Presence is inexorable.
How nature makes
three legged spiders,
made for a grave in the
dust of a window sill.
How civilization makes
light pollution.
Soon the Moon will be
the only Old God left.
How my hands are so empty...
And the subtext is--
Oh the things I wish I could cry for:
I know them like the back of my mind.

It might be a life-time
before you know that
the spirits haunting you
ceaselessly scream
"We know each-other!"
By that time you will be
a moth with it's wings
stuck in the wax of a candle.
And when the great light burns down
it won't be long until
what you thought you knew last
were the stars
on this side of death.

doll parts
cat bones
"it's freezing out here"
broken light-bulbs
dusty tools
"when you're older"
rotting fruit
meat hooks
"I'll have to remember that"
quiet incisions
death by worms
"so bad it hurts"
clothes burnt to ash
broken windows
"waiting for the lightning to strike me"
knots upon knots
disused spider webs
"lost art"
drowned candles
paint, painted over
"a clean cut"
silver-lined clouds
loved and lost
"wouldn't do any good"
..

"You don't know what you have
until it's gone."
Is it right to say the Phoenix is
most it's self as ashes?
And
"It's darkest just before the dawn."
More like 1 am.
But things begin to end, then end to begin.
I think
you can only get a good look at the Sun
when it just arrived, or is about to leave.
When you get your first impression,
or when you still know both it and it's history.
When it is either intensive, extensive.
And the Sun of the East casts
shadows on the end of the day.
The Sun of the West shines
on the memory of that morning.
At noon you can hardly look up
so that you don't know the light too well.
The opposite reason, in the dark you must dream.
It is no flaw of the cosmos
that the Earth turns.
If there was always light
it would be forgotten.
The Sun made you,
the night says "Drink plenty of water."

The truth is so clear
you do not see it,
you see through it:
it is your eyes.
Lay the lines down.
Plug in to the mesh.
Nest the virtue of order-
that some things are true
is the sun under which
the World belongs.
Though it may never culminate
- as it turns -
we're here for the story.
Only some things are true.
This was never a poem.

Depression is like a marrow-less bone.
Depression is like being lost in the sewer,
stooped over just to fit.
I pick a direction and shamble,
and occasionally I'll find a manhole
too heavy to lift,
but I can stand there under it,
not making any progress,
but not hunched.
It's raining somewhere up there.
The water will rise.

And the light at the end of the tunnel
is on
the horizon.
I'll have trench foot by then,
but when I get there
it will be
The Moon herself.

In the streets.
Hot asphalt any bad egg could fry on.
All fighting for their right
to daily, cheap, red meat.
A man with burning incense,
stuck in sidewalk cracks,
announces he is open for business,
selling shoes he mugged people for
the other night.
A young burn out smokes in the miasma of the alley
to avoid sharing with friends in the park.
A woman curses a puddle for simply
allowing it's self to be walked on.
A rogue justice, vigilante, gangster
grips security in their right jacket pocket.
A business man, working in sales since sixteen,
makes not vomiting- drunk on an empty stomach-
a high art.
A transgender elder faces the possibility
of a hate crime
with grit.

And me, another homeless body,
with all the curb appeal of
an out-dated, 10 inch TV-
and just like one:
(I could just vanish)
I could just vanish..