Self Improvement

I'm sorry I barely spoke
over supper tonight.
I'm tired in both lungs.
I'm tired in the tongue.
It's this old divorce that keeps
splitting, splitting different seams.
So I'm tired of reading
poker-faced promises,
of building scrap-metal,
thumbscrew consequences
for her anemic mother-love.
Also:
I'm tired of advice.
I'm tired of laying my life
on the workshop bench.
Tired of the tools
digging their grooves,
tired of the glue . . .
I'm tired of finding
new ways that the work isn't done.
But I am on the bench
and somehow, my tongue
got lopped off as we
solder on new teeth.
Please keep talking.
I'm sewing my tongue back in
with that sour old thread.

Meditating at My House Near the University

Some mornings I sit on my porch and do nothing
but drink coffee and listen to squirrels chirp,
car brakes squeak, and bulldozers shatter a house.

But I can meditate back into that morning-porch body
in the middle of the day if I listen to my breath
until the greasy machines rattle to a halt.

You know the machines: one practices cleaning the house,
one makes invisible money, one makes love.
One machine splinters a warping wooden porch.

Now the bare ground of my body has a tremor
of caffeine underneath and the engines send up
the last blossoms of smoke over the rubble.

The University is one big Buddha. It’s fattening
into the neighborhood. It’s meditating everything
down into parking lots under quiet lamps.

This Buddha awakens in my direction. It wants
its fields empty. It wants to wake up with the engines
cold and still, the wreckage gone, the squirrels chirping.
.

Poem

Sometimes a bird builds a nest
in the jaw of the letter “e.”

One could wield a cross like a dagger
and stab a man through the heart.

I caught my wedding ring on a box.
It planed the skin back and left a scar.

Every garbage truck is packed with symbols.
Metal, paper—--uninterpreted

I’m falling in love again.
All the small, solid objects are growing nervous.
.

Consumed

–after “What Weighs” by Elaine Terranova

Angler–
or football fish,
inky opaque.
Vein to vein, they hold on.

The male, a swimming syringe. She,
wooed by the barbed mouth,
the dissolving head.
Joined by a point of melted flesh.

But, oh, to be taken so completely.
To be scorched to a single
organ. Joining.

One kiss, oblivion.
My eyes melting through
the soft torso to the womb
as they go blind.
But nothing is so fully spent
as the undigested flesh.

Once joined, his sperm
chambered and waiting,
she feeds the piece of him
remaining with her blood.

When she’s ready
their spawn is a soft sheet
of translucent eggs, two
feet wide
and thirty feet long.

untitled poem requiring much revision

I get these little wounds that I don’t remember taking,
I’ve found them on my chest, a short slash
and the pink swelling edges. But mostly
I get them on my legs. One bled into my sock
and dried before I noticed. I like the way
blood turns hard like lava out of the hot,
weightless core of the Earth.

All bodies have gravity. If we were falling
in perfect emptiness forever, one day,
we’d notice how much closer we’d become
and then we’d have to make decisions.

Like the Earth, I have a core warmer than the rest of me.
But let’s stop there; bleeding doesn’t make new
islands for my body or even my soul (at least,
these quiet little rips and punctures don’t). They
aren’t the kinds of wounds that cool
in the salt-bath of time, leaving a small
rich-soil perch where my mind’s little raft
washes up on the sand.

Let’s stop at the place where the body
is like a planet, and as I find these
tiny wounds, my mind is on that raft,
watching the little sparks dance like
fireflies at the mouth of that crater
just over there on the mainland.

Noticing the Body

The same way a friend’s hand
laid with fresh instinct on my arm
roots like pollen down to the seed
from which my heart grows—
the pressure of my foot
against the strange terrain
of my floor, awakens me
to the wild fleshy novelty
of being some kind of a
living human thing.

Earning a Wish

A thousand paper cranes
is supposed to bring one wish, but who
could fold a thousand today and not think,
at least once, of wasting so much;
the trees felled, the fossil fuel burned to power
the plant where the paper’s made, and the gas
burned to bring it near—
all for a single wish for me. It’s surely
a kind of bad karma yoga.

If I met one of these in a dream, large
as an angel, it would strike me
as a messenger of fear: the wildly unbird-like
spear of its tail, the sightless
dagger of its head, and the wings,
and the wings that look bound up by threads
tied to the sky—a marionette of heaven.
Indeed, if you drop one from a high place,
it floats down, slow and straight.

I make a thousand little deaths, let a thousand
small slivers of the earth vanish from my mind.
Whatever strange shape the end takes, it will
strike me subtly as the work of my own hands.

Strength

I love the way you can
push through a sore and stiff
body whose bones are trying to fuse
and burn it all down into motion.

All the pains of this world
are curling up their creaking knuckles.

Radiation

I used to open my mouth to the sun
and try to taste its rays.

I’d learned about vitamin “D”
which comes steeping from the leaves of flesh.

and I believed, ever so gently,
in the magic of ancient things.

I didn’t know about the liquid
syllables of “melanoma”

or the cup and dagger dirge
of the pregnant letters U.V.

I knew it was warm and make
my eyes wild with red veins in pink space.

and that the sun
had been there forever.

Killing the Camomile

The plant began to turn yellow
after many days of rain so
I let it sit leaning over in the heat
until it was a melting tumbleweed
stuck in the bog of the still damp dirt.

I cut off every flower with scissors
and brewed the dusty heads
into a clear gold tea and drank it.
The pot is now holding a tall mint.

I like the idea of the dead flower
that isn’t kept for its ironic beauty
but is drunk down with hot moving water
and breathed out on the ghost of your breath.

That’s how some of us would like to go.
Others want the rest of the garden
to dry up and spoil, grieved in the ghost with loss.

Give-away

“We often give our enemies the means of our own destruction.” -Aesop

and who are my enemies?
If that’s you, have as many means
of my destruction as you can carry.
I’m seeking peace, see, inner peace,
and I believe in those scenes
where it all comes down to the gun
held in the good hand—and the palm’s
sweat tastes the metal for the tongue,
and under the open mouth of the barrel,
one heart claws its own arteries
close, waiting for the bang,
and the good hand can’t
squeeze and goes limp.

I’ve lost the heart for all this almost-killing.
Take it all; the only things left are knives I can’t
find, nooses woven from mucus, and secrets I’ll never acknowledge.

Classical Music

I first knew classical music
through cartoons and movies.
When I first heard Wagner's
Flight of the Valkries
sailing naked from the radio,
I could only imagine flying monkeys.
It was the first time I heard
the rattle of the brass and the clatter
of the keys, and from there
the breath of the players
and the whine of their chairs
shifting on the stage.
I could hear it was a made thing.
There was a mind that heard it first
before any instrument rose to meet the mouths.
Why?
He he imagined a fleet of flying monkeys?
I didn't like it then.
I wanted to see
the monkeys fly again
and rip the straw from Scarecrow.
What else could I do with that music,
imagine my own brand new evils,
animated by the lucid, cinematic
effects of the unfocused eye?

Ambition

The sky is blue again.
The clouds are white,
painted with a dry brush.
It's the perfect sky
to put over a circus.
The train cars right there
look like elephants.
I look like the ticket taker
but I'm on break.
These two smokers look
like the barker and the fire breather.
There's a new guy today
and we all tell the same
stories again and laugh
right where we should.

No, the circus doesn't stop here.
Not in this town. It doesn't stop
tomorrow either. Always
not in this town.

Manifesto (April 1st, 2007)

Let the greatest minds be put to this task:
the vilest emissions of the human mind;
the bloodiest tasks ever lodged in the flesh
of the cankered body of human history,
that ever-convalescent ancestor of us all;
all the suffering that ever stopped time for one
beautiful soul and emptied it of humanity
so the pain could replace it all, all
for the love of an idea whose time had come—
let them put it all down in verse.
Forge again the dark manifestos,
hammered with every word set ashine.

Poems have done far too little harm
to be taken at their word by us all.
We need our Jesus with a whip.
Let the best words be as bad as their makers.
Let beauty reap blood from us all.

A Desire

As a long-lived animal who has seen more snows
than any of the creatures whose small footprints
stitch the ground down into a drunken white quilt
and make meetings that lie to time itself---
I'm certain to make more than love
out of spring.
I've seen thirty springs and made
love and child but my mind is made
to want more than memories,
more than more-to-remember.
It wants to be the recurring dream
of another dreamer.
The mind wants so much more than the body.
The desires of the body are in the world.

Six Recent Poems (two of them about tattoos) with a reading of one.

Doplar Effect

The blue star on your lumbar vertebrae
moved toward me when you turned around.
Did I lean toward you at near-light speed?
Or did you fall back at impossible velocities?

They say your spine remembers the sudden motions.
The mindless dive to the dirt that saves your life
is chambered in the spine ready to fire.
It takes time for youth to pool up deep enough to drip.

When the madness comes, it comes blue and truthful.
It comes dark enough to stain the skin.
As it goes, as you move away, it fades....
The past is vanishing, rapid, mad, and red.

**********

Valentine for the Hands

In a photograph of a woman's
hands
a man's
mind is free
to feel his whole body
through her.

And how close
to his own flesh could
even a solitary
man be
if not for the
imaginary
hands of a woman
ripening his body
a moment before
her astonishingly real
hands come down on him?

**********

A Poem on Two Spiral Tattoos

This is why the spiral should be on the body:

we can think of ourselves alive a century from now,
getting up from bed another day and going on
as always, in the near-cyclical way we go on.
But we know we won't. We might as well end there
as anywhere. It's just as easy to imagine
all space filled with the one winding arm
as it is to carry two on your body, one on each shoulder,
fetal and unattached, without any meaning coiled inside.

**********

Found Poems

This is one.
They're all over.
And surely someone
has picked one up off the back
of a toilet, or an un-bussed table
and read it--
and it was perfect;
they kept it forever or always
remembered it.

This poem's for you.
Keep it as a little shelf
for the one you're waiting for,
the one that could only
have been written
because you exist.

**********

Valentine for an Ill Friend

How often love and death call each other!
They must be lonely sisters.

You've been rushing from one the other, friend.

I've heard there's a place just over there
where neither one visits very often.

I don't know if that's right. But I'm keeping it in mind.

**********

After Listening to Tom Waits’s Orphans

Fifty-four new songs in my head,
and a little piece of each one is playing,
running a little strip of tape over the tiny
head of the hammer-bone in my ear.
Some have curled into little loops
linked at their ends by a single drum-thump.
It’s an audible confetti in my head.
Still I sing them under my breath.
I roll them out into full songs,
patched and glued with my own words



One is a gun in my sock. One
is a bracelet made of bullets, but
the bullets are too small.
When you pull the trigger,
they just rattle tambourine-like
inside the cylinder.



I sang some “beggars and their papers”
right into a song that once had none.
They came from me rustling their pages
and shuffling their shoes into a song
with no benches and a sky ready to rain.



A song makes the most of me when it’s shout
bounces off the broken faces
of my brain and makes a new music
in the heavy air of my throat.
Now, listening to Tom Waits again,
my songs come apart at the patches.
All my little characters swipe the dust
off their jeans and look for something to do.

Mindful of the Wind

A shredded black string flaps from a nail in the roof of my porch.
I hammered the nail in the summer and hung a wooden wind chime from it.
It cut itself apart on the ragged edges of the holes drilled for the string.
Even without the chime, the wind blows through that same place.
One of the long bamboo shafts rolls back and forth on the porch floor when the wind is strong.
The string quietly jumps back from every breeze.
This happens when I’m not there.
It happens when I am.

Collision

All of the other cars
flashing past in the other lane
and the ones flowing
slowly forward and back
along with me in this lane
seem as simple as light.
They are made of knowledge.
Keep a fair distance and they pass
through the air easy as mosquitoes.

Today I made a foolish turn
and all the metal from every
automobile dropped down
heavy on every groaning spring.
The drums of the metal panels
thundered and all the glass
rattled in every door.
I let the car drift to the curb
like a body with a bad reason
for being aware of its bones.

I forced the door open
and took an unsteady step
out into a world stricken
with matter–all of it pressing,
grinding against the rest.

Watching the Moonlight in the Side of a Train

There's a train painted over with mirrors
making the moon dance like fireflies in its side.
It's a moving lake wrapping up whatever gift
it's carrying across this piece of the plain.

I've got a lake folded up inside of me.
I've wrapped all the other lakes inside of it.
It's the first lake I remember, the one
where I caught a dead bluegill on broken branch.

The lake is an ocean of lakes. It's many
horizons wide and the world goes about the rest
of its business with timeless vigor
when I float at the center in a little boat.

The boat is not a symbolic boat, the lake
folded up inside me is not the lake with the boat.
The moon was never in the train and the gift
wrapped up inside is not the fish or the branch.

A train may carry a boat and a boat may hold me
up on the water at the center of the lake.
When I see another lake, a feeling unfolds horizons
wide while the world goes about it business.

Ill

My stomach was a bowl
of hot soup burning
itself into a hard
pocked-marked knot.

The stomach sleeps,
gentle, senseless,
most of the time.

Mine awoke in a newborn wrath.
It was my fiery seed, my pit.
The heart, the mind, unstrapped
themselves from me
and the world was the Devil’s
for all my flesh could tell.