All at once a million kinds of calendar.
2. MOTIVATION
Ask yourself:
What is my longing?
Answer yourself:
I long for the world, in the form of a person, which is me, in the form of a new world, in the form of a new person, which is the new me, in the form… ad infinitum.
3. GOALS
Stop staring out that old woman’s window like a cat.
4. DISTINGUISHING BETWEEN “SAYING” AND “DOING”
“Everyone dies”
is different from
“Everyone died.”
5. SELF-ABSORPTION
This inner spinning, that petty city
the mind built,
robs the psalm of its robe of calm,
my naked voice thin and shrill in the wind.
6. DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR
I’m such a fraud
I can’t even convince you
of my fraudulence.
7. EVERYDAY MAGIC!
The new burn on my knuckle,
white, shiny, raised:
our dinner’s afterlife, lingering ghost.
Karaoke Realness at the Love Hotel
At the microphone, suddenly—oh no—
is Sandra the Available,
in her endless yellow dress
and award-winning earrings,
about to sing Rose Dickey’s unrecorded
cakewreck of a hybrid poemsong,
“Sheep Child o’ Mine.”
Now watch her win the night
before it’s all over. She’s no loser
with a fever but no lover.
Not like me. I live in a hotel
with no rooms, just a lobby and lifts
leading to experiences.
Time to ask another person,
someone who’s been outside
the fishbowl long enough
to wonder if there will ever again
be enough water. Rat race,
hamster wheel, dog run.
(Okay, dog run’s different.
It’s not for people.)
I’m not a real people-person.
Just like reality is not really realness,
people. Just try and point out to me
what’s not fake or paste or false?
Or trick or replica
or denial or dream or drama
or simulation or reenactment
or knockoff or artificial, a ruse,
a work of art, illusion,
a lie, a mistake, fantasy,
a misconception, missed-connection,
delusion, hallucination,
insincere, invalid or invented,
a rehearsal with no performance?
A viable world with no excuse to exist?
In my hotel the sleep is free.
In any hotel. Why shouldn’t it be?
And that old girl Sandra?
Turns out she can really sing.
Outfoxed
Red foxes are not allowed
to mate with white foxes
because the offspring
would all be female.
And we can’t have that.
Blue foxes are not allowed
to mate with red foxes
because the offspring
would all be gay.
And we can’t have that.
Brown foxes are not allowed
to mate with any other foxes
because the offspring would all
be, well, brown, in such variety
and number we’d never know
what was what anymore.
And we can’t have that.
What we can have is affordable
fox fur, plentiful fox soup,
invigorating foxhunts
all brought to you by Fox News.
Inappropriate Dreams
I can’t tell you
how often.
You in the grocery store
embarrassing
everyone with
the lettuce.
Elsewhere, food
in the file folders.
It’s not supposed to
be there, get it?
Another time you
were rolling down a hill
like a blueberry
rolling toward
me, a bear who will
eat anything
this time of year
but wants
just you. Then
you are not you but
the plum of a pebble
that I skipped
into the lake
and found somehow
night after night.
Products of Perception
Perhaps an implantation.
Perhaps there is no soul. And biotech
metaphysics can’t prove I’m whole.
If there were clear demarcation
between me and why me
then why wine and why whine
and if so, why not all the time?
Since flavor is olfactory
and pleasure in the brain,
does it make sense for the mouth
to open and admit blame?
Fluid body, fluent tongue,
flu-like symptoms hide a hole
through which a neutered fever catches
neutered cold. I’m told a kind of eerie light
flicks on when mind becomes itself.
Like when a book is opened,
and read, or just falls off the shelf.
Miracles
I spent the whole day
crying and writing, until
they became the same,
as when the planet covers the sun
with all its might and still
I can see it, or when one dead
body gives its heart
to a name on a list. A match.
A light. Sailing a signal
flare behind me for another to find.
A scratch on the page
is a supernatural act, one twisting
fire out of water, blood out of stone.
We can read us. We are not alone.
Big Game
after Richard Brautigan’s
“A CandleLion Poem”
What began as wildfire ends up
on a candlewick. In reverse,
it is contained,
a lion head in a hunter’s den.
Big Game.
Bigger than one I played
with matches and twigs and glass
in the shade.
When I was young, there was no sun
and I was afraid.
Now, in grownhood, I call the ghost
to my fragile table, my fleshy supper,
my tiny flame.
Not just any old but the ghost,
the last one I will be,
the future me,
finally the sharpest knife
in the drawer.
The pride is proud.
The crowd is loud, like garbage dumping
or how a brown bag ripping
sounds like a shout
that tells the town the house
is burning down.
Drowns out some small folded breath
of otherlife: O that of a lioness licking
her cubs to sleep
in a dream of savage gold.
O that roaring, not yet and yet
and not yet dead.
So many fires start in my head.
3. ARCANA
Of one order are the mysteries of light
and of another are those of fantasy
Rider Tarot Deck instructions
Card 5: Hierophant
I sit looking
around expectantly,
though really I want
nothing but I’m
so accustomed
to waiting around
I’ll just take whatever
shows up. Or I look at
things I don’t understand
and want them
though what I want
is understanding.
I take them anyway,
turning them over
and over in my hands
in the dark
as if holding such
things can give me
back some sense
of what it was like
to really want something
regardless of what
I had already
or how long I’d waited.
The wheels on the bus
go round and round.
Round and round.
But I am going nowhere.
I’ve not been waiting
for no bus.
Card 12: The Hanged Man
It seems unlikely that so much literature
could be made from twenty-six letters.
Doesn’t it seem it could all be boiled
down to one sentence?
After all, the entire volatile cosmos
seems to circle and spin and rotate
so you’d think round and ellipse
were the only shapes possible.
You’d think a square was an ungodly
fluke, an aberration, not the life force
behind writing tables and scaffolding.
Not the product of a natural human math.
The kind of math that says: if you
are sentenced to be hanged
and the rope breaks in the middle
of your hanging, you are free to go.
Such a sentence, though uttered
without error, doesn’t say what it
means: life may be a circle, but death’s
elliptical, swinging and missing.
Criminal, hangman, judge, and witness,
each matchless and speechless. Why say
anything, ever again, after such luck?
Why not shut up and run?
Card 0: The Fool
Yes, you, fool. You don’t fool
me, you fraud. I’m the fool.
I don’t care. I run without
pants in winter, cock
tucked into my asshole
for warmth and a fun feeling.
It looks good, right? I take
my feet in my hands
and fringe the public scaffold
with my skunked stuff. Sexual
and digestive. It’s so funny.
Are you embarrassed?
Why? You didn’t do
anything but like it.
Foolish reader, can’t like
what you like.
Like what you want to like.
Do what you want to like
to do. Don’t do what you don’t
want to like to do.
Card 20: Judgment
What did the stand of pines say
to the herd of elephants
wearing swimsuits
and carrying large suitcases?
“Nice trunks!”
Card 14: Temperance
The everyday truth
of the night’s delectations
appears for us in our dream.
We all ate the same food
and made the same love
so we dream the same dream,
which was: the infinite wine
was rank, undrinkable, lost
to a rot somehow familiar,
a delusion or virus, perhaps
from childhood, parents
deep in their cups.
It could have been worse.
Upon waking, we might not
have had or needed wine.
Card 7: The Chariot
I smoke between one and three
cigarettes a day.
Sometimes a whole pack will last
a week, sometimes three
or sometimes I don’t keep track,
I can always get them back.
There isn’t a tree
on the street I haven’t given
the time of day.
Time for us to meet, or maybe
eat, between one and three.
A cigarette or two or three
with you can’t be beat.
And sometimes I forget to eat,
forget the pack, and that too
is okay, you always say.
What other way, but to
forget, is there to endure
the day, the street?
Card 9: The Hermit
I burned a living rose in the fire,
its fleshsmell human.
The baby’s breath also reeked
burnt. I learned the tarot
in one sitting—arcana slipping
into my mind like a beloved
hand under my pillow.
When I woke I was so hungry
I ate the last pear. Last for the year,
another rotten year in which
I don’t need to save the pear for you.
It didn’t matter how I sat with you.
I didn’t have to cover my thighs
or make attractive angles.
I could look like a black spider
with flesh pockets
or a hairy, scrambled woman
and you would reach for even that.
I burned the pillow too,
so many objects here in the cabin
seemed to me akimbo
and interlocking. I put
everything in the fire
because it was too confusing.
Card 16: The Tower
What did the fatal illness say
to the nonfatal illness?
“Are you still working on that platelet
or can I get rid of it for you?”
Card 19: The Sun
When you show yourself to the woman
you love, you don’t know your fear
is not fear itself. You have never been good,
but now you are so good,
who are you? Is it the liquidity of her skin
that bathes the world for you,
or her face, captured like a she-lion
in your own flesh?
This summerbed is soft with ring upon ring
upon ring of wedding, the kind
that doesn’t clink upon contact, the kind
with no contract,
the kind in which the gold is only (only!) light.
Cloud covers and lifts,
and sleep and night, and soon enough
love’s big fire laughs at a terrible burn,
but only (only!) because pain absorbs excess
joy and you shouldn’t flaunt
your treasures in front of all day’s eyes.
Card 6: The Lovers
When standing naked, no mirror,
this is just me. Just me, justly
before a lover who breaks
this wholeness as if
he were a mirror
but with his mouth.
When you say I am beautiful
suddenly I stop being so
because you have claimed that.
Card 17: The Star
I know where you go when you’re hoping
to be happy: to your large, dark envelope,
pricking points of light with your tiny pin.
You call us stars, and use infantile words
like twinkle and wish, and faraway. But we’re far
from far. We’re in. And we’re old.
We’re the deep, hot gleam in your wet, cold holes.
We call them “eyes.” They are our only homes.
We shine nowhere else. The sky is a smother
of blank dust and explosion and vapor.
In your “eyes” we see fear, what you call sparkle.
We know it’s fear because we already died. We know
how it felt. Listen: I am dead and you can’t see it.
Do you know what this says about us both?
I’m begging: please choose
me to be your star.
Wish on me. Love the oh-yes of my being dead
enough to call it brightness. If I can’t be yours,
I am just a dark scar pulling the skin of the sky,