Go without me
and take with you
all the green stones
and gold you can grab.

When I’m here alone
I’ll have no need of them.
No one to flatter,
no one with whom to trade —

some will from afar call it heaven
and call me the luckiest man
alive.  But I won’t be lucky,
or alive.  No face to lie to,

no back to stab, no handshake
to pull away from — the bad man
is not lucky when there’s no one
to steal luck from.

Go without me, let me stay
here, dead as I should be,
that highest penalty paid
through my deserved loneliness.

Take the pilfered wealth
and go.   Leave me here, poor
and starving for a mark.
Wave good bye and turn your backs —

that’s what I’ve always cared most for:
your exposed wallets, your undefended spines.
Leave me that memory to work with
as I play myself, the only mark left in the house.

All it takes
is the fan going on
when triggered by the thermostat

A breeze on my legs
A paper lifting off from the table
and ending up on the floor
after a lazy fall

Startled
I take a moment
to ignore the hard work before me

It turns into an hour of
nothing
No words for the time spent

When the fan turns itself off
I sit some more

wondering how hot it has to get
before I begin to work

especially knowing that the hot days
are almost at an end

Under the pilot light,
under the stove,
under the linoleum,
there is something
that’s been there a while.

I don’t know what it is.
I’ve never seen it or smelled it.
I couldn’t describe it to you.
But it’s there, something dropped
by someone who lived here before me.

It’s an old house, built
in 1900, and maybe the thing
under the pilot, stove, etc.
is something that old too:
a coin, an earring, a scrap
of paper with half a letter
or word missing and no chance
of figuring out what it might have said.

I know it’s there,
sopping with grease and meaning,
kept warm by that small flame.

It has to be there. There’s no way
I can live here without having something
of those who also lived here
remain in my space
that was there space.  It’s luck
or curse or just remnant, relic
trash.  Nothing disappears
and nothing stops affecting me,
ever. 

One of these days I might fix the floor
and you bet I’ll dig it out and hold it
in my hand.  I’ll put it back before I’m done,
and I won’t bother adding something of my own —

better my own addition
be accidental as well, the perfect piece
of my life left behind for the next tenant
to puzzle on late at night;

though he or she
might never understand
what that feeling means,
it’ll be good to be alive
and present here
for a long, long time.

A good friend
spends his weekends
liberally applying
bacon grease to his arms
and drawing swirls in it.

He stinks.  He plays with the patterns
constantly.  He leaves stains
on everything.  He’s always happy.
He calls himself
the pig tattoo king.

Yes,
it’s odd.  But I’ve met
people
who swill money
like chocolate, coat themselves
in dirty metals pulled from the ground,
smell like rare flowers
crippled with salt,
build small honesty into huge lies
to keep people guessing
and off balance.

What you see is what you get with him.
That’s more than you can say about a lot of folks.