some will seek medicine

Some will seek medicine,

and some, to keep on going

will go to sleep.

I'll keep writing poems.

I'll stay up until there is a listener,

I'll wait for light until it comes.

And when dawn comes, a whisper,

I'll keep writing poems.

When my hands shake and my lungs ache,

when you're still

still gone and far away,

I'll keep writing poems.

death

David Bazan, on death: "It's gonna fuckin' happen."

salt of the earth, redux

When the

Salt-of-

the-Earth

became

the Salt

-in-the

-Wound, you

suffered

for it.

Sudden

-ly you

can't sing

or stand

to sit

with the

people

without

the fear

that the

(that is,

pastors)

would speak

with you

on your

illness

without

adding

to the

inflam-

mation.

You had

a nice

illness,

tasteful,

father-

and-son-

troubles

all laced

up with

biting

lack of

the God-

who-is-

with-Us.

I was

a tired,

easy,

SICK SICK

target.

for david bazan

Hey man, I love your narrative,

your insistent piloting toward

the sun and the stars, +

any black hole

you could get your

quick, sad eyes into.

You could sing for the "Vision"

or you could sing for the booze,

but shit, man - you

could damn sure sing.

Sorry you've had so many

bad diary days. Keep tripping.

calendar

Impatient with time, my hands open and close.
My fingers determined, my fingers ready to touch your skin
in warm yellow latesummer light, ready
to keep warm under the cold evergreen burn.

I distract myself with purchasing books, reading perhaps half at best,
stories by Dennis Johnson, poetry by Whitman, his disciple, Hart Crane;
and minimalist novels which speak to my slowed-down heart.

Inside my chest there's a dull thudding in time
with the opening and closing,
replaced by a latent smashing in the night

when you visit me in my sleep, when you crawl in bed with my sleeping self.
Your whispering floods my dreams with pages we haven't filled yet;
I wake only to knock an inkwell over on my sheets,

which is, with my morning cough-cough-wheeze, a true catastrophe.
You're not here yet. The calendar

has nearly a whole month to move. But the birds are singing.

The midsummer sky expands, a soft sailor's blue,

and the clear wind barely more than a breeze.

two from stephen dunn

"I don't trust people until I know what they love. If they cannot admit to what they love, or in fact love nothing, I cannot take even their smartest criticisms seriously."

"Lovers are unreliable witnesses, which is why reliability is not always to be desired."

- Stephen Dunn

illusory

Sometimes I get this

insufferable idea

that I'm entirely illusory,

and barely that.

Personally,

I'd rather be vague,

instead of so solidly

disappearing,

transitory,

a hummingbird's wings

hovering

in a nothingness

of empty air -

no longer bird,

color,

beauty.

manifesto

Love expands to fill

the wounded space

You face yourself -

your own roadkill heart,

your fear to climb the wall.

That fear -

I use it as a stepping stone

to climb up to you now.

(rev. 8/18/10)

two years later, he speaks

1

I found your glasses under the bed this morning.

They'd grown dusty in the boxes you packed in those months of preparation ages ago, when I found them,

I was trying to clean up the dust that buried the bookshelves. Staving the rust off the windowsills. I was thinking about mowing the yard.

You can't blame me for finding your glasses, can you?

I admit that I looked for them. Searched for them. Yelped with joy when I found their tiny rectangle frames, thought about how beautiful you were when you wore them, your placid hazel eyes just above your silver nose ring so elegant and spare, the way you first made me sing. I wept then

as I shivered above the sink, drowning my face in the tap.

2

Did you know that I vacuum the place once a week now?

I pick up the place before I leave off for town,

take the rug to the cleaners every three weeks, mop the kitchen, take care to fix the leaks, make the bed; occasionally I trouble to change the sheets.

When it snows I shovel sidewalk, I make up the fire and drink the ginger tea you always told me you liked. (I finally tried it and like it a lot too, lots of sugar and lots more milk, just like you.)

Tomorrow I'll pick some of the yellow flowers you planted in the yard.

I'll set them in the inkwell and balance the accounts, I'll think about you buying the seeds for those flowers at that flea market in southern Maine next to the field with all the cows, and for a moment you'll flicker there, leaning down to smell them. I'd touch you on the breast if I could. Hold you again as you wept in that Autumn's sun.

I think about these things, cleaning the place up.

After all, you could be back any day now.

sometimes i with fear

Sometimes I with fear,

sometimes I with trembling go;

but to remember

what is, what was, what-will-be best

is the realest, the truest;

the road toward home.

spiders

Spiders crawled my face

this morning. Climbed my
neck with

ticklish speed,
eight legs at a time

skittering with shoe-shod feet.

Enough to crush me,
asleep beneath them.

judas shakes

What if the metaphysical became unequivocally solid? The philosophers would be terrified.

Suddenly nothing to do. Professors worldwide, irritated.

Peter and John seek weaponry.

Judas smokes more and more.

His sides shake with agitation.

The stars begin to fall from the sky.

judas smokes

Judas smokes on the front porch after playing cards.

He whistles because he won, he takes deep full drags and smiles. The moon smiles with him. The off-white light is perfect.

He’s already counted the coins everyone expects him to count because he likes to count.

Peter and John are jealous. They shit themselves with jealousy.

Judas keeps the money and they do the cooking.

They think Jesus looks at him funny, but playing cards requires their full attention.

Judas flicks off the ash and smiles at passersby, especially the women. He likes them.

He thinks about drinking beer at the Fisherman’s Terminal because this seems like an honorable task. And it is.

He’ll go to bed on a full belly tonight.

a view of the world

I could call up my brightest green memories

to bring you to my heart's center.

I could love you in the spring again,

like I always wanted, free of my idiot-suffering

and shuddering arms, free from fear of ghosts.

I could kiss you

with a view of the world.

not understanding

"Most of my life has been spent not understanding, and I can assure you, it was not easy." - Rilke

work

From my perch at the park

I watched city pigeons eating bread,

the tennis games in the heat below.

I was sitting in the shade.

Then my friend Wayne

hopped over the wall

the Eucharist in his hands

trailing the smell of stale beer.

(20 feet down I saw

his body in the blood.)

heaven in hell and hell in heaven (a series of messages i sent myself or myself sent me or some other thing)

.

god i can feel your

absence in my guts

there is darkened mass

and there is no evening there

there is no jazz

and there is no water in the fields anymore

there is no morning to wake them

only the dark

only the red

at the burning barn

the sea vespers

?

there were fires the

oldened fields

the people in the galleries

became the pieces

watched and watched

by themselves in the

forms or the floors or the ceilings

from the white red lights of hell

speaks Judas i listen

are not both he and Christ

my liberators?

. . .

i take heaven in hell and hell in heaven

in my two fists + now

my back is iron between them

-

after reading franzen and roethke

1

In the womb of the shade at the edge

of the walk at the riverside's park,

as I tremble and swing in the sigh

of the weight of a shameful frailness,

I watch the orioles, their feathers

orange, dirty, dusted brown, below

my knees. No one has washed them but rain,

they gather, sing and flit through the holes

in the wall; they hollow out the air;

I can barely believe this - so simple.

Sweat drips down the sides of my face,

salt-staining the printed page where frailness

guides Alfred to a safe-home - the floor - where the repairs

needed and not got, stack up under shame.

And the halting voice of his closest son subsides,

haunts him in the hospital. The changes.

The long failure-filled hallways with familiar locked doors.

No songbirds sing here.

2

Alfred, old and dying man, will I be like you one day?

Will this edged mind collapse on me,

leave me locked away from all?

Farther than the far plains, will I bury

myself in prairie grass? I need to know,

not let it pass unknown.

3

Will someone carry me down the stair

when I am old? When my bones are broken

and my mind withheld, when her name is

all I remember and all I want to be told,

will anyone be there?

Will her wind still

caress my hair? When I am naked and skin-spare,

when I am wet and drowning, in the tub and alone,

will she still love me when I am there, my heart

shot-through with cancer and age,

when I am nowhere.

4

When the blood quit turning in his heart

I left my book, my perch at the park.

I was lighter without his troubles,

without the image of Alfred's eyes.

Without the no-love that howled

in the meat of the book, I imagined feeling

again at the end, where his wife smiled, smiled and shook,

ready to "make some changes,"

or better yet, go somewhere.

Exiting, the birds around me

smothered my ears with wings

with their easy wire-walking feet:

I wished for all they'd never have to know.

the silent hollering

To see your face is

to be pulled the

length of water

separating our bodies;

you're within, even

without you now.

Hang your hair in your

eyes, lover. Whisper

and feel my teal-colored

sighs turning blue, turning bluer.

Whisper hazel

eyes across the screen. Stay there

inside my ear - your wave crashes

against inside around within

my wave - inside is a silent

hollering in a conch shell,

smooth and pink,

vibrant, alive.

6 haikus, senses

1

The last of the air!

Hold up your lungs; see it through.

It's all you've got now.

2

Smell the last of her

and imagine her body

in soft candle light.

3

But hear her after

all else leaves you; you're alone;

when love's the best thing.

4

Watch the west's last light,

look back into the coming

darkness: she is there.

5

Feel the old moss once

green, the new moss under your

feet. Life is mercy.

6

Or life is looking.

It's hard to say. To work and

eat, but mostly - love.

i keep telling myself

Where were you love last night, when my heart

was pitching and whirling like a sailboat

in a high-break sea?

My dreams nightmares and nightmares dreams,

I woke up with Death in the sheets next to me.

He laughed and shook his scythe.

He knew it was a lie, he knew he was just being efficient

scaring the shit out of me, that fuckheaded bastard,

he made a face and said he was havin' such a good time,

working for free on his offday, no killing,

no taking-of-prisoners-to-the-great-blue-fiery yonder,

just scaring, like halloween.

But without the candy?

The candy is essential for shitless-scared nights,

nights when you're not next to me

but the nightmare is, when

it's not right it's all wrong and not real,

and then I wake to a pillow,

lime-green in a house I don't know

on an air mattress, hungover

or under my grandpa's dried open eyes.

(Everyone else's overseas somewhere.)

There's no punchline, just a harrowing arcing climb.

There are a million stars in the sky, lovely

stars, constant;

but too much humidity to find

them or sometimes,

to even breathe.

As I woke I started thinking about Rumi,

about weeping, about just wanting to exist.

I sat up in the dark bed and knew it was okay.

The shadow of the old man and

Death-on-holiday were invisible.

I cleared my throat and tried to think:

The stars are up there firing off,

making newer and better lights

and there's nothing I can do to

stop them, though I'd give it a go.

That's what I told myself,

and keep telling myself,

until this hibernation is over;

until my insides expand again and quiet this dull night roar;

or when at last the morning winks at me,

and I find you on the other side of the sheets, grinning,

a smile on your morning voice.

The terror
of the blank page
rests within me
foreign; needed,
like a stillborn child.

sunset after being alone

The light is thick, a substance here, golden

on the hills of my birth place.

It makes me miss these scenes . . .

yet I know it gave me the strength

to leave.

If only I could

bring it back

with me. I'd show you the mystery.

If only I could

carry the deep dark

of the woods on my shoulders

with love;

then - you would know the cost.

old beginnings

Cicadas, frogs, no people sounds,
I listen with all my ears:
The night is full;
coyotes howl in the hills
beyond my Papa's pastures;
the insects crescendo, climb to a monotonous, lovely roar,
and the old rusted propane tank still holds vigil.
I've journeyed far to sit on this porch
built with his hands and fine for summer nights,
summer sweat-heats and rains.

(I am here,
have journeyed far,
only to listen.
This blackness is a canvas singing;
I will sing with it.)

The moon hangs in the cleft of these green oak mountains,
full and huge and orange,
a childhood thing to be eaten
and savoured; savour I do, thinking of the mountain names,
Indian names: Boktukalo, Kiamichi, Ludlow, Zaffra,
and the moon, unnameable, watching them all.
My smoke hesitates in the air,
full in the humid warmth, winding
and expanding, expiring above me.
But this place has not expired.
The cows are in their pastures, silent
old dead Keith's house is still and empty on the hill.

(The insects roar and
the moon fills the sky.
The song I knew has not ceased.)

uniforms

Children in yellow tunics

run about on

thin chubby legs

kick a ball around

pictures of ecstasy.

the grand american expression

"The English language befriends the grand American expression . . . . it is brawny enough and limber and full enough. On the tough stock of a race who through all change of circumstance was never without the idea of political liberty, which is the animus of all liberty, it has attracted the terms of daintier and gayer and subtler and more elegant tongues. It is the powerful language of resistance . . . it is the dialect of common sense. It is the speech of the proud and and melancholy races and of all who aspire. It is the chosen tongue to express growth faith self-esteem freedom justice equality friendliness amplitude prudence decision and courage. It is the medium that shall well nigh express the inexpressable."

Walt Whitman, from the 1855 Preface to Leaves of Grass