Go.  
Just go.
Go do laundry, shopping,
banking errands.  Pay the bills
and visit the folks.
See if there’s anyone
at the coffee shop, the bar,
the library. Make
some conversation.
At the least, pretend
that movement is valuable
in this case.

Go.
Just go.
Take a job, a volunteer
position, a role 
in a community play.
Play a unicorn, a pirate,
a fur-clad king or queen.
Take on the control and mystery
the house doesn’t afford you.

Go.
Just go.
Get out the door
and unravel your hermitage,
following its threads
to the world 
outside your house. 
Let the slam of the door behind you
be your fanfare.
Let the anthem of reverse wail
as you get out of the driveway.
You’re an American, 
royalty among nomads,
shining as you roll across the world.

Go.
Just go.
Go big, large, gargantuan, grandiose,
universal in your journey.
Make a virtue of pretending to tear
your roots from the ground, 
even if just for a little while —
for the afternoon, the morning, the day —
your car radio on roar, your home behind you
laid open and wasted as Jericho from the sound. 
Take comfort, though — 
magically, it will be reborn when you come home
and rest.  You can tear it down again
the next time you need to go.

Breaking your story
right down the middle
into perfect half-shells;

I see fruit left standing on end —
to rot?
to sprout?
to be consumed?

Did that truly come out of what you’ve been claiming
was yours?  I can’t see
impressions on it at all;

it’s lovely, soft, so ripe —
how is this possible?
How can you be?
How might this, so unguarded now, grow?

acknowledging
that war
can make my blood
sing a little

means only
that I know myself
and the animal somewhere
within

if I pet him
the right rough way
now and then
he stays quiet mostly

I’m at peace
with the bloodsong
I do not deem it necessary
to pretend I cannot hear it

and will not deny
that I know how war
is a part of me
settled on my hands

as tightly
as skin
snuggled cozily in my mouth
sharp as teeth

and why else does my blood
burst scarlet from my wounds
as if it were the chorus
of a grand opera 

as red as all other blood
from all other wounds
blazing the aria
of the common nature of all 

who refuses us
entrance
calling foul
on us
saying
the door is closed

we should say
pfffft
we’re too wide for that door
and far too stubborn
to turn sideways
and try to get inside
on his command alone

who then turns away from us
to hide his stuff

pity him and not ourselves
for we can make our own
as anyone can
and as countless anyones have
for as long as there’s been
breath

Overheard these words
on a Philadelphia street
a toothless woman
a rusty gun 

They’ve had me quivering
for two full days now
as I’ve tried to decide
how to steal and reuse them
in a context 
of my own choosing —

how to create
a suitable conversation
not slanted
toward redneck imagery

Perhaps I’m quivering
because I can’t decide
why that was the first
context I imagined
would fit those words

Perhaps that’s why
I’m working so hard
to ensure that you know 
that I’m putting
someone else’s words
to work for me

Perhaps because
I myself have grown
toothless
and rusty
and making
the original conversation
an evil to rail against 
makes me feel
smiley and shiny again

Whatever the words are caught on
they landed in my ear
are trying to leave my mouth
are having a hell of time doing it

I don’t know where they want to go

I never even looked up to see
who in Philadelphia
was using them

He repeals
a law he has lived by
for a long time,

contemplates
how the first word
he thought of
set the path
for the ones to follow,

how choosing
“repeals” created
the notion of “law,”
how “law” led to
“rules to live by,”
how that opened the door
to “a change of life and
law.”  And so

by repealing a law
he’s held sacred for
most of his life, and then
considering the process
as a function of choosing
the right words and their
intent, he put on fresh clothes,
cinched his belt tight,
and walked out into the sunlight

as the same man who’d lived
arbitrarily locked down
for so long, one who 
having freed himself
at once prepared himself
for the next binding
he’d impose upon himself,

but far more aware,
at least at first,
of his freedom of choice.

A blind woman
accosts me
after the reading breaks up,
refuses to allow me
my convictions, challenges
my view of my own humanity —
seizes me by the arm,
insists I listen —
and all because she didn’t like
the last line of my poem.

“You don’t believe that,”
she implores.  “All the rest of your work
says you don’t believe that.”

Maybe she heard something
in my voice
that I didn’t intend to leak, maybe 
something only she could hear,
because I’ve questioned that line
a million times before deciding
to let it stand
because it has always made me so uneasy
that I suspect it is in fact
a core truth
that I want to reject
before I have to live with it.

She won’t let go of my arm
but I’m at ease.  “We’re going to have to
disagree,” I say, pulling loose.
“I know that’s true — I’m sure
of it.”

“No, no…you can’t!” she says,
louder and louder, over and over.

I step away,
telling myself
that only those most unsure
of their convictions
are this vocal —

but then again,
I chose
to read that poem
and I always read
that poem. 

Try angular living —
approach from the side.
Taking things head on
results in television and
a corporate existence.

Do not imagine yourself
a lion or other predator —
orchids make fine familiars
as do hermit crabs and 
the common rat.

The hairstyle matters.
Doctor it up with fronds
and stick a Christmas string
in there — no matter that you have
no plug to illuminate them.

When asked for a biography, dissemble.
Demonstrate charity by offering
a lollipop to the questioner
but demand the stick back
after it’s been sucked clean —

recycling, y’know.  Watch 
responses to the most common
questions — place of birth, siblings.
Choose, perhaps, the life of a saint
or a local practitioner of chiropractic

as a source for details.  Whatever you do,
don’t mention motorcycles, or umbrellas —
routine items lead to routine assumptions.
Again: routine items lead to routine

assumptions.  Nothing you say
should establish a routine.  If you are 
an artist, for God’s sake deny it.
If you are an embalmer, stiffen up
and lie right.

The angular life is worth living skewed.
Long term pollution of the mainstream
with your existence pays off.  When the rest
die off, you’ll be sitting pretty.
It’ll be a world made for your type.

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?