The Song of Angry Men

Michael Larsen hit me hard,

Though I didn't even know about it til two years after it happened,

Wasn't the fan I pretended to be, I guess,

Jesse's dad, Brother Wilcox, Brooke's dad, Elliot Smith,

Sad grist for songs and cigarettes,

Anthony Bourdain was a sharp blow,

In France when I heard,

And I've never seen the depths he has, but

I'd been on both sides of addiction and

Been father to a ten year old girl, and

Maybe started feeling that I can't know anything for sure, but

 I had found myself on a shore which suggested that

The game was worth the candle,

And now in a Paris hotel bed, left to wonder if

Even this is too much to count on

Chuck E Cheese

I wonder how it will be if the afterlife really is just like one big mind waking up from a dream. Some supremely complex dream where each of the infinite fractions of your conciousness had a turn as protagonist... maybe even rocks and comets get a say.... and to realize that each thing you hated, and each person you pretended didn't exist because their every word and action seemed an affront to creation, was actually you all along. Rapists and their victims reconciling what they did to themselves... Jews and Gentiles, lambs and lions and all that.  And I don't know if it will outweigh the nausea from all the misguided self-serving, but a salve, or the hope in pandora's box so to speak, might be realizing your loves - the ones you knew before the dream lost its sheen, its new-car-smell, its ability to surprise and strike awe, the ones that made you feel you'd been holding your breath for years until you held them close and inhaled at last, deep and quenching - are also inseparable from you, with all their impossible goodness.

Void is Form

It is two minutes past noon and I am still alone in the office.  One colleague has called out sick, another has called in late due to fevery children.  The third doesn't bother with excuses anymore, as he never appears until he's been to the gym and had lunch.  My boss's Google Calendar says she'll be at something called "Moving Forward" until 3:00.  I don't mean for this to sound as whiny as it's coming out (there's a little self-righteous resentment yes, but just a little).  It's more of a lonely thing.  Ella Fitzgerald can't be helping... I'd never really listened to 'They Can't Take That Away' before.  And only 27 hours ago I was standing over the Snake River near Shoshone Falls, in the parking lot of a Michael's craft store, watching base jumpers leap from the Perrine Bridge.  My daughter is at the perfect age for everything and she squealed as each chute opened.

Mermaids can't be caught
Or they become like girls or
Fish, though goddelijk

I didn't get my little boy but I got my kindred spirit

Opium of the People

If it wasn't a cold digital reading and the push of a vinyl button

The nurse had found an errant blue-black seed in the crack between the driveway and her mother's vegetable garden

And warmed the soil so as not to shock the fragile thing, and misted it with a thoroughly rinsed spray n wash bottle

Each morning, bleary-eyed, sensing how many spurts might replicate a humid morning in  Bangledesh

And cradled its trailings as she transferred it to a larger space along the side of the house

Between the pottery kiln with the frayed power cord and the deflated basketball,

Would there be a pain justi....

I notice my thoughts have carried me away again and I bow to them like Jack Kornfield's tapes taught me,

Acknowledge the 7 year old Mennonite girl across the childrens section of the Kanab Library

Realize that I'd shifted my arm to obstruct her view of my more obvious arm tattoos without even thinking about it