Originally posted 4/27/2013.

I turned around 
at the end of a long corridor
to seek contemporaries. 
Found a few.

Craned my neck
to find peers. 
Found a few.

Looked then for friends.  
Found very few. 
They were distant,
at the far end of the hall,
whispering.

Little of what they said reached me
but from tone of voice I understood
that they felt I’d left them and
for me there was no way back.  
No matter the clear corridor,
no matter the direct path — 
there was no way back.

Edith Piaf’s voice rings out,
non, je ne regrette rien.
“I Regret Nothing.”  

Her last words?

“Every damn fool thing
you do in this life,
you pay for.”

Originally posted 6/8/2013.

67,000 perfectly lovely
gods out there,
67,000 facets to the diamond
of God-Being,

yet here is one facet that insists the light’s
coming out of One and only One.
Care to guess which one he claims
is the only true source of all light?

Try to be serious!
That one must be
the God Of Cosmic Jokes,
or of the Ego.

67,000 perfect little gods
out there,
and those are just the ones
we can see.  Probably

another 67,000 at least,
invisible to the poor
human eye, that we could call on
if we knew of them,

yet one god
in that crowded field of stars
demands we believe
in Just One, claims there is only

One God, a God of
Umbrella and Blanket
covering every possible
need for Deity.

Listen to this world screaming from its roots
to its crown canopies, abyssal waters
to rock peaks; listen the old way,
the way we listened

before we stopped listening to 67,000 gods
and started listening to that One
with the blanket and the umbrella
and the sword and the plow.

67,000 gods: at least that,
perhaps twice that
or even more than that.
They remind us that

before we ever heard
that insistent One,
they were talking directly to us
all the time. Remember how that sounded?

Like whales, like crickets, like wind, like water,
like fire: the 67,000 voices of the Gods
of our particular patches of Earth. A chorus of Divinity.
Every one singing along. Every last one a harmonic of Light.

Originally posted 4/16/2016.

Radio preacher, how you talk —
lips looser than Lucifer’s,
spitting hate from a so-called 
Christian face. Your God forgot
to put a muzzle on your judgment
when He laid His manly paw
upon you. Are you insisting 
He was perfect at the craft 
and this is — YOU are — 
are as good as it can get?
Are you really your God’s 
best selling point, making claims
for your own humility before Him 
even as you aggrandize yourself?
Get gone, sticky fingered priest,  
knife tongue pastor, pope
of nighttime rope, saint
of burning necklace, deacon
of past prejudice and future petrified heart,
congregant in the church of bending love
into daggers and handcuffs, bishop of murder 
under the high altar; your game is
looser than Lucifer’s, 
who did not hide his dark hatreds
behind a Cross, who at least owned his pride
at not being in the slightest way
anything like God.

Originally posted 9/20 /2013.

The animals are off the grid.  
Think about it: they have no jobs, so no need to keep time.
What’s the point of Monday or Tuesday? Friday? Pointless.  
There are no weekends, people, and no Sabbath!  
This is intolerable.

Give the animals jobs.
These will of course have to be tedious —
how else to depress a deer or make a clockwatcher out of an owl?  
Soon enough, they’ll develop calendars and then start crossing off
the days to vacation.

Then, we just kill them at random.
Nothing structures time like the justified fear of sudden death.
We’ll have to think about an afterlife for animals.  
Will deer get their own, and owls get another?  
Will they be close to our own?

This new world is coming:
forest cubicles. Rows of antlers visible, the deer bent to their tasks.
Owls calculating in the trees, softly hooting their dismay at the results.
Now and then, a shot will ring out and a corpse shall be dragged away.
That’ll show them what Humpday means.

No more slacking. 

No more full sensory awareness as a result of living always in the Now.
They’ll soon enough begin to line up to get a good pew on Sundays.
They will learn to tremble and to pray for benevolence.
They will learn not to expect it.

Originally posted 12/16/2009; revised, 8/28/2014.

No one photographs him
more than once
once they realize
that the only pictures
that show him as himself
show him
onstage.

What’s his motivation?
He gave up everything to gain a spotlight.
That smile you see up there is genuine,
so if you want to try,
use no flash.  Catch him standing there
in his natural setting: 

darkness all around him
as he pretends like mad
that light is the Sun.

Shoot him anywhere else,
all you’ll capture
is a pillar of salt.

Originally posted 10/22/2015; revised, 4/2016; revised again, 5/8/2016.

I have seen too often
how much of the holy I know
was made by devils — 

I should burn this church without mourning.
I light it, but I cannot smile while I do.
I’m sorry.

Nothing’s shining now under the sun.
What I know, what made me,
whatever I have made my own

is problematic, a fallen forest full of shock.
Felled trees row upon row,
no one seems to have heard a thing.

I should have known.
Should have been listening all along
for the sound of clear cutting.

Evil disguised itself
as birdsong and brook,
hymns to the betrayed sun,

slew and laid waste on my watch.
All the holy I know
is devils’ work,

and it falls upon me now
with a roar like a deadfall,
a huge and broken tree.

I’m sorry, but I do mourn it
a little. I mourn it as it falls upon me.
I’m sorry for mourning,

but I do, even as I see
the need for this reckoning,
even as I join in a call for it.

Once-honored voices
have failed so miserably
at being their professed truth; 

they are part of what I am, 
as is now my disgust 
at how I have loved them; 

as is my confusion 
at how I love them, even now,
knowing what I know.

Originally posted 4/27/2014.

God says 
in order to find peace 

link arms with it
and ride it beyond death

we must seek one pebble 
in one gravel bed 

find one rootlet on one tree 
in one forest 

then cleave to them 
and forsake all others

We take that as true 
but we misunderstand it

Holy is not held
in the stone or the root

Holy instead 
is held in the search

Holy the touch of each stone
we turn over

Holy each time we plunge our hands
into the soil while seeking the Root

Holy even the choice to say
there is no need to search

Holy even to pick up a random stone 
skip it over a pond

point after it and know
that path is as good as any

Originally posted 12/22/2008.

Each of us is a vault of moments,
a bank for remembered scenes.
Poets eventually spend all that they save,
and I am one — or rather, have been one, 

for from this moment on
I refuse to pass my mysteries out 
like so many stray pennies.
Let it now be someone else’s turn.

Yes, there are times
when it comforts me to think again
of the way her hair felt
the first time I touched it;

times when it seems important to recall
what it feels like to press
the point of a hunting knife into my chest, 
adding a quarter pound of pressure with every breath;

I could still make them real
for anyone who asked, 
but could anything I got back 
make giving that away worth my while?

So much that I saved from youth to now
has ended up on stages,  was spent
for others’ amusement, was traded for glad hands. 
What has it ever gained me?

Just grant me now, at last,  
my hoard to hold for me alone.
Let me count my terrors and my ecstasies
in my own time, sitting up late at night with them.

Lord, how I wish I had been 
less profligate with these 
when it would have been wiser
to keep them close.

If I can learn
to be tighter 
with a memory now,
I might yet be happy. 

I could get a job where no one will ever ask me
about who I was, where I’d been,
how I view the search for meaning, 
how I got here. 

It’s none of your business,
I will say if they ask me. 
Write your own goddamn poems, 
that’s what I’ll say. 

Originally posted 3/31/2011.

talk about walnuts dammit
speak of bananas or plywood
maybe there’s a door to consider
or typewriters themselves
so sexy and so willing 
to be closely observed

talk about bricks dammit
spend an hour staring at one
until you have the red dust
and the surface pitting memorized
keep staring until
the brick’s all mopped up
and your awareness of it
is ready to be wrung out onto paper

see the pavement — kiss it
see the cobweb — swallow it
find a key — stuff it up your nose
learn how brass smells
of dirty fingers and ozone
then gimme an epic about that scent —

start maybe with

first time you noticed  that smell
was when your mother died

the keys were in the hand
you bunched up to your face

you could smell and taste them
mingled with tears and lemon polish

on the oak table where you laid your head
to weep when it happened

or anything else
any something or other
some incident
something or nothing at all
just talk about
something real

rage has no flavor
and neither does love
but bodies do
and so does your blood
so give us the taste of your iron
your salt, your sour meat 
we are hungry and thirsty
for you