White Chips

{During the initiation of the Buryat shaman he is told by the “father” shaman (who performs the initiation with the aid of nine appointed “sons”)}:

“When a poor man has need of you, ask him for little and take what he gives you. Think of the poor, help them, and pray God to protect them from evil spirits and their powers. When a rich man summons you, do not ask him much for your services. If a rich man and a poor man summon you at the same time, go to the poor man and afterward a rich man.”

-- Mercea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy



NOTHING SUSTAINS

Nothing here yet sustains
what I let go there.
Nothing: This hour
bleary in the first light
of a hungover Sunday,
tree lawn & shrubs
in the window stained
blue and bitter: The books
piled round this chair
just so much cultured
vacuity: The poems
in this verse journal
that dribble and blubber
and whine without a
glint of steel to hold
against my wife when
she looked at me the
other night and said
It’s like you took an
animal in and cared for it
so it trusted you completely
and then you suddenly
slap it and kick it out
the door: I can’t find
a motion new or different
enough to wall in those words:
Clean house,
go to the library,
buy groceries,
watch football,
read a short story,
cook dinner,
talk sadly with my mother,
go out,
shop for clothes,
have a cup of coffee
at a bookstore,
drive neighborhoods
now blinking with
Christmas lights,
drink Scotch in a
bar with all these
younger people
hurtling at each
other like zealots
enflamed with their
lack of definition
or grace or humor:
Nothing. Not even
in the topless bar
where there’s little
complication in getting
to what’s beneath:
Those thongbottomed
beauties revealed
no beauty, just perfections:
Nothing can howl
long or loud enough to
blossom this dark
and purposeless orchard
I have destroyed
everything to tend:
This morning shaking
off the booze to resume the
only making I understand,
the only hint of what
may yet sustain me
through this rebellion
right down into the
belly of the whale:
Enough ink to send two
pages into the white
fire, enough light
to guide my pen this far.



WHY AM I HERE?

Why am sitting here
with twelve others on
this first night of class,
a graduate workshop
in the writing of poetry?
The question won’t
leave me alone.
Why am I here? Again
I’m feeling lost and
estranged, exactly
when I should feel
most at home.

Only three other
students say they
even write poetry
or write only poems.
I don’t think I
really chose to,
but I certainly can’t
imagine life
without these
accustomed bleeds.

The prof I know
sees me as a
nuisance, the
pain in the ass
part of having
to still teach—a
student who knows
too much, or thinks
he does. He’s right.
I’m cursed by the
thousand poems I’ve
written plus that
one poem that sprinted
six thousand pages
so passionately trying
to forget that passionate
singing and failed to.

I’m crippled by
so many years now
feeling a music
inside the world
I never quite
articulate. Then
there’s all the poems
I’ve read, such
gorgeous clutter—how
can I forget them
to, or learn to forget
them, as Rilke
tried for half his
career?

Why am I here?
The prof reads snippets
of prose by poets
on writing poetry
—here’s Rilke again
in “Letters To
A Young Poet,”
writing to the
beginner that an
expert could no
better critique
the boy-man’s
poems because art
is so much about
what’s nameless—
what could he say?

Yes, I nod in perfect
assent, grinding my teeth.
I was ready for
this ten years ago.
Readiness now wants
to tear out the heart
of this class and eat it.
To scream the song.
Obviously it’s too late,
so little good
can now come of it.
What a pain in the
ass I will be in
this class.

Why am I here?
My wife urged me
to enroll in grad school,
hoping that
re-engaging in a
world I love
would keep me centered
at home, bolstered
by a dream of work
I could someday
leave my corporate
jobs for (at half
the pay) — Well
I blew that and mightily.
Now I simply
wish to go home
and would burn
every poem to do so.

I’ve written maybe
200 poems in the
past year, first drafts
mostly though I’ve
kept working at
20 or so and sent
some faithfully off.
Doing as I should
have 20 years ago.
Perhaps that’s why
I hate poetry more
than ever — my cursed
wild-yet-repentant
voice with its
strict counterpoint
of irreconcilable
halves, forever at
bay. All my self-
loathing and rancor
is revealed here
—who would care
for art so shat?

Why am I here
at all? I drove back
to Orlando tasting
the metal of certain
defeat, which had
a whiskey edge.
A shot, maybe 2,
two beers, then
I’ll go home, I promised,
turning north from
the expressway.
But I didn’t go home,
not for many more
hours, careening
through a brace
of bars so indifferent
to anyone’s choler.
Almost wrecked my
car at 3 a.m. on
the last stretch home,
had to call a
tow-truck, waking
my mother with
the news. Called in
today and hasped
the hours with a
bad hangover and
the dolor of what
feels like madness—
No escape from this
and no way home.

Why am I here
in this poem?
Because the mad
sadness has a lyric feel,
and so I write it
that way, in a
poem now late
in the afternoon
with hard storms
approaching on
shots of thunder.

Why am I here?
Perhaps only for
this poem, this white
trampoline of spent
sugars leaping ever
for a meaning lost
to the world, careens
which no one cares
to read. A real pain
in the ass. That’s art.
Roll on, dark thunder.
Brink at last this rain.


WHITE CHIP

Air I could not breathe,
vowel I would not speak.

Bright penny of
the bitterest moon.
Ante of surrender.

Door through which
it is death to enter
and hell to refuse.

Coda to an
infinite agony.
Color of an
endless patience.

One hand held
high in room no
longer empty,
begging the
coin which begins.


IT’S ABOUT

It’s about letting go
the kite which flies
the abyss. About
changing the address
of your heart.

It’s about the whole
world you can’t
see from hell. About
only today’s juice.

It’s about work
which returns and
completes. About
silken wishes
in shoe leather.

It’s about going
home in some way
or another, perhaps
in every way.

It’s about hobo
packs becoming
suitcases turning
into window boxes
filled with yellow
geraniums.

It’s about the
miracle of the same,
simple, good day
and everything
in the cup after
all the dregs have
been poured out.

It’s about shaking
a shakier hand
at the door. It’s
about never letting
that grip go.



MEETING NOTES


The guy who said
he had three cousins
working atop Tower Two
on September 11
hasn’t said a word since
but there he sits,
meeting after meeting.
Jan talked about her
brother in the Air Force
and how she can’t
do a thing about it.
A woman said she
was being called up
in the reserves and
was fucking scared
shitless. The woman
next to her told us
her brother had now
lapsed beyond talk
and would soon follow
her sister, father
and mother into the
same dark. It all
made me feel grateful
for my near-bankruptcy
and ruined marriage.
The group shifting,
sighing, receiving,
sustaining each blue
bolt cracking through
our single common life.
Because they keep
returning so will I.



FACE IN THE MIRROR

heard in a meeting

It was another hard night
of Jim Beam long and late,
alone as usual at my end
of McClure’s dark bar
— a shade among shadows
fastened to misery’s raw tit.
Don’t remember leaving there,
though it must have been
past closing. Nor do I recall
getting in my car or lurching home.
All that was muffled inside
a black depth, as if I drove
at the bottom of the sea.
Then there was a jolt — I
was off the road —
then clatter of shrubs and
breaking limbs — then
a sickening crash
as I drove through some
poor sap’s front door,
careening to a halt
in the shambles of a living room.
That’s where it all ended,
my ruination made fast in
another’s (no one was insured).
Well I stumbled the hell away
before anyone roused up
out of bed, though surely
the kiss of buckshot wasn’t
far from blistering my ass.
Made it the few blocks home
and fell in a heap on my
own living room floor,
at rest at last, my
hands clutching at nothing,
my lips mouthing a prayer
to God to relieve me of
what I didn’t have the balls
to do myself. Passed out there
and slept as though falling
slowly down the pit of hell.
Imagine me the next day
rising from that cold dirty
floor (I hadn’t cleaned since
my wife passed away), my
head cracked half open,
a rib or two busted.
See me trying to focus on
the bathroom mirror,
my hands trembling so bad
I couldn’t button up the shirt
of my state trooper’s uniform.
Couldn’t look into that man’s
rotted eyes. I loved my
job and believed devoutly
in my badge; I lost’em both
to Jim Beam and the ends
he lowered me to. Now I’m
here, retired from duty
to patrol and bottle
but very much a part of
something I’ll call life.
May my story keep just
one drunk off the road—me.
Some day I’ll be able to
look at myself in the mirror.
Each day I pray for the
courage to lift my eyes
one day higher.


DARK SUGARS

Dark sugars in
bottles, blouses
and the pale chill
of vanilla ice cream:
Sirens all
of a leave-taking
for that honey isle
roamed by bears
too close to my ilk,
too shaggy in their
red hunger. I’d turn
it all over but their
reverse seems
is a surer curse,
a riven fixity bereft
of salvage.
A dry drunk corks
himself in with his thorns.
Good God, make me
willing to let go
this dangerous
preter-swilling
where even the
shadow of sugar
is insatiable.



BENEFIT OF ILL

O benefit of ill! now I find true
That better is by evil still made better ...

— Shakespeare, Sonnet 119


A year ago this morning — perhaps
this hour — I loaded clothes
and journals and a guitar
into my car and drove off
from my house with a squeal
of the tires and one pregnant
look back on all I left behind.
I was convinced some steady
will had forced me to go.
I was no longer of a heart to
sustain that house with
a wife and two cats;
no longer a man of the suburbs
bound to the patchwork
of yards so neatly tendered;
and no longer protector of
that woman I once swore
the rest of my days to: drove off.
Seeking to ink my pen in
what followed, I got a hotel
room in town across the street
from a dive I slummed in
15 years before when my
first live-in girlfriend kicked
me out. Lugging suitcase
guitar and journal: strange parities.
This next hotel room was a
dive too, befitting my leap.
I called the woman I was
chasing but she was busy.
That was the signal that
the left-hand road I’d taken
past a crossroads was
disappearing into dark.
But what did I know, or care?
I had a journal full of
roaring red verbs and
an $18 thousand dollar
credit limit on my Gold card.
Drove to the mall to buy
cologne and shirts
while shoppers shopped
for people other than themselves.
Fitting myself for the plunge.
Bought beer on the way back
and spent the rest of the day
drinking in the shadows &
trying to play old songs
on my guitar as college football
murmured glories far away.
Come night I climbed out
of my guitar case to feed
with impunity, driving down
the Trail past singles bars
and further into the hot artery
of night, finding a place
where booze costs dear
and dearies drop their
blowsy tops to wiggle
heaven’s billows in your face.
Ah sweet martinis, cold fire
freezing down the plummet
— my Job-like days
which make me today
cringe with shame.
That was a different
Florida from today, so
unlike this day, so fair,
so unburdened. — But
the heart has its crayons
and colors, all according to
it’s royal whim. My page
turned black and cold
and endlessly feral. I
inked my pen in that
and wrote it all, bleeding
an ichor from some
whalish depth. Ah how
sad it makes me today
to think of that night,
it nettles the serenity
I’ve found 3 months off
the booze. Perhaps
I graduate into the
agony of memory.
Seeing what damage
you can wreak when
you believe the sirens’ tune.
A siren you know is
a muse you fucked,
mistaking sonority
for ripened pleasure.
All it seems today
is that I’ve ripened my amends.
I didn’t die out there
as perhaps I should have,
and I don’t deserve much
here in the life I
worked so faithfully to destroy.
Why should I feel serene
and good when 30 miles
from here my wife wakes
as if in a cell where
there is no pardon?
If these meters turn
me on a spit today, then
baste me a minute more
with your attention.
What I learned in letting go
is that some depths
sound nothing. Some
nights are not wild.
The shadow of the
yew is black and silent
and eternally mild,
drowning every drunk.
Since returning to AA
I”ve heard of my type
who dove off cliff
wearing a noose.
Surrender is the only
escape, but by the
time I got back I found
I had small fight left.
Today I’m not at peace,
but I know I’ll be well
if I keep these hands
at the oars. The bad
ghost troubles but
will fade back to
that quiet, irredeemable
bourne if I add its
night to this story.
And so I roll this
poem and squeeze
it into an empty bottle
and loose it back
on the tide I cannot name.
Should you discover
it some day on your
own raging, cold beach,
read, enjoy, beware,
and cast it back.
I’ll try to do the same
the rest of my days.


THE JAYWALKER

Something in him loves
to dash cross traffic.
He can hardly contain his feet
once the threat is real:
a Grayhound bus
bearing down a wet highway
or a jazzy Jag soaring a
coastal road adrenalines
his need like a pedal
pushed to the metal
He sees it — and off he goes,
barreling out across
the way in high hilarity,
never quite sure
which will reach him first,
the other side or what’s
coming on. All he knows
is that it must never be easy.
A few bruised ribs
draw more taut
the singing wire.
No one understands
the sense of completion
which comes at
sprint’s end, breathing heavily
in the weeds and litter,
receding horns and curses
zippering into a
more splendid silence.
In those short moments
he’s arrived, Master
of the Universe or just
a local hero on the shoulders
of an everyday desire.
But it doesn’t last for long.
There’s still the boring
life he has, which seems
somehow to get worse
with every all-out tear.
With nothing in the real life
is as sweet as
this candied thrill,
all else in his life goes fallow.
He stops going to work
and leaves his wife and kids,
sleeping beneath the overpass
so he can live as close to
the interface as he can.
But he can never get
enough of it. Seconds
after he’s wheezing in the weeds,
that wild elated panic
flees like fizz from pop.
Soon he’s jaywalking
just to lift his spirits
back to par. He grows
to hate the hellbent
drivers of Ford 150s:
Starts taking knocks, too:
A Lincoln Town Car clips
him but good, gashing wide
his thigh. Hobbling bad
the next week, he barely
misses getting clobbered
full-on by a lumbering
Hummer. He’s getting old
for this shit, but what else
is there to do but carry on
to the end? The few times
he tried to go back home
his wife shut the door on him,
frightened by those
vacant beacons in his eyes.
He hears of a stretch
of 1-95 peopled
with others of his ilk,
the most desperate
rabble of jaywalkers.
There’s Rudy
who’s been known to
cause semis to jacknife,
Mike who loves
to roar across the paths
of Harleys, and Lars
who’s specialty is leaping
before limos, causing
unspeakable mayhem
to monied reveries
in back. Among
these guys he looks
tame, almost normal.
Nights they pass a bottle
of Mad Dog beneath
the shusshing freeway,
changing bloody dressings
and ranting about the one
they almost didn’t get away from.
Others have quit this gig
after a scrape or two,
but not these hardwired types:
they’ll jaywalk to the end.
And it comes to each,
sure as brakes fail and
horns squeal their last
like an angel’s blast.
Our hero crouches
behind a bush in the meridian
at foggy first light. The traffic
seems almost surreal here,
steel bodies piercing the mist
with twin swording headlights.
With visibility so poor,
the drivers can only see them
after they’ve wigged past.
We don’t know what
our hero prays for:
to be seen as wild
to the weeds,
or to be hit
head-on, square in his tracks,
the madness of jaywalking
in the crosshairs at last.



CORDAGE

At first it was just a small lie,
fitted like a joist into a gripe
over how little you get paid
for all you do. I threw the first stiff
in a ditch — who needs dead
old grandma anyway?— and
sent back to the funeral home
an urn filled with cement and
potting soil. After all, human
cremains are just dust,
silt-grey silage of all other ends;
besides, I needed the 50 bucks
for rent. Soon the money became
a form of income, and so my crimes
became the day’s routine,
stacking bodies like cordage
where I could, in ditches
and in vales, rigor upon rigor
heaped with lime so I could
fill my cupboards with Cheerios,
Jack Daniels and potted meat.
One week I swaled seven bodies
in a row beneath the clothesline
so I could buy my Mary Lou
an engagement ring from the pawnshop—
small gold, smaller stone— and oh
how gratefully she smothered
me in her love that night!
I guess that sealed my deal
with the lying devil.
I sent back my baggies
of God’s saltpetre
with my condolences,
ringing up the till and pocketing
the stiffs every which
way out of sight. You know,
it takes a skill to hide
six feet of bone: I made
of it an art. I furrowed ancient
farmer types to labor under
the field and dropped prodigal
sons like tears just beyond the fence.
Sixteen wives I arranged like petals
round the ruins of a homestead
a half-mile toward the swamp.
I never thought much about
the families who received
my purses of dim dust; dead is dead,
I reasoned. I sent off Mary Lou
when she started complaining
of the sewer smell that seemed
to rise from the grounds.
Marriage, hell! My bride
was veiled in dirt, a good woman
who asked no questions
after dark when the whole acreage
hovered in a greeny glow.
Still, it took a lot of Jack
to drown those tiny voices
which mewled sadly at the window
just below the crickets and frogs.
It took a pint, then a fifth, then two
a night to erase the vapid litanies
of homeless daughters and sons,
husbands, wives, the occasional parent
too. Believe me, the chorus at 3 a.m.
at the Groveland Crematorium
would appall the devil himself.
Well I got sloppy, eventually,
or maybe just went nuts.
I started stuffing corpses
helter-skelter where I could,
in the toolshed, beneath the trailer,
even in the bed of my truck.
Ten years, fifteen. I should have
hung a No Vacancy
sign beneath my official one:
my small lie had become
an empire bursting at its seams.
Finally it happened, someone
must have wakened in the night
to wonder what was really
in the urn on the mantle,
and was nuts enough to
call the cops. They didn’t
have far to go to find the first one:
A finger was crooked above the dirt
by the mailbox, welcoming the
two deputies in. I’m in jail now.
I can almost hear their spades
pawing up that bounty of finds:
five, two dozen, fifty-three, one twenty,
the bone racks come up like
prices in an old cash register—
ka-ching!— ringing up
the same lie again and again.
Just call me the Enron of the dead,
a middle-man profiteer
who peddled in old ashes
and pocketed all the gold.
The suits in Houston will never pay,
nor will I: Convene your hand-wringing
committees, line the litigants against the wall.
What can they convict me of
that I haven’t already heard
from a rabble of skulls?
See how I fashion a noose
from these bedsheets—there’s
always a loophole in this business of life.
As sure as sin, I’ll swing from them all.


YOUR STORY IS YOUR SOBRIETY

Your story is your sobriety.
I hear of people
in Mozambique
induced to exchange
Kalishnikovs for
a tool—a sewing machine
or a hardy set
of shovels. That’s recovery.
No more the sear
of self-riotous bullets
like an angry wind
winding families down
to ruin. Instead it’s
husbandry and
hard work, the patter of
thread patienty crossing
blue fabric, the steady
rhythm of spades turning
fresh dirt. Some artisans
took those Kalishnikovs
and fashioned life
from them: a chair,
an urn, a violin.
What strange music
must have risen
from such heavy,
murdrous steel:
a bone-sweet,
difficult ecstasy,
weird as swords
breaking up the earth,
sewing seeds instead
of dragon’s teeth.


IMMORTELLE

I imagine a mushroom
called immortelle:
A small white roundlet
far beneath a canopy
of oak, inconsequential
to any foot straying
on a nearby path,
neither poisonous
nor sweet, unjacked
with any psychotropic
weal: And thus eternal
for this one day,
resident of that middle
wood with it’s single path,
a sort of heart
which endures
by not lasting, sustained
by fitting exactly
in part of the general
vacancy, humbly
offering small comfort
beneath the larger
canopy which is God’s.
Nestle and nurse
there, traveller, just
this one day,
then sing on.


EPITAPH FOR A DRUNK

for Walter

Pity that fellow castaway
whose bones scuttled in
to our noon meeting,
sighing so forlornly
of the music which
shipwrecked him here
though he would not stay.
He just didn’t get it;
couldn’t parlay
experience into sense
and so fell bottomless,
stumbling bottle to bottle
from freeway nave
to unmarked grave.
There were good times
long ago before this
frosty hell: Hunting with
the boys, a few wild babes,
fast cars, lots of laughs.
But all that’s gone now.
“I’m not a drunk!”
is the epitaph
he wrote in whiskey’s
disappearing ink.
Yes, pity our brother
and friend — he
stumbled out
never to return
unless you count that face
which frosts your every mirror,
whispering you aren’t one, either.


HAPPINESS

Rain outside in the 5 a.m.
dark, soft, steady, rinsing
away a long spell of heat
which long ago wore
out all welcome. Soon
it will turn cooler, the air
like freshly turned earth,
surprisingly alive and aware.
Our cat goes frisky on
mornings as this, her
spin a ridge for
nervous colts. Feel
a deep contentment spread
through this narrowest
of openings, as if to
wake in a country blanketed
with overnight snow
or to a woman you
have been with for
years but never seen as this.
Confucius said
happiness isn’t getting
what you want, it’s
wanting what you got.
If you would love
your life for the rest of it
you have to fall into
every day with the simplest
of verbs. To catch the
butterfly’s bright paper
wings, lighter than
first kisses, then letting
go a world
gone wholly green
inside the same
old weary winter day,
now pouring rain
from heaven to heaven
to heaven.


NEW YEAR'S BABE

taken from the news

It was New Year’s Eve
— a night to party
mama said, drinking
rom a bottle of wine.
She made me
drink some too even
though I was only
six years old.
I recall sour fire,
somehow like fruit
with gas balloons
inside. Lord knows,
there wasn’t much
to celebrate
that night; mama’s
brother went down
with the World
Trade Center
that September,
and at Christmas
dad got bad
drunk and beat
up mama bad,
whipping her
with their framed
wedding picture.
I remember blood
and glass and
that open cold door.
I haven’t seen
him since.
For years I
was so sure
it was my fault;
I was so small
back then, no
man at all, my
skin too easily
beaten blue.
I take my beatings
now like a man,
all scar.
all through.
Mama opened
another bottle
and turned up
the radio, dancing me
round the room in
a sloppy salsa. We’re
gonna dance and party
good tonight she cried,
whirling me hard
and harder. I cried
but she didn’t seem
to notice. We danced
on through another
bottle of wine.
When it was gone
she zipped me
into my jacket
and hissed let’s go.
My eyes were hanging
heavy but I
could tell the
night far from over.
We walked down
our neighborhood
to a corner where
she gave some guy
some money and he
palmed her something
she smoked further
down the street.
We’re gonna have us
some fun she shouted
up at the sky,
I guess informing
God that she didn’t
care what He thought.
She was through
with men.
Then she took
me up in her arms
and started to
cross the parkway,
not looking either way.
I remember screeching
brakes like huge birds
and white hot headights
just before the first
car hit us. Mama
I cried as we
lurched up into
the air; her arms
round me were
tight that only
instant. Over her
shoulder I saw
the next car
coming the other
way at us
and then everything
shattered like
a big window.
When I came to
I was on the pavement
a few feet away
from mama. She had
a halo of blood behind
her head, bright and thick,
and her white eyes
seemed to take in
all heaven. Cars passed
slowly round us, the
faces in them feeding
on us. I swore
that night I would
finish the dance
before all gods and men.
For year I have
partied but good
as good boys should.
I cross that street
now and then when
I get crazy drunk,
my arms wide.
But I never caught
the eye of God, I guess.



MURDER SUICIDE

alkies go this way

If I can’t have you
no one will.
That’s the deal.
No one. You
left me to my doom
but I believe
there’s room in
it for you.
If our love was
shattered by the
light of day,
then you and I
will house together
in what darkness
eats away. See!
As I finish this
bottle of vodka,
I’ll polish
you off too.
This gun is
like booze
in my hands —
tumblers of fire
behind the trigger,
my finger loosing
all the while.
You’ll be home soon
from your second job.
I wait here in the
bushes, patient as
a freeway bum.
My only job
is to wait serenely
to consummate you.
Hurry home, love.
Your drink is ready.



SHAY

she’s paying dues

Shay was never good with men.
She always ran with the ones
who ran over her in the end.
Maybe it’s all Bad Dad, she groused
to a girlfriend one night over
tequila shots and chasers at the bar;
a grim succession of dirtier shades
pulled over the old man’s grave.
Lord knows they all drank like him,
proud and cocksure at their end
of the bar, little boys so pumped
on bullshit you’d think their tattoos
glowed like the neon Bud sign at the door.
She’s danced for ‘em, rode astride
their Harleys, fucked ‘em every
way and how, even placed a
white rose or two on their graves.
She lights a Marlboro and inhales deep,
staring at herself in the bar mirror.
She’s not young enough anymore
for an merely honest charade. Now there’s only
the same slow dance at closing time,
late leers poured down onto the next
morning’s chilly cringe, rants and beatings
like a metronome clocking their
last footfalls out the door.
She remembers Saturday mornings
watching cartoons while Daddy slept
off his rages on the couch. How he’d moan
and curse behind her as if stranded
far at sea. Once in a while he’d sigh and
whimper, baby I’m so sorry or
your Daddy loves you. Well he
never rose much higher than that couch
before falling into his grave. All she asks
of these men who shamble into her
is just one I love you before
they commence on falling through.




DOWN AT SMOKEY JOE’S

When we pony up at Smoky Joes, our favorite barman
says name your poison. Not that it really matters,
because any pair of burning wings will do. Top shelf or
well, we only choose how much or more it costs to lose.

Down at Smokey Joe’s we’re all victims, rappelling
down snowier abysms than the sea. We huddle
round the bar like monks at vespers, chanting
our complainsong to anyone caught in range.

The TV at Smokey Joe’s rolls the late sports highlights
we lowlifes coulda contended for, had not others
suckerpunched us to thirst: Bad Daddy, Bitch Wife from Hell,
the Bill Collector with his way-way- way-past dues.

We’re fenced in by a thousand blades, each aimed
with great angst toward our long-soured intents.
No wonder we’re such immortal flops, knocking back those
bullets of schnapps, blacking out the mirror’s leer.

At 1 a.m. in Smokey Joe’s it’s never dark enough and the tap
is always running dry — our wallets near empty, that resolve
to have just two drowned two hours ago, the only woman
in the place snoring with her head down on the bar—too

much trouble to rouse, too little lust in us to silk a souse—
Yet somehow we always find some way to order just one more.
Let’s light a fire, burn patience thin. Let lead the way with
our luckless chin. Let’s mouth the words to incite that

old, infernal brawl—Fuck it, yah, fuck it all. Bartender,
here’s my house; drinks all around—a final douse!
So it goes down at Smokey Joe’s, where the rotgut flows
like lava from the darkest reaches of thirst. And since

we’re down here again. my man, how about another to
thicken the murk just on notch closer before closing time
shoos us out that smokey door where the sun is soon to rise
and nail us to the next day’s rack. Oh what the hell—We’ll be back.


WET BRAIN

Well, he finally got enough
to drink. There’s a door
down at the bottom of
the last bottle you’ll ever
need to drink, concluding
all the ones you never thought
you’d enter. After the broken
homes and jails, the detox wards
and cold floors in homeless
shelters where anything worth
stealing was lifted from you
while you wheezed away,
after how many years
ticked off in two liter midnights
and all the mouths you entered
when world turned blueblack
in its simple rigor of
drinking only to drink
to death, you arrive at
a drunk’s magic island
of repose. Some of us
don’t die drunk, we’re hardier,
chosen by the devil
to row out from that final shore
on a day like any other
out behind the liquor store
beneath the boxes in the filth
where even rats disdain
to go, unscrewing that last
desperate jug of wine:
And with one greedy sip
the thirst is quenched at last
and something descends
like a vacant, distant rain,
you can’t see it and don’t know
that your brain has finally set
in perpetual West. The thirst is gone.
A wet drunk never needs to
drink again; the anchor’s pulled.
Pray—oh pray!—you who
wake today in your vomitous
puddle of misery and shame
that you aren’t that strong.
There is a solution if
you drink enough —jail,
ward, grave if you’re lucky;
wet brain if you’re not.
See the shade sitting on
the park bench at midnight
smiling so serenely,
his eyes content, like iced seas.
When you’re wholly dissolved
in booze, there’s nothing
left to solve, no more need to drink.
The drunkenness now inks you.



KEEP COMING BACK

Walter was back in the meeting again
looking rougher than ever, soiled T-shirt
and ratty shorts, a long red bark
on his left shin, hair like a toilet
scrub-brush, his eyes blue fuses of woe.
I’m real hungover, he said. I’ve been drinking
way too much and I gotta do something
about it. No one could say much
to him because he left soon after
that. I think we all sighed,
not that we were glad he had gone,
but rather we were relieved we had not;
that somehow, through
some higher, sweeter agency, the freezing
spirit which had glaciered us
for so long had been lifted.
How sad to see Walter in the jaws of that
cold shark whose only whim
is to drink and drink
down the thickening ink.
More mysterious than that distance
between hard drinker and dying sot
is the eternal gap between the
misery which drinks to bad ends
and the desperation which
surrenders and begins.
Will Walter get it? I’d given up
on him long ago, but there he
was, at least for a while,
looking ever worse for the bottle’s wear,
his tale one of new lows
spreading beneath the loam
of old ones. To all the Walters we say
good to see you again, friend,
some day all that’s killing you
will make you willing.
You just keep coming back.


DISAPPOINTMENT

Heaven was in a rout. The Evil
One was too strong. The world
resembled the shins of warriors
sliced at the knee: everywhere
splinters and the bright gules
of defeat. The hearts of men
and women too much like raisins
popped in any imp's mouth.
God called the Devil to talk.
They drank coffee atop Ararat
surrounded by the fumes of ruin.
Humans are just too easy for you,
God sighed. You were only meant
to make their choices difficult.
So I've decided to take back all
of your weapons save one.
Which of them will you keep?
The devil sipped his coffee.
He didn't need to ponder, but
savored a pregnant pause.
Inhaling the sweet aroma of
crushed beans he said,
let me still disappoint.
God sighed again, surveying
his created world. The people were
good and strong, handsome,
gifted at singing and trade.
Yet how they would stumble
and fall once the devil
had slipped them again
that coin from which makes
of plenitude a shade.
But God granted his friend's
request. The smoke cleared
for a while down below.
Fields got planted, kings built
palaces. Children were
born ruddy and golden.
But inevitably one day
a rich man stood in his
treasure room and
and failed to see enough.
Disappointment creeped
through his heart
like cracks in a wall.
The man sat with a
heavy sigh on his throne,
sad head in his hands.
No matter what came his
way after, he saw only
what he lacked. How
every grace of living
failed to reap that
infernal demand. The
kingdom fell to the
sourest of levies,
a people of paradise
taxed into a living hell.
Disappointment rang
loud from dark towers,
moody and dark to
the core; and all
the king's people walked
by a sea short of the
sea's true dark door
of more, oh inexpressibly more.


TRASH PILE

Heaped by the road,
a trash pile of now
vagrant intents:
a ruined mattress
(blood, booze, burns),
an easy chair with half
its stuffings pulled
(or chewed), box of
battered pots
and cracked dishes,
clothes in helter-
skelter sprawl:
all pointing toward
the worst of exits.
Who knows,
maybe the guy
was locked up
long enough to miss
enough rent payments.
Or perhaps he's just
plumb gone, departed
the way of the last
drops of whiskey
in the empty bottle
which lies next to
the pile, catching
the morning sun bland
and blank as the life
which never was.
Look upon that trash
pile, friends, and
be immensely
grateful that your day
--this day--steers wide
of such riven ends.


THE POWER

Here is the power
you never had,
here in this little boat
beneath the moon,
your history behind you
and nothing ahead
but the open sea
and a fuse
of dazzling water.
Pick up the oars
and start rowing.
You know how to go
and where, at least today.
Trust the power
you ride, a sure and
deep current.
The circuit completes
with your hands
steady at the oars
and your heart open wide.


YOU ARE NOT ALONE

To the crying woman
in the corner here after
her third DUI;
to the banker who's
been sleeping in his car;
to the cocksman
with AIDS; to the
mom without her kids;
To the man who once
killed a wife now two days
out from Starke;
to the young surfer
who can't understand
how fast he fell
and sits here as if jail;
to the angry man
with rictus teeth
and poison spleen;
to the strangely
distant one whose
every center has
been drowned in booze;
to the woman who
can't believe she
turned out just
like her dead mother;
to the cop who
tried to smoke his
gun and failed;
to the good old boy
who watched his
drunk buddy burn
to death in his car;
to the woman who's
back after so many
years living up the curse;
to the young man
who's here to keep
the wife at bay and
the old man who
has no one left to shame;
to the homeless man
in the other room
who doesn't even
know his bones;
to the professor and
the auto detailer,
the jailer and the con,
the roadie and the
whore's lonely son;

Welcome home,
one and all.

You are not alone.