I am trying to get sleepy
but time is refusing to budge
from the track it’s on
and there are after all many hours of the day
we waste numbers on
considering how often most of us see them
I am trying to get sleepy
but the night’s flexing its muscles
showing me how strong it is
by holding me by the lapels
and not letting go
I am trying to get sleepy
without aid of alcohol or weed or heroin or death
and it’s a no go tonight for the straight man
who seems to be stubbornly awake and alive
when sleep is the most important task before him
I am trying to get sleepy
but the damn sheep are singing
at the top of their woolly lungs
I am trying to get sleepy
but the sirens outside
sing as well of other people who aren’t asleep either
it’s criminal how they torture me for their sleeplessness
arrest all the waking rascals
me too
I need to be imprisoned somewhere boring
with gray walls
and nothing to stimulate me
it’ll be like sleep
even if I’m awake
losing track
to time

The meteor never knew
how hope grew from the light
it gave to the watchers below,
or how they hung their wishes
upon it. 

It did not know
how alive it made those people feel,
how for a few seconds
they put aside their envy
of those around them
who seemed to have had all the luck
and told themselves they now had
a little of it themselves
because of what they’d seen.

Someone will no doubt say
this is an argument
against suicide, how you never know
who will be lit by your passage;

someone will be wrong,
someone will have missed the point
that awareness or lack thereof
would have changed nothing
for the meteor, which fell
into vapor according to the rules
which also gave the people below it
the light from the burning
and the hope is always
a secondary and unintended
effect.

Tags: poems, poetry, meditations

In an eclipse
of an eclipse (too many
clouds to see)

the sky may redden
above the cover and it may
seep through

I’ve never seen the sky
not change even when
the event was obscured

As above
so below
The event seeps through

Colors oddly burnt
onto the ground
as if all had been concussed

Shaken
into strange
shades — as above

so below
and inside
and overall

Cut me off
because I’m stupidly
long winded at times,
oversensitive, fat with a sense
of my own importance
and centered on the inner eye
of my personal storm.

Cut me off
because I’ve stopped caring
about how much I sound
like parents, like teachers,
like the people I hate to admit
live within.

Cut me off
even if I bleed because
that flow would be
the cleanest thing
to come out of me
in years.

Cut me off
and see what buds
from the scar if I heal.
It may be smaller but stronger.
It may be all the incentive
the healthy core of me needs
to get out there
into the sun
and live.

Let us all have one moment
of clarity for our pasts —
not the catastrophic moments,
not the Big Events, not the tragic
or comic or blissful climaxes
we usually hold close and call
“the past,”

but for the startling moments
when we see a person
in a new light, someone
we’d forgotten who comes back
and opens up school lockers
full of surprising good.

Let us praise unfamous people,
words that should have been recalled, statements
that should have been murmured
and branded and engraved
somewhere inside.

Let us open up.
Let us seize scraps
and set them in lockets.
Let us speak to the small
and the ordinary.

Let us learn that
pain and joy are not our province
alone.  Let us learn
that those we forgot
might have been allies
in the old battle of awkward
had we let them in back then,

and let us not keep them out
a moment longer
once they reenter the room.

Phone calls
from dear friends
buzz through
the line I’ve drawn
around time meant
to be alone, very alone
with the critical work.
Like bees
stinging through denim,
they itch me all over
though I know they’re only
reaching out to me
and reacting badly
when I swat them off.

I may never taste honey again,
but at least I’m completing
important things. So many,
many important things
I can’t remember them,

and there’s no one besides me
who knows of them all.

I can’t follow
pathological curves

too natural
too actual
too much
infinity

such curves
terrify me
to the point of
angelic fervor
possession indistinguishable
from the demonic
to these eyes unaccustomed
to perpetual repetition

pray then as taught
through exponential smoothing

thy form
is immeasurable
through my poor arithmetic
it requires new dimensions
that thou will not allow
my cup runneth over
thy will be done
though it will take me
into the valley
of lost in the curves
forever

My mind: a collection
of useful disasters.

A bundle of arrows
clutched in a dead hand,
made of different woods and heads,
all fletched differently,
all facing
the same target.

A muddy stream
running swiftly
and tainted with blood.

An industrial park
full of small, unknown firms
making small parts
for war machines.

A parked bus
growing cold in the lot,
still holding one passenger
who fell asleep
long before the last stop.

A yearbook
missing one picture.

A worn lucky coin,
a worn worry stone,
a frayed string of prayer beads
lying in dirty snow
fifty paces behind the hole
in the pocket they came from.

I have owned so much
and have so little useful left,
regrettable remnants
of regretted choices.

I live in here
where loop upon loop
of the push broom’s path
cleans up nothing for good,
only makes dirt-curbed tracks
and piles that look the same
no matter where they are left,

no matter how often they’re rearranged.

Useful disasters
only in the sense that they keep me
thinking, always,
of how I might recover, reuse,
remake them to new purposes.

Fire the arrows at last,
hurdle the streams,
bankrupt the factories,
get off the bus,
show up for the photo shoot;

learn, at last, to pray.

Suck it up —
you aren’t anointed.
You shit like anyone else.
More, probably,
you eat so much that’s bad for you —

fuck indiscriminately
(though you won’t admit it)
or base your choice in partners
on the same chemicals
the rest do —

not so hot on the evolution of thought —
you buy the same ideas
your friends bought —

and oh how pretty
your conceits and paradigms
look in the reflected light
from others’ eyes —

Suck it up, all of it,
all you bother with
is as much insult as exaltation —

and the roses
know more than you
and smell better too —

I think I see a prejudice
peeking out, a bias or two
set up to support the lifestyle —

you’re just a
whatever you are
and you measure up about the same
as the rest of them —

I can’t tell you apart
and I’m the same
so this ain’t sour grapes
as much as it is a loving
awareness that feels
like someone took a sledgehammer
to my shell —

all of us do the same damn dances
and there’s not a damn thing
a damn one of us could do
to change a damn step —

granted,

once in a while there’s a genius
who stumbles well
but you won’t know it
till the genius gets copied
and then we name the stumble
as new dance —

and watch us do that same damn dance —

Suck it up,
you obvious,
you clown crown of clones —

admit it:
nothing new here —

because it’s easier that way