Someday, we will be astonished to find
that the time we worked so hard to save
with our rushing ahead to the next,
and the next, and the next....
is not there for us
like an old cigar box full of cash
buried in the backyard.
It’s gone, gone, gone
and no thief in sight.
It can’t be saved, or spent
and it’s never there
but always here
if it’s anywhere at all.

“I have no life.”
These words, spoken ruefully
or in jest, matters little.
The meaning is the same:
my life, as it is,
not important enough,
not exciting enough,
not good enough,
not enough.

Thousands of messages
in a lifetime,
telling us this.
It’s good for business
after all.
Buy the car,
make a statement,
people will notice you.
Join our church
you’re separate from God,
a sinner, we can help.
You need this, and that,
see what others are saying,
dont want to be left out.
Can’t get laid without the cologne,
won’t be loved without the diamond ring.

Our souls crucified
on all these lies,
we go insane,
and wonder why.
“You’re not enough,
go buy more stuff.”
I’d love to see
an ad like that.

If you can reclaim yourself
from beneath the rubble
of all the shoulds, and musts,
you will have achieved something.
As for the rest:
**** it.
All of it.

In the silence
beneath the static,
in the grasping hand
that comes up empty,
in the searching mind
that finds no answer,
in the child’s last “Why?”
and the parent’s exasperated
“Because I said so!”
In all of these things,
there is truth
not to be found
in a thousand sacred scriptures.

Sitting outside, mid morning
warm sun, light breeze
on bare skin.  
Sparrow song,
and the hunting hawk’s cry
that silences it.
Blue sky,
white wisp of cloud,
pull of the Earth
weight of the heavens,
and I see in this moment
that this is really it.  
All of it right here.
And it does not seem
like a trap.
Or if it is,
it’s one big enough
to roam endlessly inside.

“I’m a loner.”
You say, but the TV’s on,
people there, living their lives.
Your favorite family, perhaps.
You wish you were part of it,
laughing, crying with them.

“I’m a loner.”
With the radio on,
someone sings to you,
or talks about politics, religion
and you agree, or yell at them.

“I’m a loner.”
On the computer,
social media, or chatting
with an old friend from high school
or a woman you just met.

Go to some deserted place,
a mountaintop,
some lonely, rocky shore.
Stay there for an hour,
a day, or a year.
What, or who
did you think about?
Then return, and say again
who and what you are.
Or better yet,
say nothing.

A love song
still brings goosebumps
like tiny fingers.
Even my skin
wants to reach out.
We meet, and I know this feeling:
the spark, the currents flowing
between us.
Do I trust it now,
as I have before?  
Or am I too tired
for this, anymore?

I remember being young
watching TV romances
bloom and wither
and wondering why
adults complicate things so.
It must be an act,
they must be pretending,
I thought...

And aren’t we?
Maybe it’s that
I’m tired of,
and not merely
another lost love.

Your daydreams
were my first drug
long before the bottle.
Even now, you ******
with fantasies of revenge,
the perfect woman,
world peace.
Is there an “I” without you?
Are you even “mine”?
You seem to believe
you could survive without me,
that you are immortal, omniscient.
Sometimes you are a friend,
more often an enemy,
like an abusive spouse
I cannot leave.
Master and slave,
liar and prophet,
giving with one hand
stealing my life with the other.
The lies you tell
about what others think
are the worst.
You con me into believing
your story is true.
Occasionally I catch you
at what you are doing.
I shine a light on you,
and you disappear.
You’re nowhere and everywhere,
I hear your laughter,
mocking the oracle’s injunction
to “know thyself.”

Both in the baking Sun,
one says “Slow,”
the other “Please Help.”
But one is a hard worker,
well paid, respectable.
The other seen as a loafer,
a scam artist, a loser.
His paychecks tarnished coins,
straight ahead stares,
and the occasional, “Get a job!”

If, as you say, such a life
is easier than working for a living,
why not give it a try?
You have already invented
that man’s story
before you laid eyes on him.
You wear it like armor
against grey truth.

Perhaps one is more valuable
than the other...
We usually have the sense
to slow down in work zones,
but without such a mirror
our true face
remains hidden from us.

I like to stroll in empty lots, full of weeds
thorns and broken glass.
More peaceful this way
than in some imagined future
when the land is sold off
to the highest bidder and filled
with fast food joints and markets selling
cheap goods made by foreign slaves
and cars frantically searching for the closest
parking space, and people scrambling
for the best deals for as much as they can get
not seeming very happy to get it.
Parents, dragging their kids along
like little sponges soaking up the
living waters of the great marketplace.

I consider all this, and rejoin the passing moment.
A man is walking his dog some distance away.
The dog sniffs, squats, and after,
they both walk away, leaving the **** behind.
I walk on through the tall weeds, swooshing,
catching seeds in the hairs on my legs, a sower.
And every shard of broken beer bottle reflects
Sun and sky, like jewels
in Indra’s net.

I hope one day
I can look at life,
and at you,
like a newborn
that hasn’t yet learned
to smile, or frown,
or the unwritten law
of when he must turn
from the gaze
of the other.
Until then,
sometimes
I just have to stare
at my shoes.

House sitting at Mom’s
and couldn’t sleep, so
I was snooping a bit in the
closet of the spare bedroom.
There’s a box there,
pieces of my childhood in it.
A story I wrote when I was
8 or 9, about a haunted house
A ghost lived there, a ghost
with just a pair of eyes that
watched me wherever I went.
I was alone in this house,
and there were many doors,
thousands of them.
Some led to empty rooms, or rooms
full of skeletons of others
who died before they found their way out.
Some other doors led to long hallways
with thousands of other doors,
and some others led to prisons,
or dungeons with implements of torture.
And I wandered and searched, for years...
according to the child “me”,
until finally I found a secret door I hadn’t seen,
and was free.  
I went home, and my parents were worried,
And happy to see me.

....a ghost watching, many doors,
wrong turns down hallways, prisons...
How did the child know?  
Maybe only children
and those close to death
know anything.  
Or they don’t pretend to know something
that we capable adults pretend to know.

We talk about time
as if it were a space
we travel through....
if I could just get across this space
this empty room that seems
so daunting but the wall
on the other side keeps
moving away from me
and even if I reached it, then what?

And sometimes the room is not empty
but filled with light, shadows, reflections,
things my own paintbrush has created,
childhood beasts that cause me to jump
or hide even though I vaguely remember
painting them myself.

If you have ever been my friend
and in that room we are still laughing
and joyful, or you have been
my enemy and I am still wrestling
with you there,
then please tell me
where you end
and I begin.

All worldly powers
are his, and yet
his decisions are made
with a mind like a rabid mouse.
He got what he wanted,
which was everything,
now everything is his
to lose.

His is not the misery
of privation, cured by
a roof for the night,
a plate of food,
a warm bed,
but the misery of too much,
yet not enough
for which no remedy exists.

I must apologize, for
when I see you
I do not see you
but only my own shadow
cast across your face.

And when you speak,
I cannot hear you
but only the winds
howling through my mind
carrying your voice far from me.

As it is with us
so is it with nations,
like hungry dogs barking at
their own long shadows.
The sun of civilization
low on the horizon.
The hatred perfect, complete
as only self-hatred can be.