I have often wondered
(Though this one time out of respect for the deceased,
I suppressed the urge to ask the question)
Why in hell preachers never seem to own any old pairs of shoes;
Certainly, they must be cognizant
That the when the Lord brings rain
(Though never when, where, or in the proportion we would like,
His way being not our way and all that *******)
The mud is sure to follow, and yet I have never seen a preacher
Who didn’t approach an open grave in shiny new calfskin loafers.
To say that having a man of the cloth approach
The solemn duty of uniting a man with his Maker
Like he was tip-toeing through a mine field puts a burr up my ***
Is to make understatement ******* near an art form;
I have stipulated in my will that I’m to be buried
Smack-dab in the middle of my cow pasture
(The farm itself, sadly, a bit easier to reach
Once the town—over my strenuous objections, I may add—
Decided it was necessary to pave
My section of the Crow Mountain Road)
So when the time comes for the minister
At the Presbyterian church over in Delhi
To spirit me away from this vale of tears to the arms of Jesus,
Hopefully he’ll do so with good honest cowshit
Splattered on his suit trousers.

Car-di-o-meg-a-ly.
That is, apparently, what old Doc Cathey
Scribbled down on Henry’s death certificate,
Though I suspect he simply picked a page
Out of his medical dictionary
And wrote the first thing that looked plausible.
Given that the man was big as a house and soft as a newborn,
It’s **** near a miracle he lived as long as he did,
And he sure as hell didn’t do anything for his longevity
By taking on the cares and worries of every loser and fool
Like they were so many stray kittens.
For myself, I learned long ago where value lies:
You come up to my place,
I can show you an Ithaca Double Shotgun from the 20s
With the blue still on the barrels,
Worth **** near a thousand dollars now,
And Liberty Head ten-dollar coins
That you’d swear were freshly minted.
Now that, my friend, is the kind of thing
Which appreciates over the years,
And if I die alone and unmourned,
Well, that’s pretty much how I came in,
So I’m more or less ahead of the game.
What killed Henry? Well, I’m no M.D, praise God,
But I figure it was his failure to take into account
That saintliness doesn’t pay off
Until a body’s gone and become past tense.

We say
it is wasted
upon the young, to which
Youth retorts, Grampy, I do not
concur.

It’s a ******* good thing there’s no bouncers in church,
(Though your dad’s just the type who would bring in some thugs)
And the lack of an invite left me in the lurch;
All I wanted was one goodbye kiss and some hugs.
I suppose I should have laid off the Prairie Fire,
(Two parts Wild Turkey, and three parts Tabasco)
As the ***** and my broken heart served to conspire
To make the affair something of a fiasco.
It may have been short-sighted to **** in the punch,
Waving my Johnson around like King Arthur’s sword,
And I regret if it ruined the buffet lunch;
I’ve never been the type who liked to be ignored.
Your mouth opened to scream, but didn’t make a sound
(I’ll take that as a sign that you might come around.)

I want to share my light with you.
I want to put it in a jar,
With little holes in the lid to let it breathe.
A little part of me that you can keep.
I want to take it out and share it,
Trap it in a bottle for all to see,
The little light that shines in me,
And shows me the way.
I don’t mind making it a little dimmer,
If I could just make your life a little brighter.
I want to set it on the stand beside your bed
To keep you warm and safe at night,
To remind you,
When no one is around,
That I still love you.

If I love you
I love you diagonally
The rest of my life is vertical
Tall and straight as an arrow pointed skyward,
But a line like that is too thin,
Our love would be balanced on the point,
Our love would fall to the side.
And I can’t love you horizontally either.
Nothing so flat as that,
Not so evenly connected with the ground, no,
Our love has to have some lift to it,
Our love would go nowhere on a flat line.
No, our love is diagonal.
Our love points neither up or down or left or right,
It points in the way it itself choses
Our love rolls down a *****
Gaining speed as it goes
Till it skitters and bounces and points itself
In a new diagonal.
I love you diagonally.

When rooms sleep and birds carry heartache to trees, when light
is gone and peace is woven into dreams: I will build myself a nest
and unfold the poem I stole. I will taste with care the words you
chose, and pretend you wrote them for me.

(I will love, I will love, I will love)

The sensation of a memory,
awoken in the mouth:
a sweetness on the tip
or sourness in a bite.
As we chew a picture forms,
the shifting sunlight drifts
across a single pane of glass -
the taste of time transfixed.

gloves-off, she
leans on her back foot
moves fast and hides tired eyes
behind a battle-blue arm  

from a punch-bloodied mouth
she spills and spits words out on canvas
makes way for cool air- tries to
pacify lungs before they explode, calm
a heart that longs to rebel

she needs to feel loved, but can
be understood only by tracing braille-like-trauma
on her Vaseline skin-
and if she’s not out for the count
she doesn't keep still