures now.
You’re in all the pictures
you weren’t even alive
to be in. 

In fact,
no one knows what you were thinking
when you walked
against the talk
with the bottle in your hand
as casually as you might at home,

fogging your hedge against wasps.

You’re of that ilk now —
the ones who walk
the talk, even if it’s not
their talk.  Even if
you had a smidge
of heart for the ones
you soaked.

I imagine you at home
not watching the news.
Maybe you take a walk.
Maybe you talk
to the neighbors.  Maybe
they clap you on the back.
Maybe they stand back. 

Maybe you go home
and sit for a while
not talking.  Maybe
you’re just fine, maybe
your eyes well up.

In the pictures
you’re so 
matter-of-fact. So
just do it, so
army of one, so
thin blue line —
maybe at home
you’re someone else,
but you’ll forever be
one of that ilk
in the pictures.

I picture this —
a walk where you don’t
fire, their talk
ignored. No ire
and thus no pictures.
No knowledge, even,
of your name. 

Maybe that’s
what you think about too
while you’re sitting in the dark.