Irrevegant scapegoat with uncooked beliefs sheaths his knife when he finds the doubts he worked so hard to bury.

The words don't carry that weight anymore, he mused, and laughing aloud at the faces of the brandy-plied crowd he turns on his heel and vanishes into the rain.

We watch this, silent as only a stunned mass can be when faced with eternity, then turn to each other to mutter low-murmered threats about the night and the sight we'd just beheld.

A special time for all, as we sink back into hell.

What’s your problem?
Is it so bad you have to run
Run away
Run away as fast as you can?
You’re already so gone
Gone
A stranger’s eyes have found a home inside your weary head

Deep inside you
The city burns
I don’t know what it is about this place
That everybody
Seems to be fine just killing time until the end of days

Sleep to forget
Sleep to dream about anything
Anything at all
Sleep will save you
From all the monsters that await your waking like the executioner awaits the gavel’s fall

What’s your problem?
Is it so bad you have to
Lock
Lock yourself away in your dreams?

Count your heartbeats
As long as you’re inside this cage
You will never know what it is to be free

It was you
Who embodied brokenness
So long ago
When my skin was soft and pale,
Lineless as the summer sky.
Clear eyed, then,
In everything but you.

Tonight it is the same
I know your name
Your number by heart -
Now so scarred it
hardly bears the beatings
Of that forgotten mottled sweetness.

And you’re still broken
And I am healed,
healing.

We catch up, old friends.
Flowers blossoming in the wreckage
Of a felled tree.

Oh, to again be nineteen.

In the gas station mirror I look frayed and stringy
The word that comes to mind is “threadbare”
Which I quite like as a descriptive term, but not as an accurate appraisal of my own appearance.
Pale and too thin, wrung out, stretched, and hung up to dry.
****, I always wanted to be thin and now that I am
Turns out, I’m still me,
just thinner.

“And older. No one tells you that when you finally lose the weight, you trade in that fullness for some freshly minted crows feet, smile lines, forehead creases.”

My reflection smirks at me.

“36 and no baby, never even a scare. You know what they say, better get to it, if your insides aren’t already dust.”

Ouch. *******. I pout at my own face and the crease between my eyebrows thanks me for the job security.

A knock on the door, ah! How long have I been in here?? Feeling like an alien, I run the water for a few seconds and hastily exit,
narrowly avoiding a collision with the huffy brown parka waiting for her self evaluation.

- - -

I wonder where it states in the Gas Station Code of Interior Decoration
That all gas station bathrooms must douse each user in the inevitability of their own mortality,
cast in green from the regulation fluorescents.

It’s dry and still in the house this afternoon,
The way houses are at 4:00 in December.
I feel a little itchy and claustrophobic,
Sitting on the floor.
I hate this ******* carpet.
Berber.

I know you love me,
But sometimes I wish you would let me destroy myself completely.

Darkening winter gray settles over us in a dull film,
Berber carpeting the world.
It seeps into the house through cracks in the doorframe you kicked down when we were locked out that night.
Into me too, coating my brain and joints and dreams in liquid fog.
The streetlights will be dark awhile yet.

Cotton ***** fill up my mouth
And I’m fine, just fine.
My grandmother’s favorite color was gray before people awarded points for such things.

It’s nearly night, now, and the sky swirls with peek a boo pink and blue where the clouds are thin and blowing.
No streetlights yet.
The shadows gather at their feet.
I pull out the spaghetti;
Time to start dinner.

The air is heavy with a million million souls
Parts of wholes that escaped in the breaths of prayers
Whispered at windows of the desperate and the faithful
In the apple-core-rot towns and cities of America.

I’m standing in my driveway
And I can feel them all,
Bearing down like storm clouds in the heat.
Another offering could bring the heavens crashing to my feet.

My forehead is sweating, standing there in my driveway,
And I wipe it with the back of my hand,
Squinting into the haze.
The waves of energy
Their ecstatic mass vibrating, buzzing, clicking
A dog’s toenails on linoleum  
A tiny ear pressed to a mother’s chest as she hums. A heartbeat.

I feel dizzy
and wonder if the entirety of the universe
is made of the hopeful, wasted energy of unanswered prayers

I will dig a deep well inside myself to deposit the seeds of doubt, I say to myself and no one and the universe,
and despairing for the orphaned dreams surrounding me,
I give in to the indulgence of wishing.

The sky sags under the weight of a new plea
As I prepare to forget

I’ve been unsupported lately.
Not a leg to stand on.
Some would call it untethered.

Floating.

A kinder soul might liken it to flying,
But they would be wrong.

Flying starts and ends with both feet on the ground.

It’s been a prolific day
David Berman and I spent it together:

Me on his Wikipedia page,
Wondering at his language
Broken hearted over his final great collection of art,
A self-titled album released under the moniker Purple Mountains;

Him a genius
And dead
Tortured by his inability to change the world
Self loathing and addicted,
The son of a gun and liquor lobbyist who is quoted as saying, “I will miss him more than he was able to realize.”

It’s the ultra absorbent ones who make the best artists
Walking around in a store somewhere and wanting to die for the brutality of it all
Nothing brings the raw desperate animalism out from where it’s buried in the Stone Age like good old fashioned American capitalism.

(Last week I ate a gummy before going Christmas shopping and had a panic attack in a cute little boutique while buying a puzzle for my niece.
My sister-in-law told me I looked like I was seeing things
But it was the loosening of the barriers,
the flood of conflict and dissonance,
every person a song and all the songs playing at once,
tidal wave,
a cacophony of primary and secondary emotions.
This is why I don’t eat gummies).

It isn’t fair
I guess
That the ability to be so penetrated by truth isn’t beautiful
It should be beautiful
Like that shrimp, right? That can see a whole universe of colors unreachable by any other animal in existence.
An elevated understanding of truth should be like that shrimp
-The mantis shrimp, I remember now-
Truth cones like with sight…every texture and flavor of enlightenment.

In David Berman’s case, he piled substances onto the fire of his brain to ***** it out
And haven’t we all lain in a dark room on a sunny day
Haven’t we all found our habits

Instead of lamenting the curse of the truth addicted artist, as I have done most of the day,
I will tell a story
(this is true)
of my 17 year old niece Sophie
Who, when she was 9, demanded to know the Real Truth about Santa Claus.
Her friends were insistent, and she didn’t want to be left behind.

My sister, not one to mince words, told her directly and plainly,
and when Sophie asked, who then? Do you buy all of our Christmas presents every year?
again my sister gave it to her straight.

Sophie’s eyes began to swim, just as my sister suspected they might,
But when she went to comfort her daughter,
to try to convince her that magic isn’t in the elusive but in the every day
She was met with simply,

“Oh, thank you, mommy. Thank you.”

It was unexpected
I can’t be expected to be right all the time
I said
And poured another glass of wine
It was reasonable
I reasoned
That I should have more

Are you feeling it are you feeling it?
It’s the ghost girl in the bathroom
It’s the dreams and screams and half moon
It’s the ghost girl in the tide pool
Are you feeling it?

Did you pass out
Or fall asleep in the deep end
Are you holding onto defense
Are you holding on at all?
So much blue in this ocean
They said it would be green
Its blue
I’m through with you
I’m through

Are you feeling it, are you?
It’s the ghost girl in the bathroom
It’s the meaning that escapes you
It’s the ghost girl in the tide pool
Are you feeling it?

I can cross my eyes
In the middle of the night
I can’t be expected to always be alright

There.

Are.

Horrible.

Things.



You.

Are.

Responsible.  

For.


No.

One.

Knows.


The.

True.

Meaning.

of

Regret.

Predawn is the most underrated time of day, if you ask me
Blurry lines and street signs
Cast in hazy yellows and oranges from the burning sodium vapor in the street lamps
That iconic suburban glow,
Stark against the impenetrable blueblack sky and all the mysterious silhouettes cut jaggedly against it.

(A staggering feat, to beat back the darkness. Humanity.)

The pavement shines bright gold - must have rained - fading to bronze,
rose,
purple,
finally disappearing into nothingness,
a question mark.

Pillbox houses,
neat rows in every direction,
squat mutely,
some with their own brief reach of a lamp in the window or the warm assurance of a porch light -
Even the occasional sharp cough of a security spot,
high beams razor white,
primed for each raccoon and every vague, faceless fear.

“We never thought it could happen here.”

Ah, but the unsalted dough of the middle class is a subject for the afternoon

This is the royal Morning’s expectant hour.
She wanders eternally,
accompanied only by her barefoot unrest, bathing the earth in her wealth of unspent moments,
untold riches of possibility streaming from the many secret folds concealed within the depths of her ermine cloak.

(Am I hopeful or fearful of the coming day? Are the paltry occupations of one electrified grain of stardust worth a thousand words?)

The flat sleepy windows of the sleepers and the risers,
grumbling caffeine addicts and early birds, night owls with their midnight oil long spent,
dreamer and seekers lost on the astral plane and the merry punching rumble of the bustling workforce’s well-rehearsed choreography hold court over this rarest domain,

while the Fates, ever watchful, hand select the paths to put before us.  
Each choice a thread.
Each decision a stitch.

Polka dot trees
They're supposed to be cedars
A collage for my mother
For Christmas Day.

Asleep on the sofa
You wait for me
Quietly breathing
You give yourself away.

I could be painting
But it's four in the morning
The day that awaits me
Is silently dawning.

We'll drive to my parents
I finish this there
Sleep is impatient
In its persistent glare.

Goodnight to the bakers
Goodnight to the bells
Goodnight to the sleepers
In their comfortable cells.

The first night we met
You showed me your guitar collection
- an impressive one -
And we played Get Together by The Youngbloods
-You on a gorgeous 12-string electric,
And me on some other guitar, I don’t remember-
for my parents and their friends and your wife Robin. Singing in harmony.
You were much better at guitar than me.

You offered me *** that night,
And I said no thanks
Not trying to be a *****.
I knew that your hips and back caused you pain and that Vicodin and red wine were a part of your diet.
But you got high anyway
And we talked about guitars.

When you came to see me play
You sang from the audience.
“A Little Help From My Friends,” I think, and
when I sang Hallelujah at the end of the night you cried, saying it was the most beautiful thing you’d every heard.
The next day, at The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you wandered through the exhibits in reverent awe,
A cane lighting your way like a candle.

I know it hurt to walk that much
But you were determined to see all of it;
I left.
Having seen it before.
“I was on the HBO special in 2020” I told you, puffed like a rooster.
And you said that you would watch;
That I have what it takes.

“He was a big fan of yours,”
My father likes to say, like I don’t know.
A person always knows.
Your reworked Gibson a fresh addition to my own growing collection; who could pass up an SG?
Sold for nothing and only because I liked it that first night.

And now you’re gone and your wife is undone and I am so angry with you.
I wonder, would you have listened to me?
Had I reasoned with you about your health problems
The increased risk
The pros and cons?

And maybe it was your time
But maybe if you had fortified yourself against the devil you knew
By taking on the devil you didn’t
We would have had time
For one last duet.

I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the lord, but you don’t really care for music do you? It goes like this: the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall, the major lift, the baffled king composing hallelujah.

Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.
Hallelujah.

Is there anything more pure
Than a dog who curls up at your side
And leans her sweet meaty head against you
And falls asleep,
Dreaming her dreams as she snores?

A studied and precise move,
(the snoring is key for peak adorableness) clinically proven to woo your human into giving you a bite of her dinner.

I am out of practice.
So many parts of my former self swirl around like the last catch of a half-remembered dream.
I am out of practice.

Having a baby will change you, they say.
and they’re right.
I am changed.

But tonight I am the same me of a thousand me’s ago, the whole me, the core.

It’s hope.
That’s the instigator,
and I hope my daughter can see that.

Your whole me is worth fighting for.

There’s a monster lurking
Jerking
Working at the chains fixed to the wall

It’s gnawing,
ever sawing
Ever sawing through the gristled gall

And here I am
A traitor
Telling tales
Upon the bristled ball

Oh treason, tongue of daggers, poison apple take the fall!

I stare into the maw.

- - -

I wander through the mists of mourning
Pearls adorning every limb
As tears.

They drop and drip,
they pour in
waves, cascades
they coat my lips as fears

And warnings, death and din
And here I am, a berth of sin
A deer,

the headlights imminent,
the rain downpouring,
glistening and raw;

I stare into the maw.

The wall
That boundary between just enough and too much
Slammed into me sometime yesterday.
The candle had burnt out and I was in the dark.
It caught me by surprise,  
And as I melted into a puddle of exhaustion
I cried out,
I’m sorry,
I swear I didn’t see this coming.

I’m eating this cake
Your homemade fruitcake
And it’s something, alright.
Bitter and sour,
Like rye bread with cherries.

The holidays are never easy
And this year is a testament to
The sour
Bitterness
That’s grown between us
Dark with sweet icing
And made with love beneath the dense
Thick
Dry
Cake
That makes up your smile
And mine, too.

A homemade fruitcake
Ripe for the picking.

I lick my fingers.

Delicious.

It's
strange
to
me
to
write
one
word
at
a
time
on
each
line.

Who
speaks
like
that?

Poetry,
I
think,
should
be
a
conversation
between
you
and
your
soul.

Your
soul
may
not
understand
unnecessary
intermittent
pauses.

Well.

I
don't
understand
unnecessary
intermittent
pauses.

Case
in
point:

Writing
this
was
difficult.

(It's
probably
a
literary
weakness.)

I
imagine
that
a
soul
would
speak
in
at
least
partial
sentences
without
such
halting
spasmodic
twitches.

Unless it doesn't. I am not your soul. If you find wholeness and depth and truth by writing this way, then carry on.

*******.

(There's the rhyme. There's always a place and a time for convention.)

Ida!

What a name
From another world, you are.

It’s still your house, Ida.
Like all the **** I sold to manage this move,
All that **** is still
Mine…in a way…if you consider things to be infused with the life of the owner,
Which I do.
That Holy Grail, for instance,  gave me extended foot problems
From kicking the switch in the soft middle of my socked foot during every band practice at Karah’s house.
No shoes allowed.

So my foot injury now lives as a legacy in that pedal, even though my pipe fitter buddy bought it from me as his first pedal.
(He has money and real deal gear and I feel kind of sad for him that he’ll miss the experience of hacking away on a $300 setup with borrowed effects.)


So right we all get the metaphor, it’s one I use often, that we leave ourselves behind wherever we go.

And Ida, your pink appliances and your pink tile and your pink wallpaper
Well
It makes me
Glad
To know you.

We can share this home, this stake you drove into your own heart in 1960.
I’m glad you got to die here, Ida
Amidst your pink at 98.

I like pink too.
I do hope that if your spectral expression decides to reveal itself to me,
That it is to give me tips on how best to preserve the pink enamel sink
And not to box my ears for snapping the light switch
Instead of placing it.

This is how it happens
Obsession then compulsion
Humming humming, jet propulsion
Palms to temples, heat emulsion

Pulling at the thread pulling at the
Thread pulling at the
Thread pulling
At the
thread
Thread pulling at until there’s

nothing in my head
Nothing in my
Head nothing in my
Empty underfed
Head
Nothing in my head

I’m just pulling at the thread

Pulling pulling

Pulling at the

At the thread
Pulling pulling at

Until
It
Stops.

I kicked an ant today.

It was coming right for my bare foot, so I kicked it. The thought of its tiny feet tickling my giant feet made me feel ill.

Generally insects don't bother me, but ants. Ants, with their underground tunnels and their abilities to carry a zillion times their body weight, with their appearance in my kitchen every spring from seemingly nowhere even though my kitchen is clean and inhospitable to them - I hate ants.

I was outside, the ant's domain, on my back patio enjoying the beautiful weather and the newness of spring. It wasn't fair of me to kick him like that in his own domain, and yet.

I wonder what I would do if I was kicked by a giant. I would probably die, land in a heap and break all my bones and die. That ant almost certainly didn't die, but I wonder if it hurt. Do ants have very many nerve endings? A question for the ages.

Before I kicked that ant, I was reading some old poetry and letting the sun warm me and the light breeze riffle through my hair, avoiding work and thinking about my life and the big question marks that punctuate my waking moments with their soft severity. ******* this brain and it's forever worrying.

The worrying is the problem. I should spend more time doing.

But I don't. Instead I write poems and kick ants and daydream about finding a home where I can begin my Real Life.

Because this isn't it, is it?
Is it?

Kicking things out of my way that make me uncomfortable? Finding the sunshine and basking like a lizard? Reading poetry?

Actually, I think I can live with that.
That, and fewer ants.

It is rare that I see me in you.

Oh my word, they all say,
She looks just like her daddy!

They’re right, of course.
The snub of your nose, the sleepy turn of your eyes,
The golden autumnal hue of your shining hair.

No, I rarely catch my reflection in your mirror.

This morning, though,
you didn’t know I was looking.
You were staring out the window, music playing in the background,
At some blissful something in the cloudy October sky
And I flashed to the moon chasing the car when I was six years old.
Nine.
Thirteen.
Listening to Paul Simon and Linda Ronstadt with dreamy ears in the dark backseat of my parents’ old GM conversion van:

“Joseph’s face was Black as night, and the pale yellow moon shone in his eyes.”

And suddenly I’m blinking back tears on the way to the babysitter on a pearlescent early-fall day,
Fearing as sharply as hoping,

Please god let her have inherited the moon.

Every job interview
Feels like fighting to prove that
I deserve to exist.

Sitting at the kitchen table in a towel
Eating strawberry yogurt,
I wonder if I’ll leave on time.

32 minutes and counting.

I should be asleep
Or playing the guitar.

I should be planning my next moves
Like the spider who lives in the screen door
Always weaving, weaving,
Catching her flies.


I should be asleep
Or playing the guitar
Or planning, weaving,
Catching flies.

Whoever heard of a person who just sits?

Yet here I sit.

Just.

Sitting.

“I think there’s something wrong with you and that’s okay,” she sings with all her heart
and strums the guitar with my pick.
I’m in charge of the chords,
holding the guitar so
she can reach it where she sits.
We dream it up together, but
I phone it in
I admit.

A, D, E - 1, 4, 5 -
arbitrarily chose.
She keeps it alive with her prose
Just 5 years old
A poet with her eyes closed.

You can be anything you want to be, and that’s okay as long as you’re happy.

Like she knows
The greatest longings of the whole of humanity,

Like she’s peered into the depths of the vast ocean of broken hearts,
And know this is the best place to start…

Like it’s easy.

“It’s okay”, she sings with closed eyes,
and strums the guitar in musical bliss.

And it is. For that moment. For a heartbeat.

It is.

I used to be a *******.
Now I’m just dumbfounded.

This place is a wasteland
Wasted potential
Food
Opportunity
Wasted at the bar, looking at your hands
“how could you do this to me?”
What happened to beauty?
And who will be the bad guys in the movie?

If a fascist takes a **** on the floor, will it land in 1984?
We’re at war
We’re at war
If you’re not rich you’re poor

We’re not the ones keeping score.

My lips are chapped;
The winds were high on the mountain.

The evidence of the climb smacks in the dryness and hunches in the body:
Curled in the arches of the feet, in the biceps;
roped across the shoulder blades;
crisscrossing the palms of the hands and the flanks, stippling the spine.

I sit for a long time afterward
Shivering in the car with the heat streaking the windshield.
I just sit
Staring at the windex smears where I recently tried to clean the windows-down grime of the summer.
I don’t remember how to get to your house -
The climb stripped your address from me
Like it stripped everything.

I experiment with the emergency release on my ankle
As the song Birds by Dominique Fils-Aime rises like smoke from the bottom of the car.

They find me in the morning in my front seat,
Completely flat from a slow leak in the pressure valve,
And gently cradle my head as they lift,
Out of the car and under a mountain
(Under, now)
Of softness and fragrant sweetness so I can sleep for as long as my deflated body will let me
Before it’s time again for the air compressor,
Time again, as always, to climb.

I read a beautiful poem once by a poet named Mary Oliver
(My uncle will tear out pages of The New Yorker sometimes and keep them in a box  the way some people of a certain age do)
called The Poet With His Face in His Hands.

“You want to cry out for your mistakes,” she says rightly and wisely, “But to tell the truth the world doesn’t need any more of that sound.”

Mary Oliver tells me (she has my attention now, she speaks directly to me, my face in my hands) that if I’m going to do it anyway, that I should travel far away from civilization where I won’t bug anyone, a noisy place, like a waterfall or the Internet, where I can scream unheard, a tree falling in the forest. Where I can “drip with despair” unobserved by nature her very self.

Mary Oliver doesn’t want to hear it.

So I go.
I take my hiking boots and my entire supply of shame, guilt, rage, doubt,
Fear
I slip it all into a secret compartment just behind my ribs
And we set off together past the city limits to the wastes.
They’re crushing me, the wretched fruit of my faulty design. Too heavy to go on tonight.

I quietly wish Mary Oliver had never been featured in The New Yorker where my uncle would find her, where she would mildly wait for me to crash into her on my world tour of destruction.
I wonder into my dinner
(beans, like cowboys)
if Mary Oliver ever trekked to the waterfall, if I’ll find her there,
an etching, a manifesto.
I imagine myself stepping through, somber, monk-like, and Mary Oliver’s glowing apparition slowly gathering before me.
“You’re so cool and smart,” her energy-being murmurs,
and I wake up feeling important.

Cleveland is so grey in the winter,
my grandmother’s favorite color,
like that song.
The morning sky rides my shoulders and I feel deliciously tragic,
a broken-hearted pioneer woman, maybe, escaping into the wilderness to mourn the loss of her baby…****, too sad.

…to mourn the loss of her old mule Hank, and to find herself among the…
I look around. Generic Cleveland Trees. ****.
I wish I knew about local foliage,
everyone is impressed by a person who is At One With Nature.
I would know if I were a tragic yet somehow glowing from within pioneer woman. Head down, wondering how it can be 53 degrees on December 10th and trying not to think about the polar bears.
I soldier on.

Mary Oliver recommends traveling 40 fields and 40 dark inclines of rocks and water.
(A sweeping arial shot of me traversing the expanse, majestic hair blowing behind like Vigo Mortenssen at Helm’s Deep).

Beans again, like cowboys.

I feel good tired and wonder where a person finds quality poetic landscape like 40 fields and 40 dark inclines of rocks and water.

I didn’t really think this through.

An itch, a burn behind my ribs,
like stars,
like cravings.

A peek.

Just one! Just one, Mary Oliver,
just a ****,
they’ve been in there for days with so little attention.

No one answers, inevitably.
No one’s there, just me, always just me, alone with all of my worst days in the dark in the woods.  

Just one peek.

I wake up and its bright as hell.
What the ****.
What is the point of trees if they don’t dramatically block out the sun at your lowest moment?
The sun.
I squint and automatically say a little thank you,
the sun is so rare in the winter.
A ritual in the cold light.

I flash in, awash with readiness
It’s sudden
Something is coming or something was here but my stomach hollows out like a fake-out gut punch

Was here
Something was here, last night, it’s surrounding me on all sides
Yes that’s right, I remember and Im sorry for the remembering because I’m creative
and before I can stop myself
I’m swallowed whole into the darkness
Just like I wanted.

It’s a struggle,
The swirling absence of light from last nights indulgent, masochistic self-harm parade has expanded like smoke to fill the third space of my body. I am 2 dimensional, a 3rd grade drawing of a person, flat and scribbley, a poor representation.

They always come back.
Sure as eggs.
Sure as taxes.
The greatest hits, everyone was there,
Ripe and healthy,
My well tended heirloom misery, dismal in the garden and aching to stretch its creeping vines.
A vessel to feed on, a disciple,
Bleeding on the alter of self sacrifice, oh happy dagger, ecstatic drag over the open mouths of those cherry coals. Faithless and perfect. Crimson crisp is a broken spirit,
Brittle like nails, and sleep, and ego.

My friends, too, wars within wars. Pale and desperate. Trauma-bonded and aging faster than their parents did, who bought a house, who had three kids, who saved for college. Wars within wars. Shame, guilt, rage, doubt, fear. Pain. So much pain.

I’m lost.
I’m lost in the ******* woods and this poison smoke so black so black it’s in my eyes burning my throat my lungs swirling now sure as eggs sure as taxes I repent I release my will please it’s crushing me I can’t make it Mary Oliver, you shining city on the hill, where are you, Im losing, Im alone, alone, no one knows
Not a cowboy, or a pioneer, or a ranger, or a monk in a waterfall cave.

I’m a poet with my ****** face in my hands.
I’M THE POET WITH MY FACE IN MY HANDS AND I WILL NOT FEAR CRYING ALOUD FOR MY MISTAKES.

They come then. Every one of them, as I knew they would, just outside the gate and waiting ravenously  
My endless flaws  
Powerful and obstinate in their glaring humanity
The constellations of hurt snaking from the roots of my well kept garden
Barbed and bound to everyone I ever loved. The horned monsters of unresolved trauma and the ego machine

Deafening static roar, mechanical swarm of devouring plague locusts
descending upon the 40 fields
Oh here, oh now
In the dark of course
Where else but the smoking vessel of my brokenness
I want to laugh at myself for constructing a cliche within my own self reckoning
Choking on my own toxic exhaust and crying  and choking
This is hysteria, I think
Blurred and muffled on the edge of the hole, a ******* slurring descent, it’s there if I want it
I could dive in and

Mary Oliver.

What is happening,
What the ****, Mary Oliver?
Of whom I’ve never seen a photo,
who is crowning now from the bubbling tar pit, who has chosen this  moment to reveal herself, a nice touch.
She rises from the epicenter of my chaos
Like a blinding beacon of holographic light
(Again I check in with myself that it’s weird she is holographic, why is she made of rainbows)
Beautiful and terrible and 10000 feet high
My mighty dragon. What an entrance.

I laugh again, of course Rainbow Bright  is my big bad, how did I not see this coming, the final girl against the final girl, myself against my greatest self betrayal
She is me
She is arbitrary denial
She is suppression and avoidance
She is vying for approval
For attention
Validation
Every embarrassing moment and every unbidden 3am attack of self loathing.  
Shame and guilt and doubt and rage and fear.
She is my pain, this awful manifestation, this truly depressing personification of all of my absolute *******…

MARY OLIVER I AM THE POET WITH MY HEAD IN MY HANDS

Blink

Blink blink

She turns and sweeps down
And grabs me tightly, ****, oh god you have a nest dont you?

Through the air and I’m wet and dripping and…
is this a cave?

An etching, I have to find something
Something
A manifesto
I desperately search and my teapot is boiling, boiling, boiling over

And there behind that jubilation and water fun
I find no trace of Mary Oliver, who is me and I am her

There in that moment when nothing has been gained and my body begins to release from its own tension and collapse into itself from exhaustion and despair
I notice the air
Fresh and cool and fragrant and something else too
My dragon, far from slain, squirming a little inside me, feeling prodded and suspicious of this quenching.
At least we had this moment
Oh it’s you
Oh god it’s me

And finally then,
I throw my head back

And wail.

Feeling the rain more than hearing it
6:24 dark and threatening
It’s so cold in this ******* basement

2 hours and 36 minutes away
Crouching in plain sight
The work day.

Delivering food for the food bank, which is punk as **** frankly,
It’s a wasteland out here
And people need to eat

(A human right, if I understand the constitution correctly. Happiness is a lost pursuit in a body that’s hungry. You say food is a privilege <yes, you said it and believed it>, I say it’s life and liberty.)

Two 15 pound bags at a time
In exchange for baggage a mile high
Stacking cred against labor to build tone in your thighs

My joints wonder how young I think I am
Remembering the time my leg seized up and that old man just stared until I saw him see me and I smiled, I’m so silly

Hurry before all this pain ripens to taste
Slug it down like tequila
Try not to make a face
Born at the finish line, running in place.

2 hours and 26 minutes to make the coffee and absorb the caffeine
While I’m still me
And there’s nothing else to be

The monsters don't hide in the closet, or under the bed, or in your head all full of juice. They roost. It's not their fault, following through with some innate longing they're called to.

It's a simple, impish existence, these monsters, who might prefer to be doctors or lawyers or sound designers for Alice Cooper or Rob Zombie or Blondie; alas they burrow and nest inside my ***** laundry.

A wise person might have said, "Take care, kiddo, and guard your head against the evil that so easily nestles there." I reflect on this through the cloudy density of my beer an wonder, could he have been right? Might I fallen intrigued, ensnared, by the casual taunt of an apple's dare?  

We climb the beanstalk for the giant only; the goose is second hand. The giant's defeat is the glory. It doesn't matter what the stakes contain, live or die, princess or mother or cow or land, as long as a marching band greets us at the end of the ride.

The monsters don't hide in the closet, or under the bed or in you head full of juice. They roost, and they can't help us themselves in a world full of books gathering dust on shelves overlooked where their hardcovers guard against  stray shells unloosed.

There’s something so comforting
In trading in everything
The taking and giving
Of motherhood

What does it mean to be whole?
Shifting your insides around an additional soul?
The pain and the toll
Of motherhood

How to express
The vastness of universes
Alongside the mundane  
Of getting dressed in the morning?

There’s something so absolute
Something so boundlessly true
In the brown of the root and the red of the fruit
In the green of the shoots
Of motherhood

There’s a certain blurry gentleness to denial
A Tylenol bottle cotton plug of protection
Muting the inevitable rattling,
A scratchy puff, a cloud,
Shoving it down into the bottle
Until it’s wedged Somewhere Else
now just a half a whisper you can almost hear
On a tv with no subtitles

I like it here.
Swaddled against such unpleasantness
Nestled and unfocused.
That’s the key.
Focus your attention on anything for too long and you’re *******
The spell will be broken
That little whisper
Now a shard of glass
Now unforgiving and sharp edged on your naked awareness

Now, it insists
Now
Hear me NOW

NO, ****!
So many wishes spill out when you lose,
The blood of your unreason stinging your eyes like black pepper
Like a floodlight in a dark room
Pluck it out or shove it down
It will find a way to find you
Outside or inside you
In front of or behind you

You can’t escape this time
Or can you?

If you sink to the bottom you can hide awhile
With the anchor on your ankle
And the waves on every side caressing, pressing oh so gently
Like a kiss, like a smile.

Bliss endless and tidal
Like denial.

In the photo, the grass looks silver,
not dead and brown at all,
but vibrantly,
defiantly alive.

Not dead, no, not at all.
Just different than what I expected.

It may surprise you to know that I feel sorry for you.

Yes.
You.

With your gigantic shadow,
Punishments fresh on your tongue
for any unfortunate friend or foe or relative
Who happens to wander across your path and blunders instead upon Vesuvius

You

Ever the open wound,
the heavy hand.
So much resentment to stoop beneath

it must be exhausting.

The cuts on your forehead so deep
The ****** of the sentinel’s spear
You’d have everyone believe they’re real.

I’m sorry to tell you
That every vicious blow and blown blackjack hand dealt:
blow backs from your own blustering
By which those fingers cast the first stone,
That voice eagerly weeps
and gleefully moans
Oh cruelty, oh woe!

You,
The alpha and the omega
The House and the player

I feel sorry for you
and your blindness,
That no one will ever speak up,
but instead will silently watch you run into walls.
You’ve conditioned us all,
As we watch you lay the bricks,
To take the blame for your bruises.

It’s a shame, too.
You have such beautiful gemstone eyes

And yet,
as any professional would tell you,

they lack clarity.

You broke my heart today.
I worked your words around my mouth
And spit them out,
Each one a traitor to my tongue.

It’s funny how a dark red wine mood
Can shatter one’s bones.
Maybe this would hurt
If the neuropathy hadn’t set in
So heavy.
You know the numbness so well
It’s as if you feel it yourself.

I’m glad you’re free of grief
But the pain
The pain
You breathe it like fire
All of us alight in the heat of its flame.

I caught you in a dead faint
And set you on your feet again.
You’re not who you used to be
But still, you’re my sister.
That has to count for something.

Forbidden night, with your sheltered hours.
How I long to paint you in broad strokes, adding water to the brush,
That you may spread and extend your precious mercies beyond the borders of your designation,
up and out into the wicked day.

May the sun forgive me for bankrupting its grand offering in favor of the always-waning dark, when it’s easier to walk between worlds without touching.
Daylight brings out the conquerers and also the conquered,
creating a vacuum that devours the air between gaps in the dimensions,
the grind and squeeze of many lungs contracting at once.

And although every period of light and compression is followed by a period of darkness and grasping strangeness, I am never unsurprised by the strength of my enduring love nor less enchanted by the singularity of our shadowy and permissive embrace. I have traveled great lengths to con my own rhythms into abandoning  their posts.

Oh night, I hold on to you like a new bride at a military wedding,
resolute in the knowledge that you will only return once you’ve already gone.
No sooner do you pull from my arms do I finally rest, too early and too late for a gentle landing onto the unforgiving surface of the sunrise.  

the hourglass breaks and so appears Morpheus, great and ancient, to call down black night upon the wretched world.
For it was agreed that once per cycle, the world must lose itself in necessary madness, and thus rests the cosmic balance upon which fares the day

The air is magic
In the same way a human nervous system is divinely inspired by tree roots

As tree roots seek other tree roots to bind to, sharing nutrients and information underground in secret tongues lost to time (but not to trees),
So too does the nervous system talk to our various insides,
electricity and fat and water and blood,
mysterious even to us as we haphazardly propel ourselves through space,
a mess of actions and reactions.

Magic

In the same way that time exists only because death exists
And death exists both because of and in spite of time.

And I am alive.

(If you ever doubt yourself, remember the incredible odds you overcame just to become).

Months maybe, a year?
We were unmasked in your home or mine,
Or on a walk
Or texting our words into knitted ropes that became our strength and our life line
And you said
“I never realized how connected we all are. That every moment spent with others, I am breathing their breath. We’re sharing breath, all of us, all the time.”

Oh.
Oh. Yes.
Lashes of breath like lizard tongues
Forked and solid and hot
Plunging and coiling;
Ariel losing her song.

(I carry this with me still, like I carry the threat of the possibility of blood drying in the veins, crystallizing there.)

A sharing of totems, airborne on the exhale, between the vastness of humanity.
Maybe it’s a
Heart,
feather,
child,
guitar string,
equation,
pet,
sense memory

- a bit of mustard,
a crumb of cheese -

a shame,
a secret,
an illness,
a loss,
a hope,
a flame,
a diary entry,

a passage in a story that is so written on your DNA that your ancestors will possess its truth and sacredness,

Not ******, but nakedness.

The unknowable intricacies that terraform the gallery walls of every life ever lived,
Each of us a cavern sprawling brimming with a trail mix of escaped fragments of other souls, nestled among our own wreckage and music and roots of trees.

This invisible connection to each other,
so wrought now, warped and vivid
against the sky.  
Drawing breath as drawing sword,
building blocks as barriers built,  
We are withdrawing from each other in our sick rooms,
dosed on breath from birth,
suddenly forced into thickened singularity for an easier swallow, weighted heavy on the chest.
Oh I know, it’s the X-ray blanket at the dentist when you were a kid
It’s Ian’s sweaty shaking hand during that first detox, 20 bars deep, wanting to tell him that I ******* told you so, I TOLD you. Knowing that no one’s voice would ever be louder than his own.

You look at me,
And I’m losing you.
I see it like bitterness on your lips
But I don’t mind.
You’re right, I’m exhausted too.
I wish I was better at being frank.
How, though, to make sense of this new world if not to drag the old world into it?
How to point and name and say “this is”
When all you know is what it is not?

Metallic pinging behind my right ear
Reminds me
That this
Is the first quiet moment
I’ve experienced all day

Sometimes it just feels like what you thought was your purpose in this life has been buried under the weight of the expectations of others

or leftover guilt

or a series of catastrophically poor decisions.

And you look around and see it all:  

the beauty
and horror
the good
and the awful

and you hate yourself for taking advantage of your peace and safety and relative health, complaining instead that you're lonely and lost.

But sometimes, man,
sometimes you just don't want to get out of bed because you know that it all:

the beauty
and horror
the good
and awful
the loneliness
and questioning
the self-disgust

is going to be there until the end of time, and your body is gathering rust, it's so heavy, pinned under all of that weight
(stupid brain so concerned with the micro and macro)
so you roll over and try to black it all out.

I mean, you have to keep going.
You have to.
Other people do.
People suffer every day and keep going.

There is nothing special or urgent or interesting or even particularly DESERVED when it comes to your silly problems.

But it doesn't mean that they're not there.

The whole world is suffering, and we don't know where the band aids are.

It's hard to write poetry
When the world is so terrible
And people are suffering
And I am not.  

It seems selfish, uncaring, aloof.

If there's time for writing, then there's time for action!

I have to remind myself that writing is action, humble as it is
And creating a small piece of art to send out into that great collection of consciousness

- even if it's a blip on the screen, even if the universe doesn't notice, even if people continue to suffer and all seems so lost -

is a tiny tip of the scale toward light and beauty
and away from injustice and insanity.