Bitter imagination
I know the wheels on Mendicino avenue
The saint of the rose
Where she goes alone
Only hours behind where the sun goes to set
Grown so tired
And each irrelevant question
Interminable problem
Becomes a fear hard-cast in stone
And even the weightless
Is too heavy to bear
Life is a battle
The world spins rounds of ammunition
The man pains to bring peace
To that city far west of the place I stand

There are no flowers in the desert
Only fruitless land
Barren, dry
And beautiful

People only ever want to ask me about
the poetry -
those verses about
busted up noses in outer space;
about the pros working
way down passed
the corner of Broad and Main;
about fistfights and hard, hard drinking.
But I built a flowerbed this weekend...
Twenty two tastefully irregular stone blocks
in a crescent moon shape,
filled with the blackest of soils.
The sweat of toil.
The digging.
The planting.
Exotic grasses. Asian maybe?
Purple and yellow flowers.
Zinnias or some **** thing.
All covered in a thick blanket of brown mulch.
It's a fine thing to have dirt on your hands
instead of blood.
No one ever asks me about flowerbeds.

I'm tired.
Tired of everything.
I just want to sleep,
And never wake up again.

No, I'm not lazy,
I'm not running away from life.
I'm just tired of the world and myself,
And too tired to change anything.

We rise
not like smoke from the flame
to demonstrate
the Law of Conservation of Energy
-matter shifting forms-
Violent change followed by
heavenward ascension.

We rise
not like the phoenix from the ashes.
No glorious re-emergence from
the ruined form
of what came before.
No rebirth as
the middle stage
of an endless cycle.

Instead
we rise
like an orchid, blooming,
up from the shitheap.
We reach for the sun
even while
our roots sink deep into the filth.

This chain was my home.
This chain is my home.
This chain
will not
always be my home.

I’ve seen a hundred things stranger than
a ship that steers itself.

Not all slaves
have a master
after all.

The setting of traps
has always seemed
like a tacit endorsement
of the mice.

Acknowledgement.
Validation.
Admission of failings as a homeowner –
(cracked baseboards or an unsealed gap in the door.)

We are usually responsible
for our own infestations, after all.

The relationship with the mice is codified
“you are vermin,
I am not.
I will ****.
You will die.”

Thus the mice are transfigured,
Christ-like.
Frozen in fear,
frozen in time,
laid bare
on a sticky, chemical
altar of sacrifice.

Saviors
giving their lives
so that we may preserve
those unwanted crumbs
in the vacant space
between the couch and loveseat
where the vacuum won’t reach.