Think of mole rats,
spiders, mites even,
crawling underneath your
feet without knowledge
or care that you may be
thinking of them.

Think of you, conscious
animal fretting your
mid-twenties or a mortgage
and think of your family,
all blood and genome and
thicker than ******* molasses.

Think of the microscopic
living things which coexist to
make you, animal accident, a
living thing. Bacteria boiling
your stomach, microbes bailing
from your bottom lip. Kiss.

Think of love, in all its
devices, tedium—conquest even.
The smallness of our thoughts,
little whispers skimming the
surface of the pond. Do you
think of what comes after?

What it must
be to be a
poet with
clarity of
thought

bully the knot
in my head
unwound and
***** and
bounding straight
for daylight

God slips from
tongue as phlegm
from lung post-
cigarette

back to back
reel to reel
sitting *** to heel
palm to palm

praying

I've spent paychecks
laying pavement
into bedsheets
bearing teeth

biting holes into
free time
me time
with myself

waiting

twenty one years
stacking unread
newspaper new with
news not bothering
with digestion

to treat the text
as words on paper

*******
transfiguration

sight unseen the
sight of me in
chapel pacing through
Peter as though
for penance

God is meant
a friend to
comfort but
recently its
felt dishonest

a masquerade
a malformation

For the first twenty years since yesterday
                  I scarce believed thou couldst be gone away;
            For forty more I fed on favors past,
               And forty on hopes that thou wouldst they might last.
                    Tears drowned one hundred, and sighs blew out two,
               A thousand, I did neither think nor do,
               Or not divide, all being one thought of you,
               Or in a thousand more forgot that too.
          Yet call not this long life, but think that I
               Am, by being dead, immortal. Can ghosts die?

Crimson red beset
on body and brainmatter,
be it blood or ***.

Some things reek of
sameness. Winter rain
for instance

driving wind whipping
at light poles, chilling
other thoughtless things.

Christmas coming around
in a few weeks, money tight
with bone-cold breeze.

Five people shot in Oregon.
Happy holidays, please remember
to duck and cover.

Write in stanzas. Think in stanzas.
Speak in stanzas. **** your routine.
Sleep less. Go to work drunk.
Yell at inanimate objects. Yell with
inanimate objects. Fly your mother to
San Francisco (coach) and watch the
house for her, the dogs, the child, the
drunk. She is your mother.

You do not like your job. Spend
your days beneath an apple tree and
spend your workdays eating apples
in any given weather. Lie on the floor
of your bedroom belly-flat and smell
the carpet beneath you, all dead flakes
of skin and dog fur, sinew strand of
hair, black dots—tar or shoe-gum or
something other.

Think on your place. Reach to the left,
your side table with glass of water and
lampshade. Feel the hilt, small knife for
your pocket, small pocket. Free the blade,
feel the grooves, gold and blacked-brushed
blade you bought with a flask, a set, two
tiny commodities that may serve you well
in the wild or a shopping mall, what ever
little evils exist away from your bedroom
with its television and soft blankets, slow
mortal shuffle and modicum.

Stop and breathe. Feel the heart in its
always-patter. Know it will stop.
Not fret, no, only knowing.