Coming down
like a rent-a-cop’s
six D-Cell Maglite

every word of hers
an angry unlit
potentially blinding torch

whupping heavy on my head
whapping crunchy
on my wrists and knees

like I was a poor concert-goer
caught lighting up in my seat
who backtalked her at the wrong moment

and with a soundtrack at 140 decibels
she did me in one blister at a time
until I crawled out from under

and ran for the exit
that black pipe full of lead
whistling in the air behind me

though all it was after all
was words — electric words
that didn’t even light up the room

but laid themselves hard
on me until I burned and ached
unnoticed by the cheering crowds

knowing I’d feel this one for days
and this time the ringing in my ears
would not be pleasant to recall

I say, ah well.

I’ve spent too many years
dreaming of death,
longing for it,
to be afraid of it.

I may have abandoned
the headlong pursuit of it
but that doesn’t mean
I’m not enjoying this slower ride.

As for the end itself:
it’s just like
going over
a divide,
and I can’t speak for you but
I’ve always most loved that moment
in a mountain journey
when you can first see
the other side.

Luther,
who grew up on
the reservation

with my father,
said tonight while we were all watching
the news:

everything here’s occupied
and has been for years —
why are they so willing
to say the word now?  

And why should a change
in occupiers matter to those of us
in the less
than one percent? Everything’s

stolen — how the thieves
divide it
doesn’t matter much
to the robbed.

Not sure as to what to say to that —
half of me nodding my head,
half of me wanting to hide.

The places 
that call most to me
I imagine as oceanographic treasures:

Moscow, undersea mountain,
pressed by the weight and cold
of the dim abyss;

Venice,  tangled in kelp
at the surface, its pieces joined
with sodden ribbons;

London, barnacled anchor,
its crust hiding
secrets, history, and good lies;

New York, that great sponge,
porous, soaking in the flowthrough
from all the world’s currents; 

Tikal, Angkor Wat,
Tiahuanaco, Rapa Nui; out there
in the misunderstood margins,

waiting for the time to be ripe
so they can rise and erase 
“Here Be Monsters” from the old charts.

Worcester, at first, didn’t seem like much to this old salt.
Arid, stoic, sticking up in the inland air.
At first glance, not even a bit of interesting flotsam.

It’s instead like visiting
a landlubber older brother
who pushes me roughly into the big chair

when I come through the door from a journey,
teaches me rudely but not without care
how quickly I can lose my sea-legs

once I sit for a while. “This is what it feels like
to be home,” he says. And it is that.  
A good place from which to watch the sea. Home.

For the remainder
of this well-lit day 
the night-light in a little girl’s room
will be whispering:
soon will come our time.

Black tire marks on the streets
will settle in, bake to gray,
resting assured that come the night
they’ll be invisible — no evidence
of near-disaster to be seen.

The child who was almost taken
by the Crazy will be safe inside her head
from moment to moment. She’ll almost forget
what happened, how the Crazy skidded up
to the sidewalk and then left as swiftly

when she began to scream.
Tonight in her pastel room
the nightlight will do its ambiguous work
of dispelling some shadow and amplifying
the rest, and she will not sleep.

As for the Crazy, dark and light
are of no matter to one who sees
the rainbow in his drink,
the wet red sickle beside his plate,
her hair in his knotted hand.

Light and dark are at play
for him, and he goes through the dark
to find sick light which leads him back again
to insomnia and the thought of the child
and her fair hair and face

just before she screamed,
just before he turned away
and did not do what he’d planned.
No matter; day follows night follows day.
It will happen — another girl, another way.

A patron saint of good circumstance
and found money
slipped off the earth into a ravine 
and was lost.

A patron saint of lost causes
went missing. 

A patron saint of pastry chefs,
coated in flour, stopped breathing.

Are you hungry? Are you broke?
Are you forever lamenting your luck?
A patron saint of the pure voice
pushed his earplugs deep into his head
the minute you started complaining.

God doesn’t love you.
God doesn’t see you, in fact.
God reserves holy oversight
for the largest:  play of planets
and stars, winds and climate
and sustainability.  You’re the mote
carried through the grand scale.

All right then:

are you ready now
to save yourself?  Isn’t this
bracing —

the cold 
we find ourselves out in
and how we have no choice
but to stay awake?

green bell pepper smell 
all through the house
and not a pepper to be found here

maybe my grandmother’s come
and is ready to roast them
on the plates of her old gas stove

her gone these ten years
and the stove’s been ripped out
and junked almost as long

but the house smells like bell peppers
turning black on the iron plates
almost ready to be peeled

my fingers are itching
to set to work under her cataract eyes
I see them not seeing me

it’s been a while
she always knew what I was doing
I don’t know what I’m doing

smelling bell peppers that aren’t here
peeling bell peppers that aren’t here
pleasing my grandmother who’s not here

Mistaken for a bird at the window. Caused a blood chill.
Appeared to the children from the closet.

Was associated with the scent of lilacs in December.
Opened a window; said opening was dismissed as a forgotten action.

Married the sister of the local midwife when she was asleep.
Grew into the lungs of a goat and bleated along with Miles Davis played through headphones in the dark morning.

Invited to leave, and stayed,
stayed past my welcome time and wilted the flowers in the front room.

Scribbled a song in the folds of the husband’s frontal lobe
that rang in his workshop when he’d quit for the day:

I am mechanical,
you are flesh.
I am eternal,
you are fresh.
I am the retort,
you are the calm,
you are the sermon
rationalizing harm.

Went to the kitchen and left the cupboards open for the rats.  
Became a deity to rats and whispering centipedes.

Called a ghost and was exorcised.
Went on vacation in Buffalo and returned in two weeks.

Called a demon and was cast.
Went on vacation in the china closet, cracking the antique cordial glasses.

Called a delusion and was medicated.
Lived with that pretending to be dull brass banging.

When they moved away I stayed behind
but planted a postcard in their luggage that said: I win.

I won.  I won and opened windows and carried lilacs
and lay down before the rats and taught them to sing

like small trumpets in mean mean mouths
while we waited for the next intrusion.

Long-nailed hand,
good for picking;
short nailed hand,
good for fretting.

The contrast between
is good for making people
used to symmetry uneasy.
I like that.

Double pierced ear
used to be good for
bothering people, now
means nothing.

Tattoos here and there,
all work-safe, all monochrome
and small:  see related reference
under “double pierced ear.”

What bothers people more maybe now
is my gut.  It bothers me.
It’s gonna kill me and
it gets in the way. Is it in the way

for you? How about
the gray in my beard or
head? Help me out here —
people call me now and then

to say we ought to get together
and talk. What gets in the way
that we never do?  Something
about me seems to…kill.

I won’t
hedge on that.  Friendship comes
to me to die and that’s before
I even speak. Is it the gut,

the hair, the ink, the rings,
the fingers, the finger nails,
the smoke, the face, the eyes,
the past, the future — what?

It was never this hard before.
We came, we spoke, we did
together well.  Not now.
I have to say it’s a little piece of hell.

When the button mums —
one plant huge enough to fill the car trunk,
covered in dark orange and simmering yelllow —
go on sale for the price of the pot

we’re close, very close to winter
because it means there’s not time enough
to get them into the ground and have them thrive
and so they will bloom and then die aboveground.

And when the Brooklyn Bridge —
its towers reminiscent of towers now gone —
fills again with bodies that this time
do not flee but resist, and sit, and wait

for the lowering arm of power to gather them in
and grind them slowly through the system,
its price soars and it won’t be sold
cheaply — we’re close, very close

to spring.  

Two crowds full of tiny faces seen from above
may mean different things —
one heralds an end, and one may herald
a beginning, but who will deny that each is beautiful?