Originally posted 8/8/2013.

A Bad Idea hugs my neck with icy meat paws,
smears me with an evil kiss
from a greasepaint devil’s face;

takes me out, gets me drunk 
and lets me slip, in disguise and unnoticed,
to the floor of a convenient dive.

If this wasn’t all mostly metaphor
I’d have handled it badly years ago
and wound up

without an eye, thumb, or testicle
but I’m intact enough that when he’s around
I forget all my years of sense.

Mr. Bad Idea, you think we’d be past this.  
You’d think we would be so intimately acquainted by now
that we’d be on more normal terms — 

I’d merely entertain you now and then
and hold you at bay the rest of the time — 
old wolverine, badger full of flammable cotton!  

How you do tear your way in
where you’re least wanted
when you’re most needed,

nestling into the dark crook
of my throat, giving me something
to talk about.

Everyone else, you’re on notice:
if you see me acting out, bloated with a Bad Idea,
be a friend: step aside and take notes

from a safe distance. No telling
what might be coming;
might be lots to tell after it’s gone.

Originally posted 3/7/2013.

My arm, darker
than candle tip,
cooling like
dead wick.

My arm,
stark twig,
holds nothing,
is just pointing.

My arm tells the story:
over there’s where
I was going, where I still
need to go,

but I’ve been standing here 
for a very long time now
and I do not think I am meant to be
triumphant in my return.

I think I am instead meant to be
the One Who Does Not Arrive,
the One who tells his story
to the traveler who has made it 
this far.  The old one 

without so much
as a symbol
to fall back on,
stock still in desolation

until his arm drops,
at last, in surrender.

Originally posted 4/1/2014.

The soundtrack
of whatever it is
you daily do is
a splintering
that croaks

broken, broken.

Even when you
bite in error
something soft
of your own, your
tongue or lip,
you can only taste
the meaty iron in it.

Broken, broken.

You’ve chewed nothing
but hard old remains
for so long,
their spongy bone-hearts
are all that you know.

Broken, broken;
marrow candy,
marrow coffee;

marrow greens,
marrow marrow
in the corners
of your mouth:

in the corners
of your mouth
a song of vulture, 

carcass bird.

Originally posted 4/1/2011.

A single bird over the church
at the top of our hill.
His fingered wings
say he’s a buzzard, he of the tribe
of naked head and a taste for death.

Seen from here,
he soars.

I have an urge
to cover the daffodils
that are just emerging
from the snow-compacted mulch
beside my front walk.

It passes.
They’ll be fine.

Later, in the dark apartment,
the fears and concerns of the day
slide around me in bed
like eels — they come close,
my skin pulls back.

I sleep,
and they move away.

In waves upon waves
the disguised and dissembling
cover the earth.  From where I stand
there’s nothing out there but
a danger of drowning.

I bob to the surface
and see the sky every time.

Originally posted 12/10/2012.

I hold great love
for stones:
the ones I climb,
the ones I throw. I try to listen 
to their gray whispers, I try 
to follow their directions.  

Maybe you feel that too.  
Maybe you are meant
to climb the largest ones,
freestyling up
past ever-present death
without making
a mark upon them;

maybe you’re destined to build
garden walls, fortress walls, paved roads;
prisons, temples, or something
that serves as both;

maybe you are supposed to cut them
until they represent another thing
in its heaviest incarnation.  Maybe
you are fated to release
the deities inside them, or maybe 
you were built to hurl them.

Will you recreate 
in your brief life 
all the millions of years
we’ve already spent 
learning to do these things?  
It’s hard to avoid when the big love
we have for stone carries us there.  

For now put your face on the boulder in the path, 
cheek to its cool black nubble.  Pick up
a piece from the ground and slip it 
into your pocket.  

Carry it around with you,
worry it with your thumb and maybe
after a long time it’ll be a touch smoother 
than when you started — and still 
it will look not much different
than when you started.

If you lose it or toss it
it will wait patiently
wherever it lands
for the next pocket,
the next slingshot,
the next place it is needed.

Or it will not. It may disdain us
or ignore us.
It may not have registered much, 
if anything, 
of you or of any of us
who have ever touched it.

It may tell anyone who finds it
nothing about you
that you would recognize
as being your story.

Your story isn’t singular.
Neither is mine.
There’s no grand need
to recall them or us.
We are just part of the story
of Stone, part

of the Record Of Time
that began long before we did
and which will only end long after 
we do 
and are forever forgotten.

Originally posted 12/29/2012.

From the place I buried it all — a deep hole
I never completely filled in — 
I shall pull up the eight balls of blow and the late night breakfasts
that never stayed with me for longer than it took
to get in the car and get moving, drunk and wired,
toward whatever couch was that morning’s home.

I shall pull up the empty little gun I got in trade
for a bag of acid, pull up the skinny tie
and the hospital scrubs, the songs I wrote
when bored, the awful poetry I believed in
so hard I sprained my ego on it, even when there was
no evidence for its quality, no reason for it to exist at all.

Pull up the arrogant fool, the know it all,
the callous junior playboy
up to screw whoever was up for it; 
pull up as well any scrap of memory
any of those partners left behind, that I might
recall a time when I was superficially lovable.

What’s left in there when all that’s come up to the light?

A boy, still a skinny boy then,
though tending toward my later heft.  
A stupid young man
with a bad car
and a jammed tapedeck
and damaged visions of a swift escape from this earth.  

I pull them up, pull it all up,
the way you’d yank a weed that won’t die,
frantically hoping I’ve got it all this time:
every bit of what keeps sprouting in my life
when I least desire it, 
now that it’s inconvenient

and no one thinks
it’s cute
or charming
or melancholy-artist-appropriate anymore. 
I want it poisoned.
I want it gone.  I want to

pull it all up and burn it all down
from the memories of how it began
to the new shoots that expose me,
that nag me, that shout to the world that what I was
is what I am; that no matter how hard I pull,
I am rooted in failure and will always fail.

Originally posted 12/12/2011.

War
can make my blood
sing a little.

I know myself
and the animal somewhere
within.

If I pet it the right rough way
now and then,
it stays quiet  — mostly.

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

and I do not deny
that war is a part of me.
It has settled on my hands

as tightly as skin,
snuggled cozily
in my mouth,

and my blood
bursts scarlet from my wounds
as if it were the chorus of a grand opera,

glorying as much 
in being shed as I do
in my potential to shed it.

Revile me for that
as you will — I will be 
your paradox: at peace

with not becoming
the hypocrite who turns away
from the sludge he carries inside.