They were always coming in late,
Being young.  I used to do it too.
That night I'd fallen asleep,  not
Waiting up just watching reruns
Of a stupid show from nineteen
Sixty-eight & he said downtown
Is burning.  One side of the court
Square, it turned out, which is about
All there is of downtown any
More & she went to bed,
Her mother already sleeping,
Then he and I walked up the street
Three blocks and watched the buildings burn.

Firemen sprayed water & cops watched
And we watched the cops and the fire
And the firemen, and of course they
Had been fighting again, not much
To say about it.  I'd covered
That ground before, enough to know
It was like the fire and wouldn't
Get better, so we didn't talk.
Two in the morning, town mostly
Asleep and this amazing show
Inadvertently in my backyard
And their lives changing, separately.

& would this or that have.made it better?

With eyes mistaking order for the truth,
Another generation
Scrubbed clean behind those eyes,
Teeth set on edge--
Should all the world be gained,
A poor exchange.
We gone these days, kingdom come again,
Dot arrives before the eye. Once more
The seeing could not convince.
You understand how
                            it is for anyone
Inconceivable
                                  to make a world
Of words
And yet
A paper-thin foundation
May be all
We have.

The shadow of a cross lies flat
Against the ceiling seen above,
As i lie flat upon my back
Beneath the fan that hasn't worked
In centuries. It's five A.M.
I'm trading sleep for poetry.
I've traded it for other things,
So why not scribble? why not sing?

This second stanza needs a push.
I must confess i've used up love,
Though loathe to tell you just how much.
I've let it flow and let it go.
We're running out of time it seems.
Grey doves find branches in the trees.

Sometimes the song comes late at night,
A lazy time surrounded by
The light, when paper's never there
Except an envelope or three
Collecting dust and penalties,
In need of stamps, in need of checks
And when eventually I send,
With interest principally enclosed,
These notes to Citibank I know
They won't be read, the warning says
Do not enclose, and yet I think
This can't be correspondence, no?

What if I told you your secrets,
The ones you never tell--
lime green off the tree
at the edge of our
laughter, whispering words almost
abandoned.  Love is the way you hold my hand.

We are listeners, you and I, tracing
back the conversation, almost to its
beginning,  sharing the cost
of fear, if that's what it is, where it
begins, this knowledge of each other.

Do you look away afraid?
I do.  You live in the future,
of what might be my soul:  possible?
Give me your pleasure,
Permit me in your story, face to face.
Come, come to my bed.

Christine reached Knoxville overnight,
Gone missing in a stolen car.
Her friend, a fifteen year-old boy,
Took turns along the interstate,
Warm night enhanced by felony.
Her mother gets the call. She's found.
Drives down with dad they've not seen much
Since things went bad a long way back,
A fractured family like all
The others underneath the smile.

Rough endings somehow fade, and how
We laughed grows stronger.  Tears you cried
When he was gone reminded my
Rough hands how soft to hold a love
And not insist on anything.

Things for which there are no words are good things
To consider.  Words that proved imperfect--
Though we never did know why--can't make us
Understand the cause for separation,
As if disorder needed reason, no
Explaining it's the other way around.
And where once I wore a reasonable
Face, now you get around it with a smile.

The things we have no use for anymore
line the sidewalk where chalk once marked hopscotch
for days before the rain washed it away.
Back then one night we listened all night long
to Joni Mitchell  and Charlie Mingus,
most likely Miles Davis, Louis Armstrong,
Jimi Hendrix.  Things led to things; we danced,
we drank red wine.  I've known no better time.

Sell the records, the sofa with my long impression.
Give away what doesn't sell.
What I dread is not the night but morning,
coffee in an empty room, black coffee scalding hot. Don't sell the coffee maker.
It's a good one, very hard to replace.

Nineteen nights in a bed with rails
gave me time to reconsider,
with nothing left to interrupt,
my own unnecessary place
beside you.  Do you understand
why a bad actor like myself
would give it up, get out for good?
Dying is a sinner's haven.

Life will be the difficulty.
Teach me when I'm ready for it
if you have the patience and the
time.  Don't give up when I tell you
lies. I am not brave enough.  Who
is?  We need each honest hour.

and when you lie awake at night,
unsatisfied with what's been said--
what can be said--is any heart
articulate and unafraid
of saying things unhearable?
October is a crucible.

The mind is rough, a place
Where time gets lost.
The future wears a sad look in its eye
And I  cannot remember it as well
As it seems I should, for drawing closer
Than the past, so dutifully recalled,
Awake, asleep, ever borrowed and spent--
Overdue bills, coffee-stained reminders
That I'm still alive in someone's judgement,
Represented in a row of crosses.

Erase it all, imagine everything
Untold,
No story spoken, nothing
Overheard,
An unstrung voice--rose petals Dropped
At dawn,
Beneath what tree olives or green
Apples
Issac's lot. The question having not been
Answered. Music, though essential, tells us
Nothing.

Each new crowning, where Peter upside down
Betrayed no longer any human god
Alone somehow connected  until now
The empty skull accepts a tuning held
Across so many faces whose sorrow,
Unbelievable as truth so often
Takes on its characteristic pallor,
Insisting we are none of us forever.

How something you didn't know you needed
Can come to be the thing you need the most,
A way to breathe beneath the waves until
Someone like me or you, unlikely friend,
Absorbs the pain, the sweet perfume, instead
Of telling you you're on your own. You've had
Enough watered down love, I know it well,
And yet a stronger shot could prove the cure.

This is not air, just music in a word.
I won't call it anything it isn't.
I've has my share of lovers hating love.
You come again and I'm the helpless man
Who gives you things that vanish in the air,
Thick now with my relentless submissions.

What I have learned to do is place one thing
Beside another, using nothing more
Than sharpened sticks to guide them into place,
Where they never fit quite perfectly. You
And I were perfect once, or as close as
Apples side by side on an old canvas,
Unthinkable that one should decompose--
An accidental knowledge of the fall.

Astonish me again with those green eyes,
That see me for the fool I've always been.
One passing taste beneath the lonely sky,
A coupling held against the night
Where lovers have no need of hungry words,
And I no more than breath have need of you.

The best words ever written couldn't change
The color of the leaves before the fall,
Or how your eyes tonight give up their pain.
True love is marvelously strange.
So close your eyes and change the way you see
This language born of darkness and disease,
Slow-footed, naked, treading burning coals.
A scarring, then the soul comes free.

I've never known a poet who didn't
Wish at least most of the time that he could
Be a lineman, say, or else a fireman,
Even better, rescuing animals
And people discovered in a bad way,
Or perhaps a musician, for whom words
Are always buried in a dying song.
But tonight I envy the sweeper, whose
New machine cost eighty grand and flashes
A yellow light at five miles an hour
Up and down Olive Street, where I abide.
I'd wear headphones and smoke a pipe, I would,
And the world would be cleaner when people
Awake. Instead i've lost the urge to sleep
And cannot be persuaded by the pills
Or longing spent earlier in the dark.
I'm settled in, content to mark the time
From sun to sun, while no cars pass this house,
With pent up language of a modest sage,
Renouncing what the night has said, just me
And this steely-eyed old man who's run his
Rig on every street in town, both up at
3 A.M. and he's the one getting paid.

This slender evergreen should scratch your name
Against the perfect sky. You're not alone
While someone loves you, if anyone knows
Still what it means to hold a fragile heart
And not be frightened by the memory.

Last year, despite his long gone testicles,
& 91 dog yrs of innocence,
Old Jack got dragged around the whole back yard
By his bone, by a coybitch he lives with.
He's a lucky dog, but he's 98
Now and down in his hips. He cries at night,
Housebound by his infirmities and I
Talk to him, touch his head and give him pills.

I remember my grandmother's voice--
You old dog you; I love you like jackfrost;
Mothers are like that, yes they are. She lived
To 95, forgetting for the last
Four who she was and where she was and why.
Should you or I be 1/2 so fortunate.

An old dog doesn't know he's dying, just knows
It's harder to live. I blow smoke in his ear
And we watch ****** stories, real and imagined.
Forensic files, Hitchcock. He struggles to stand.
I'm slow at doing what I have to do.
This morning, like most, weather permitting,
We're 2 blocks down the street from
Where we live. He struggles to ****--
Cancer blocks his peristalsis, makes it difficult
To squat. And I  stand ready with my Kleenex,
In case he gets it out on neighbor's or
The sheriff's lawn. Go ahead old friend, let it
Go. I'm right behind you.

I worked here once is how I know the place--
A volunteer, but now I've come for food
For my own kids, to stand in line with kith
And kin and not discuss the kind of votes
That gave the rich a little more and us
Not quite enough to feed our kids or pay
The rent or buy a car or keep the dog.

On a clear day the morning light comes through
The dining room window, through the open
French doorway and, now that the time has changed
To save daylight, pools on the wan face of
Ophelia floating on her back above
The mantle, Pre-Raphaelite splendor
In a second-hand dress at eight-thirty
While I scribble and watch the news. Today
A new resignation, an ongoing
Investigation. Something is rotten,
Madness encroaches. Widespread melancholy,
Floating through forget-me-nots and poppies,
Singing.

A dozen young men clear debris along
The highway, not chained together but not
Free to go, yellow-jacketed, watched by
A supervisor in a uniform
As you and I pass by unrecognized
For our transgressions, not righteous enough
To challenge gravity for redemption,
Just pleading not to fall again tonight.

How easily affected are the minds,
God's children moving shakily between
The scripts and benedictions. Anon
Caffeine and cigarettes, some chewing gum.
A sketch of what goes on inside the brain.
Confessions, passes, stigma from the nurse
Who holds the pad at management. Pain talks,
At times it shouts, and who are you to judge?

Complete the course, it's all spelled out.  My songs are just excuses for the life I've lived.
Not much of one at that, not ever worth
Enough to pay the bills or right the wrongs
That lately have accumulated here
In my thick head, Golgotha of the soul.

It must have been hard to wake from a dream
Where he could do anything, even more
Than anyone alive, to realize then
That he could not move half his body still,
To wait to be transferred by his small wife
From bed to porcelain *** to lift chair-
Unimaginable loss of freedom
In a house he built from lumber he sawed
From timber he cut from a woods he owned.

I grew up there, by that same woods, deep and
Dark in the early morning light, snaking
Logs between still standing  oaks, looking up
For widowmakers, dead limbs that slaughter
Loggers, and over my shoulder for snags
That rear tractors or snap chains that become
Metal whips--so many dangers in that
Woods, yet I  felt safe, as his son, because
He had the confidence I wish I knew.

How absurd to find myself still,
Despite the years of evidence,
Believing that a word or two,
Spoke plainly on a winter's night,
Could warm your clever, unseen lips,
Just enough to call my name.

Little boy, go tell your mother
That the rains are coming,
And the horrible winds.
But don't scare her.