JUVENILIA

Only April—but already
this nascent city
park is a crazy
patchwork quilt

of ratty actual quilts
doublewide
strollers orange
cones and skittering cleats—no picnic

for the tender
blades of
grass underneath—
or the

shy young Narcissus 
pseudonarcissus 
out on the fringes
shivering in dog piss.

BABEL

Maybe it wasn't a typo.
Maybe the world
needs all its
bad people—the sharks
help the minnows learn
how to swim faster;
a pony who's depressed
finally gets
some privacy
and rest; and those
old insecure deities—
who didn't want us
knowing things,
who fused us together,
but still didn't like to
see us touching,
who never even seemed to
want to hear us
talking cooperatively
amongst one another—
are the ones
we have to thank
for towers
and towers of self-
similar books
full of scrappy blind
poems like that one.

MEETING FRIENDS IN OLD CITIES

Anyplace in the world
where now we might
push a few buttons and easily meet
could hardly be a former
tormented graveyard, could it?

Still, when you laugh
at the size of the soft pretzel vendor's
sidewalk umbrella, you do it
a little uneasily;
and I am having a hard time

ordering bubble tea
because I'm unsure of how
recyclable the container is. It's nice
but a lot of hard work
not to realize

that all around us, these
enlivening feats
of architectural genius
contain many locked doors that
require special keys—

and that
over and over again, we have to
keep paying
if we wish to remain
contestants in a flimsy game show.

Things are like this now, we say
to each other.
The world isn't fair, we acknowledge.
But walking southwest
as the sun sets spectacularly

on all these svelte
monuments to the gracious dead,
we can't keep from feeling
a little exhilarated—and perfectly free
to imagine that it used to be.

MIXED FEELINGS

You keep hearing—
the gray light of sunrise
is far and away the
best kind of light. but you'll

never be able to say it
like that. For that matter,
what was it the fog rolling
in off lake Michigan

was trying to call out to you
this morning? What on earth
did the black coffee afterward
actually taste like?

So many things
you'll never be able to tell
that have to be told anyway.
It's just business is usually

how the businessmen put it.
This is the province of science 
claims a dental hygienist.
But the poet says—maybe

this is just how it is. Maybe
you only have mixed feelings
about everything
because there's no such thing as

a pure one.
All you can say is—I love this 
too, and wait around
for the emptiness, which

chokes closed the last
line of every poem
to rush in and confabulate
the rest of the details. Maybe it's

pure selfishness
which first drove the mute
soul to dream. Maybe
each new story that's told

is only there to help us
make sense of our own.
Maybe the stars are fading
because it's finally morning.

EVERYTHING YOU OWN

Isn't it kind of annoying—
you're never alone
whenever you're alone.
All your life
there's been someone
in the other room—
someone with no job
who's always home.
In the late afternoon,
over the muffled blare of 1980s
sitcoms on a television,
you've heard her voice calling—
everything you own, isn't it 
ridiculous—how much does a 
word weigh, what does white
light cost—at the end of the day
everyone loves best 
the things that nobody can.
And when you close
your eyes at night, you often fall
asleep to the sound of her murmuring
over and over, like a
faucet dripping
out in the kitchen:
in this whole universe, 
those titanic engine-room stars
must be the most 
and least real 
things in existence. 

WHAT HAPPENED

God, we are all such assholes—

every one of us, so greedy

for plot lines and the nine o'clock 

news of our lives—so eager

to keep making 

new things occur—

just so that we might 

wear their learned lessons 

sequentially stitched 

across our bodies in public,

like keen-eyed little cub scouts 

obsessed with earning badges.

But how often

do we ever 

walk up to another in our tribe

and say—

sit down, friend, gee whiz, I can 

see it in your eyes, 

I can hear the sirens, blaring out 

there in the dark 

corners of your mind.

Please relax,

take a deep
breath, and

tell me: what 
happened.

THINK POSITIVE

Beautifully, cruelly,
day or night; everything we do—

every discontented
face we make, each false move

and every negative gesture, each hair
we carefully slick back in place,

each border we tug on
and tighten like a bootlace,

each graceless moment spent contorted
in the honorable distraction of prayer,

each cruel guillotine
ceiling fan cycle we bear

before knocking more softly
on that closed bathroom door—

every one of these carefully
choreographed negotiations

is cast in the ambient light
from every single star

which has ever existed
and which ever might.

So I'd think peace on earth—I mean
the real kind—might require

a little more
than the end of war.