Messengers bring me no messages,
teachers do not raise your voices,
like a flag I will raise my hand, like
a mad dog looking up on a hill
in the afternoon, I will smell you out
in the dead water where my tongue
is held captive, if it is to be silent
it will be silent in my mouth
where darkness and the scent of roses
come out like smoke, I smoke alone
in the woods to be smoking
so I can say I have smoked,
I call out madam
shall I undress you for a fight,
the wars are naked that you wage tonight
in a bed as broad as a battlefield
as the sword you mock the fallen with
and the angel says what is dead is
dead, I dream what I dream.

Near morning
by the sea
where I tangle
with the shadows
like a cage of sad tigers
by a grave I find a rope ladder
left by a thief
as the tide steals my eyes,
prisoners of time
without a hammer
trying to drive a stake
in the ground
and this is my crime
living and dreaming.

Death can do strange things,
like time-lapse photography,
undress those quite bored, or
make a patron saint out of a fool,
turning sleek idiots into monks
more mysterious than Rasputin.

What a place to drink, the casino
death runs, nothing fancy or beautiful,
a blind man called Dark Island
taking requests on a piano with keys
worn dull as bone handled knives.

A place the lost can find work, graceless
and not made in America without a living,
all these odd jobs death can do, like art,
factory smoke blown in the eyes of women
in Senegal making overalls for Walmart.

I said I love you in the field of honor
and she was like a colt, her name
like the moon caught in my throat,
she was water I held in my hands
like the canoe I worked through the river,
and she was a flash at two-thirty
in the morning of the suicidal knife,
and she was a fire of pine cones,
a butterfly that lit on the float of my pole,
and she was like the night herself.

All of his letters ended in goodbye
instead of to be continued

someday we're all going to die
my brother, he would say

now he's got me saying the same
words like the moon and darkness
that only we could hear

he'd listen to the blues and sip whiskey
until morning, then wake me
from my sleep, tell me to go out

and cut the weeds
growing up around the stone
angels in the field.

I have compared my love
to the lazy, the no good
and to crazy girls of the past,
to my first truck, to a spell,
a moth and a bottle, to the hell
bending moon, if you could tell,
and to a Captain - if not a ship,
and to ways you'll come to know
too soon, but I have never, ever
compared my love for you.

When you paint your walls
with nonsense, and the sky outside
reflects your feelings, sensations
tiring, discovering floors and no ceilings.

And the faceless poor man
doesn't want your tips
but your hand, he wants to try
standing, because he's tired of kneeling.

When you insure the beggar's
confidence with a dime, hoping
he will ask you to stay awhile, then
you see he's not the freak, you are.

It is your mind that is on trial,
the beggarman dying, you slowly
take up his cup, and begin the eternal
begging for just one single smile.