There may be comfort
within this shingled
roof of ours,
but there is peace
out in that rainstorm

And just how long does family persist
when the blood goes bad, anyway?

If I ever kill you
I want you to know
that I don’t mean
anything by it
and if it causes you
any sort of pain
or your family
any sort of anguish
I’m sorry
and I’ll try to make it
right

Sometimes biking back at night
I cut across a nearby church parking lot
and as my wheels spin beneath me
with the darkness around only broken by
the dim burn of nearby streetlamps
I imagine that I am gliding
across a sea of thick, black ink,
poured over the world to cover
all of its cracks and pock-marks
and eventually dissolve it down
so it can more easily melt back
in to the empty space it hovers in

This back is racked with nerve pain
from somewhere in the hip I think
Making it harder to stand up
under the weight of gravity and
self-doubt and all the other things
that so regularly and traditionally
tend to pile about the shoulders
and dangle from the neck

Perhaps this pain will dissipate
in time, or perhaps it never will
and I will stand a bit less straight
until the day I never stand again

The part I keep forgetting
about setting out to sea
is that eventually
I will lose sight of the shore

Until another one comes
in to view, at least

Souls are soft around the edges
they are difficult to grip

If you catch one, hold it close
unless you need to let it go

I can only collect stories
to shout at people over
the din of too-crowded bars
as they half-listen half-text
someone they’d rather be talking to
or sleeping with or staring at
from across a mostly-empty room
pretending that they are being coy
but mostly just hoping they
will be noticed by a person
who will make them feel more whole
instead of all these other ones
who touch their shoulders
in the heat of drunkenness
and shout their stories
over the din of too-crowded bars

And if they found that person
oh, what a story worth shouting that would be

Snow is falling
In a half-attempt to make things
Look clean and white again.

Maybe if everything looks clean
It will be clean, is the thought I’m sure

It never works anyway,
But the snow falls nonetheless

These memories fade
Gradually
Until they are nothing
Until suddenly
They are everything

This cold rain dripping outside
is part and parcel of Michigan spring
but I wonder if it’s truly necessary,
the way I wonder if this flu must come
like clockwork, every thirteen months

Some men are made of brass
that is bent and flexed
and pounded with hammers and
treated with heat until
a form is taken

and it is hardened from the work
that was done there

Other men are made of
similar stuff, but laid
upon mandrels and pressed
with sharp tools
on spinning lathes until
a similar form is conjured forth

but this is a soft, thin form
born of ease-of-production and
dreamed with cheapness in mind

It is a reasonable enough facsimile
of the part it is meant to resemble.
It will even do the job it is slotted for,
more or less

One day, though, this form will flex;
the ends will crease and the lengths will bend
so that it is useless to its purpose

And though it could be straightened out
and made to serve its use again,
scrap is what he’ll probably beceome, as
such cheap parts are always better off
replaced anyway

Terror precludes contentment
So at least I will move forward
As I, with my online shopping cart,
Terrify myself

I will end up
a gray stone marker
in a silent row –
with any luck, at least

Rock and Roll;
The louder,
The better,
The louder

Year five and
Year one are
Identical except
For the pithy parts

Cowards two were they;
one, scared of action
one, too scared to move
each hiding from themselves
behind the other,
circling in an awkward dance
as two wads of wretched detritus
in an unplugged tub

Perhaps too dizzying was this decent
that the truth of things got muddled.
Perhaps this is simply
what cowards tend to do,
as fear is King to cowards
and they will do all that is in their power
to serve His high commands

so down a drainhole they descend
to be deposited downstream, perhaps,
or else skimmed out in a reclamation plant
and cast in to a vat of caustic chemicals
for to make the water clean

And they will revel in this fate for a while
for Fear, their King, commands it
until one or the other finds a new master
or they are both bleached to death
inside of a sewage treatment tank

I stand at the top of a mountain

A six month ascent has brought me here

I am cold and winded. I am alone

A six month trudge through Hell and up hard passes has brought me here

I feel as I have died a hundred times, only to be born again

Each new life shorter and crueler than the last, yet long enough to climb another hundred yards

climb I did, though it killed me

now I look over the great wide range

And in a moment of quiet respite, I stand at the top of a mountain

Only as I plan to climb another one

I could make a list
of everything you didn’t do
and I could set it next to
my own and I could assemble
a committee of fair and reasonable
unaffiliated parties who
with some deliberation
could assign point values
to each individual lack-of-movement
and when they tallied the score
I guarantee that those numbers
would be so damn close
it would come out in a wash
and Goodness knows we need
a good scrubing-down