Putting out trash for pickup;
as much of a ritual
as anything
from my churched days.

More so, in fact.
I was never as devout then 
as I am now with careful separation
of recyclables, compostables; with
the regular observance of
timed placement of offerings
at the curb. 

It is a measure of 
the times we are in 
that this mundanity
feels like a bulwark 
against apocalypse.
In this is the hope

that I am doing something,
that this will matter beyond
not having the house smell
of whatever’s in the single bag
and half-crate of plastic and paper
I put out there. Our remnants, our losses,
our surrendered bits and pieces
given up to an effort
to green the world; they
look a little like a future 
if you squint.

When I am back inside
and see the news, 

I tell myself
that might have to hold me
till next week.  

In my neighbor’s yard,
red poppies.

Scrape a bagel, they say, and you
can grow some flowers.

On the next table over in the cafe,
bagels dotted with black.

Eat a bagel, they say, and you may
fail a test for opioids.

You can’t escape
the prevalence 

of such things.
My little hometown

has both a bagel place and
overdoses. They sell

cream cheese and Narcan
in the strip mall. 

In Afghanistan, 
there are fields of poppies.

In the US,
there are fields of dead

killed around and by
the poppies.

Read the fine print.
You’ll see

I’m right. Policy 
and breakfast and 

poppies, lovely
and filling and deadly,

side by side to greet us
in the morning light. We need

so many drugs
to get through to the next day.

I have lately dreamed the words
“stuck pig”
so often they’ve turned
into music
I cannot stop humming
asleep or awake

Accompanied by
triangle or tympani
and now
and then
the sound of stones
rolling down a hill
into a river from
their former spots
in a castle wall

If this is a metaphor
what does it mean 
that on a recent night
I received
the second verse
in a new dream
of fields and flowers

and the words were

“bleeding out
means
the meat will be 
sweeter”

Who are they,
the ones you call “them?”
It’s hard to explain, other than

they decide, not you — unless
you find yourself on the side
of consensus. 

Some jump back and forth,
into and out of it. Some join
and never look back,

some are born there, some
look up one day and find
somehow they have become “them.”

How immense they are
depends on how small you feel
yourself to be.

If there is a
visible horizon before you,
they are the vanishing point.

Your descriptions of them
have a plasticity of form,
though rarely of intent.

Their mouths
are bound over
to the service of ghosts.

In their hair the ashes 
of torches, pyres, stakes
in piles of pitch-soaked wood.

They may choose to soothe
if you agree, snip and snide
if you are mildly out of line,

rap knuckles and slap down
if you are more recalcitrant,
beat and slay if they see the need,

or so they want you
to believe. They are
avatars of what

you are supposed
to believe and the forms
must be preserved

or else there’s nothing
to be preserved and
things fall apart and

even if that is something
to be desired
it does not happen

without pain and
the circle remains
unbroken as long as 

they hold you close;
as long as you let them
hold you. 

When they take us
in the night, when they
slip into our beds with us
and rob us of our right
to our desires, when
they carve our beings
from us and leave us
as husks, as remains,

we will have to be our own light.

When they sniff at the sick
and smell what they call
justified pain, when they
seize our bodies to pay the debt
for their own satisfaction, 
when they buy bullets with 
what could have bought 
our own healthy returns to 
our own healthy lives,

we will have to be our own light.

When they come in killer walls
of camo and blue to take our water
and foul it for the joy of cash heaps,
when they step in grand cadence
to darken our streets with metal and fear
while we cower in homes they long to burn,
when they raze the schools overseas with bombs
and raze the schools in our towns with illogic and lies,
then drag our children from everywhere
into prison,
into servitude,
into battle,
into death,
into worldwide shadow,

we will have to be our own light.

We will have to remember
who we are,
what we can do, 
who we refuse to become,
what we refuse to do.

We will have to be
in their eyes
ungovernable,
will have to be our own light,
illuminating each other’s way, even
if need be learning to start
fires, with each torch igniting another
until their darkness either
fails before us
or is left behind
for all time.

Speaking of horror
there’s a
huge Dodge truck
parked at the donut shop
I’m about to go into
and it’s flying both
an American flag and 
a Confederate flag
each one the size of
a comforter or 
opened body bag and
it’s Spring

Speaking of 
horror that is as
a way of saying
something moving
in the dispassionate moment
of how matter of factly
those flags fly together

Speaking of horror
my body is hollering
stay out of there

Horror is how easily I lose
my usual donut appetite

In fact I don’t even
want a coffee

I know I could likely walk in 
with impunity
and buy my usual
with impunity
and recognize the person
who owns that truck 
and stare at them
with impunity in fact
they might nod to me if
we passed through the glass doors
at the same time in 
opposite directions

I don’t want to park
where horror lives
so I drive around the block to 
another donut shop

but it’s Spring and
in keeping with Spring
and speaking of horror

I really have lost all desire
for the usual

When “tired”
means there’s nothing
to give.

When “tired”
means your lungs
whistle dirges.

There are trees
bent more by the weight 
of life than you are,

trees that grow
anyway, but you
are no tree. 

So tired,
stunted,
stalled —

lonely too, or
alone at least,
even among friends, 

lovers, family.
Tired, alone,
shortened, stuffed

down from full height
and wasted, too wasted
to rise again. Or so at first

you believe,
forgetting how 
“tired” can easily become

“angry,”
shifting
in one breath.

When “tired”
becomes “angry, ” those dirges
turn martial, go loud.

When “tired”
becomes “angry” you
straighten like 

a full tree, even if
a storm’s coming 
full of lightning

and doom. When
angry, you grow.
You see who else

is angry alongside you and
realize the lightning can’t
take all of you. So

get angry, not tired.
Be what is needed.
Rise, grow, sing war.

It’s too early to fall asleep.

Please come,
said something.

This voice was soft
and unfamiliar yet
had managed to get 
so close to my sleeping ear
that I could feel it stir the air
as it spoke.

Please come,
it said again, there is
urgent need here, there is
a great famine, a profound 
drought, a bitter war,
a rage covering us all here.

Please come, it said again,
and I rolled over to change
which ear was exposed as
I try keep some of my hearing
to myself and not let just anyone
in that way, but it got into
the pillow itself and denied me
sleep, clearly saying again 
and again:

please come, we
are vanishing, we are being
snuffed out the way breath
takes a candle flame
and just as the smoke
from that small extinguishing
lingers for a short time and
ribbons back and forth until
it’s gone, this whispering
can only reach you for a moment
until it too wisps away. Please
come, please, 

until I could take no more
and talked back to it
and drowned it 
and snuffed it
and blew on it until
it cooled into silence
and left me in darkness
to sleep and 
keep to myself — 

but I found
I could not.

It does not happen
overnight, but

one day your neighborhood
reveals itself to be

your enemy. You realize
the streets long to cradle

your crushed face. All the familiar
walls are reaching out,

first to hug your back 
and then to hold bullets

that ache to pierce you 
through and through. Soon

it becomes a daily race
to go from stoop to work

and back to stoop 
while menaced

the whole time by place.
You spend every night

huddled in a room
you are not sure

you should trust. This
is where you’ve always lived;

you know you should belong in
your town, your place. But

what you know
and what you feel

are different. What you do 
and what you should do

are different. This place
as it is and as it should be

are different and
suddenly it appears that

exile is no longer a function
of where you live.