I once knew a man in a chair
made of cracked maroon hide,

he was wreathed by reefs of smoke
rooted in pipe-glow, and he told me

how youth was all maybes: maybe
I'd pan for gold in a cold course,

maybe love would drape me flashing
in slices like Christmas tinsel, or

maybe I'd **** someone who stumbled
into the road under pitiless wheels.

It's all just a handful of maybes,
held loose, dealt at random

as our paths divide, divide again,
divide into myriad matrices

of still further divisions: because
we're plural, we're entire armies

of fortune, and we fill cemeteries
with our regrets. Strange-faced

angels are also our oldest devils,
& anything can happen to anyone.

Until, said my friend with the pipe,
you reach a certain point in life

when maybe thickens to never.
When sourdough hearts know

that division is over, and it's entropy
steering our dwindling gambles,

when the lacunae are closer, more real
than memories of any yesterday.

I am ten crows, twenty-three starlings,
one tree, a world of racket, every dusk that ever was.

I am a holy heart four angels defend,
other times I am nothing but flesh and fingertips.

There are four seasons, three necessities,
two sides to the moon.

The window has eight panes;
I am in them all.

Shark Week plays on every screen
in the hothouse tavern; the barkeep

wears a Jaws t-shirt and doesn't miss
a single shouted order tho she stares

at silvered flanks grayly gliding
by the man in the cage.

He points his camera at hunks
of blooded gristle-head that lure

the black gape. Hey, says Tom
at the right terminus of the bar,

it's like my wedding photos.
His friends laugh, no one else

is quite sure how funny it was.
The diver doesn't flinch even

when the bars are tusked in
by hunger's muscle; I marvel

& consider that this is a proper
attitude toward death, even if

a touch more Hemingway than
I might normally prefer.

When I exit into wet-wire dusk,
an almost-green marine evening,

I think of how eagerly we anticipate
the remorseless teeth that make

no distinction between us and the bait
we lay in our endless desire to know.

I loved a star that never knew my name,
a silent flame,
fixed in the wreck of night.
Her stillness fooled me
into believing she sang.

She blinked once
in some long-dead century,
and I’ve lived ever since
by ghost light.

They say she's gone,
burned out or broken,
but I keep whispering psalms
to her afterglow,
drinking to the shape she made
in my sky.

I don't need the truth,
just the dream
of her burning.

Like something that waited for me,
not knowing I was too late
the moment I began.

An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.
-John Steinbeck

Lately I've dreamt so much of death
that death surely also dreams of me.

I die in such novel ways, that only
a brain glutted with sticky sleep

could devise: my teeth have the word
"OBITUARY" scrimshawed across them

as I dig myself a grave - my shovel
strikes colossal grandfather clocks

instead of rock and webbed root
in the wet black loam. The worst

feature my father, who vanishes
suddenly mid-sentence, leaving

behind a silence like old books
forgotten and dampstained

on yard sale tables, patiently
waiting for eyes or for fire.

Death: come, play chess with me,
as is your wont; wear Old Shuck

& twin me down the night streets -
anything but this, when I dread

the failure of evening coffee,
& slide unwilling into cold sheets.