Against Necropsy

I wrote under the influence of thunder but now it's all hot water and ripped sheets. A man needs something to do. He sat by his wife's bedside twelve hours a day for seven days straight until she died. Everybody in town talked. That's how you're going to get a cure for cancer, friend.

Love is everywhere, God is everything! They carried beach balls and made a little parade of it. When the horse died, they opted against necropsy. What can you do with grass beneath your feet? The dregs of the coffee inspired some thistle.

She bristled when they criticized her son in court. Rewriting is redundant. Popped the lid and found a beer can holding it all together. Your ballet is my mineral excavation via backhoe. That's right bud, I'm talking to you.

Wild raspberries, grunting bears. The pond was dark and heavy like a dream of your father's death. Yet we went ahead and kept going. The same ground covered twice can yield diamonds if you pay attention. My favorite writers, my penchant for cigars.

Bearing Trophies Through The Shadows

Sugar solves acidic coffee. Again solves everything. Be kind, be willing, be mystified. Also, eschew caveats.

Protection is the devil's sales pitch. The lot was dark, filled with weeds, wrecks of cars in which young people died. I said to the field you're looking good which I would never say to a woman. Falling to sleep, remembering ticks.

We're all puppets at best, Fisher Price people at worst. She took the kids outside and came back with flowers. A hunger in which Christ blossoms. Scat witch.

On Sunday, church bells. In the forest, chickadees. Odd to think of so many soldiers just a couple towns away. In my dream, the cops just watched as batons flew and glass windows shattered.

We always ready always. Mired in nostalgia, bearing trophies through the shadows. A mute angel gestures where the Momma deer hesitates. We're getting better at ashes all the time, aren't we?

An Older Habit of Baseball

Minnesotans make good deals. My aunt employed a former employee of the soda factory. Chocolate is without definition. Medical charts order the dream of tomorrows. A pigeon feather dipped in rain. Your toothpick is my lucky charm. Her sweaterss were folded atop the dresser right next to the cat's ashes. Certain boys in the tropics study an older habit of baseball. This could go on forever and sometimes does. Clarity is the other side of clouds. A list of favorite authors, a note on working with python. There's wicker in my heart, there's a candle near my shoulder. She slept with a woman who slept with you. Water bottles beaded with sweat, potato eyes all pink and moldy. We bought garlic in anticipation of parades. The vs. a vs. hmmm. Oysters raising a dim crescendo, bliss relies on baritones. Hi Alice, hi Gretel, hi Fortunata. God up in arms up to the ears. You sweet sentimental you you.

Bent Ethics

A name is responsibility. A transaction is a continuation. Tarot cards amend scoliosis. Simply angels. That was the best toboggan-building workshop ever!

I'm not okay with the poor. Paper clips are a bent ethics. Remuneration in quartz. Heaven is without exertion all the time. Be still my porcelain heart.

The keys played themselves resulting in mayhem. A pile of words that no matter how you sliced them wanted to mean something. Kind of like your typical middle class Christian. Watermelons are a circular argument. A circus mentality that heals.

Coffee while the sun rises, beer as it falls. In poetry one can be devilish which is a kind of commendation. A fine smell of withered daisies. Insects demand salvation too. My amen, your baying hound.

Crickets In My Blood

She sat on the bus and picked at her ear, now and then studying the waxy shine on her fingers. Later we had coffee and agreed never again. Imaginary cross bows. A crimp I can't forget. You cried a little or so you say, recalling it years later.

Silent warriors investing in the afterlife. After dinner we studied the fair guide and were surprised to see that the ox pulls now included breathalyzer tests. Juvenile hawks circled at a distance. I could go on like this forever. Eyes closed, no less vivid.

The engine revved up, the seamstress coughed and a man she'd never met before fingered some coins in his pocket. Once in a while it does happen. It turned out we were heading to the same cafe to nurse the same desire to create. The teamsters I mean are no longer allowed to get drunk.

Time is what passes (while we're only telling stories). Nobody says boo in Heaven. I keep seeing a woman in a tattered white gown who shakes her head whenever I opt against quatrains. Sneak attack! Cardinals in my heart, crickets in my blood.

Anger Loves A Row of Onions

At least we never hid from punctuation. At a delicate moment she farted. What ties it together? Old horses gumming damp hay.

Motorcycle gangs in upstate New York. Good neighbors help you put up fences. Right as I was about to come she laughed remembering something the dentist had said. That life as opposed to this one.

Nor would I indulge pheasants, nor bother to understand this sentence. When the rain comes, he goes inside, unless he wants to stay outside. We took soap to the river. We laughed amongst friends and so the night at least passed.

Salted beef, cold coffee, cheap chocolate and gratitude. Late at night letting the dog out to pee I thought I saw the older dog, the dead one, coming up towards me for a visit. Angels prefer birch trees. But anger loves a row of onions.

The road out led me back. A corner of the driveway I'm pleased the doves call home. New York plates, a deer print near the spinach. If it's not artificial then it must be holy.

A Funny Kind of Sorry

The asterisk in place of gender. A copper flash that indicated blades. Summer dresses, visible ankles. I'd count my blessings but I'm otherwise impaired.

You do it. Your photographs make me think you think that beauty can be made. Consider again the calf muscles of competitive swimmers. The order your inclination breathes.

Forgiveness at another extreme. He indicated he was not inclined to theological niceties. What a reedy voice you have when you complain about needing to travel. A daughter making it up as he goes.

That sonorous boom we called God bowling. A friend's cattle, a familiar blue light. We dipped cucumbers in hot sauce, watched the waves a mile away, and never quite made it to regret. Me and you and a funny kind of sorry.

Oh, it'll all be red flowers. Dull odor of piss, half a dozen cartwheels. I looked up and was surprised to see the Big Ladle at such a crooked angle. I'll say I love you and you'll compliment my vest.

Count Coffins

Setting sun, dried clumps of mown grass. The neighbor's mailbox, sullen as a mule. More wild strawberries please, I need to believe in God. Repetition is the key, so long as you know it's insistence.

Emphasis? Your autographed baseball is my melodrama. Count coffins kid, that'll help you sleep. My wife's father slaughtered a lamb and that was the end of her dreams of farming.

I'm looking for you - here - in this sentence. I'm also waiting for a bear. She chases robins whenever she see's one. Thinking about it only makes it worse.

Or this for a pass: he wrote he wrote. Writing is salvational if you want to see it that way. Visitors, gingko biloba, a pink bandana tethered to a crutch. Jump starts.

Milkweed. All sound has a certain shape. Thus I disagree with Denise Levertov who opted for another disability. Loosen your bonnet already.

The Sentence, Your Roof, A Life

The urge to create, the generative impulse. A list of things for later? Four clouds, two colors. Traffic sounds. A mosquito perhaps, fighting the breeze, but I am no entomologist.

I did once see a dermatologist. One mushroom blossomed nearly to twenty, marring the green surface of the neighbor's lawn. Did I write the stranger I sometimes wave at when social custom dictates? God bless you. You and your muzzled nostalgia.

Try seeing it - the sentence, your roof, a life - from someone else's perspective. I no longer identify as a believer. Corporate responsibility- sounds like an elective in a curriculum for clowns. Your bended knee, my pucker up.

There's nobody out there to teach or forgive but you wouldn't know it by me. He wrote to the muse, couldn't you just leave me alone for once? Old men playing bocce, happy in the sunlight. It's math, not a breeze. The universe scrambled and came up with this?

The Legwork Around Here

The neighbor's chickens scratch under the front yard maple tree. He limps along in his own way. Want to know what to do? Feed yourself, feed others. Don't ask for answers you aren't ready to question.

Pawn to e5. Don't call it a game even though it's a game. Don't call it a story. What the mail rendered is obsolete. The horses came over once, their untrimmed hooves gouging the lawn.

Forsythia, gentians, frost-crested clover. The neighbor's wife in a bathtub reading What To Expect. Not covetous, curious. Coffee sure does do a lot of the legwork around here. More reading doesn't mean more insight.

Three hours without subtitles! The queen was once limited in her movement yet once empowered improved the game greatly. Your Bucharest, my unfinished novel. Little digs without respite. The thing about hunger is it returns.

Alone and Thus

A profusion of bull thistle. A jazz horn, maybe Gillespie. In the back yard, frogs. A cloud in the shape of your ear.

Mourning doves mate forever. Never trust brown. Sundresses on the clothesline, a softball under the rose bush. It's late but it's not too late.

He was always alert to for lost lambs. Smells like cut grass or melting hard top. Deer prints filled with rain on which a few shreds of honeysuckle drift. Coltrane possibly, A Love Supreme.

Beginnings were what stopped all efforts at fiction, making poetry a necessity. You could drive all afternoon and not get there. Can you tell I'm lonely? A rich bed of clover, suitable for sheep.

Honey bees, neighbors. Lost love is the predominant theme. I went alone and thus. The trail in, the trail out and on the way you.

I Couldn't Sleep

A draft horse saddle on the dining room floor. A bad memory. Obviously it's there to be cleaned. Cleared? The neighbors are always talking. Right now I'm just writing but later I won't be. This is writing, too. Dreams are a confirmation and in a way a difficulty. What you know you know and what you know you know you share. It's early yet for blueberries. This is not the writing that I read last night when I couldn't sleep and sat on the porch waiting on a bear. Such divine prose! I'm focused on not focusing and that's how it is now. She's talking and as always that's enough. The pile of trash hidden out back gets bigger by the day. That's the way of jumbled sentences, better get used to it. That's coffee, older and older and older. Clouds obscured stars both named and unnamed and there was plenty of wind. We for whom the family narrative matters. The moon was visible through the neighbor's grape arbor, but only just and it was fine, it was better than fine.

Like Parcheesi Only Worse

Your chess set is my green world. Sunlight on a male mallard's back is not proof of God! Touching your ass made us both smile. What a life.

One imagines waves gently cresting an empty beach. Baby whales gasping in the garden. Everybody has their own idea of what it means to win and nobody gets it right. It's like parcheesi, only worse.

He taught his youngest daughter about the behavior of barn swallows. The builder smoked while they reviewed his work. Approval often manifests in writing. In this life at this time a black bear is the perfect joy.

Still a hint of red pepper when your eyes are open at noon. Your cork-colored hair, the way you reach when picking apples. Purple Loosestrife was all along the highway. What's sad is when you realize you'll never remember all the sentences you think.

Coffee and cigarettes - no better way to greet the day. The poor will be with you always is not a license to pay them no or scant attention. The flaws were obvious, his love dimly perceived. On and on it went, like a merry-go-round, like weather.

All The Same Moment All The Time

Don't make a list. Don't clump it together. Don't make meaning obvious. Don't elect chickens. And don't complain, it's unbecoming in poets.

Are you repeating yourself or saying something different? Are you insisting on a certain readerly experience? Are you using poetic strategies or theological ones or what? This note is not the one you were working on earlier and what does that mean? Yet they do have a certain charm in the way they keep scratching for what sustains them.

I'm not but you are. How did you fill that last space? This paragraph employs the strategy of a literary essay. Now are you laughing? Bob Seger reminds us that pages are meant to be turned.

Meat allowed to be burned? If we didn't share some mutual desire then we wouldn't both be here - you in the reading, me in the writing. It's all the same moment all the time. Is the overall project weakened by sharing every piece? Writing is my new favorite noun.

A Cherished Family Artifact

You should distrust every declaration. Cognition is nothing but a spark plug. Blonde rocks in the garden, sunflowers that withstood lightening. Stop pissing off quantum physicists, okay?

Whenever I found a place that indicated settlement, I kept going. I am the man I am writing about. What does my son mean when he says that? Later, Vermont, more coffee, and the same old conversation about land.

Borders making arrangements with one another. A certain focus is required. To maintain maximum awareness you should wear your crucifix outside your shirt. Yeah, Buddha wept alright.

Why not misspell this word or another? Have you ever sat down with coffee to write and the writing was so intense that you forgot all about the coffee until it was cold? The goal is recovery. A rusted wheel barrow might help.

A hankering to farm is a cherished family artifact. We are all like pigs but in the pen or in the freezer? You woke and I tried to kiss you which you grudgingly allowed. Light, the last of the coffee, the love I am trying to say.

Sunlight on a Grackle's Wing

At 10:30 p.m. lightening was visible high in the clouds. We fell asleep discussing common mistakes in chess openings. Later, it rained and only one of us woke up. You are the teacher I've been looking for.

You are the book I'm trying to sell. The vaginal folds of the rose should tell you all you need to know about the consumption of beauty. There were fifteen drops of water on the window after it rained. I counted while you slept, thinking as always of Jesus.

How many ways does one need to read a sentence? Oddly, it doesn't seem stupid to write that the rhubarb has been resurrected. The dog slept while I slept and woke when I awoke. Loyalty and love take matching shakers.

Order fish, order whatever. I make you laugh which makes being a poet kind of ancillary. Oh well, we are all aspiring altruists. Jesus made me do it!

Chipmunks hesitate near the rusted bed spring. Blue jays preen on the leg of the broken lawn chair. It rained then but now it won't. You've got a certain style, like sunlight on a grackle's wing.

The Everpresent Salt Of Now

My first assignment was counting rain drops. Next I walked a thousand beaches. Smashed plums, dragon flies and a funny story about fish hooks.

Decrepit rose bush, its littered petals. We had to move the swingset to make room for the horse. I sat beneath the willow tree, drinking coffee and reminiscing with the holy spirit.

Up north are eskimos and meals revolve around sea fat. In summer we don't touch while sleeping, on account of how hot it is. Well, sometimes.

The man without shoes takes up spirituality. Vintage Christmas ornaments. The tale worth telling is always right in front of you.

What do you mean by a 'New England way of seeing?' There's a hole in the gutter. Pabst Blue Ribbon in both dreams.

Years ago when we were still at play there was talk of opening a restaurant. Study God the way you'd study a menu. Is this the first time we've met?

For the everpresent salt of now I fall to my knees to utter. As always, resistance was never the point.

The Way Herod Did No

Writing is a noun, this time around. It's good to have projects. No baby bottles, no pacifiers.

We are specifically this kind of people. Hills are less likely to have names than mountains. A chickadee at the feeder, indifferent.

Making connections, just not the way Herod did. No, you may not buy any firecrackers for your birthday. A midnight thunderstorm, a broken way of seeing it.

Why do you always get on me for speaking metaphorically? I rose and closed the windows. She recalled a movie from the 1970's, its theme song was running through her head.

Is death quiet then or noisy? Does everybody have the same amount of blood, right down to the last drop? I've heard this before.

We are not making widgets we are not prepared to sell. Together, the two sentences bore witness to the comma. Backgammon late, in lieu of conversation.

But I do love mending fences. And your gaze in my memory alerts all snakes.

The Center From Which All Prison Springs

Four a.m. and all is well. Thirty minute meditations that lead nowhere. Mind is the center from which all prison springs. What else don't they tell you when you sign up for the Lord?

It's a long way home, whatever that means. In the photograph, surrounded by cigarette smoke, he resembled a young Bob Dylan. Banish all mentors! I begged my dreams for suggestions re: an especially challenging forgiveness project.

The power of the cloud is rain. Like most spiritual seekers, I have no idea what I'm talking about when I'm talking about quantum mechanics. He called himself the scourge of cattle. Dust off that zafu and start counting your breaths boy!

I do miss you but I accept the space between us. What can we say about the morals of swappers? Shot from behind. Leakage is helpful because it's something to do.

Is there such a thing as a mercenary spirituality? I'm bored. She inhabited my dreams to a very precise, a very troubling degree. I'm lying now so as not to say more.

Want Persists

A bounded desire. Berlin, Germany in 1988. Any landscape seen with eyes. How far will a flashlight reach?

Love is a purple pen shared with a like-minded teacher. Tarot of Prague priced out of my league. A picture of a distinctly Celtic, a manicured Jesus. Photographs then?

I love you in an active not a discursive way. The twenty sentences are unrelated to time. Form need not be temporal. Yet the question - what do you want - persists.

Parrots, chameleons. Silent dreams. Up for hours in the lotus position practicing awareness. No sign of him yet no despair yet either.

Be careful of how you advise yourself. Mistakes can be momentous. A portentous barking in the background. In the foreground coffee and writing, like this.

Contingent, Thus Unreal

Coffee is no substitute for breakfast. I wrote poetry long before I wrote prose. I can't remember the last sentence, though it resembled something out of Cooper. Commerce corrupts almost inevitably. Necessary evils.

Imagine an embodied erudition. Mother Theresa knew the value of a dollar. The devil's armory contains only doubt, though he does love our inclination to procrastinate. A dog barks, you write. Prose is the presence of architecture, broadly understood.

Turn inward. Risk the fall again and again. These borrowed bodies slouch toward dust. Craft and commerce at the mixer called life. When the dog curls up on the couch, the cat leaps down to the floor.

If it's going to happen, it will. A steady stream of piss to welcome the morning. My hands shook at the keyboard yet my thoughts were fluid and sleek. A certain wariness, a certain readiness is always advisable. Happiness is contingent, thus unreal.

We Threw Away the Baby Mattress

Bird song while the family sleeps. Still too wet to write outside. I make coffee, trying to be quiet. My teeth hurt and my shoulder has been hurting me for days. I am always looking for time to write.

Your shallow stream is my trout hole. True or false: composed of differences makes love impossible. Certain ideas - like driving to Vermont or listening to God - are not valued.  Lately I suffer. Yet forgiveness does abound and real miracles do fill our lives.

In my dream, roses, computer screens filling with pop-ups. Screw the diet, those muffins look heavenly. A rooster, a whole ranch of them. Should I reach out to you or not? Is understanding one's motives important ever?

Never say that life is a game unless you understand rpgs. You have always been the one who makes me laugh and I don't tell you that nearly enough. We threw away the baby mattress without talking. Someone always wants to talk to me about writing. Naturally we wake up.

Only A Suggestion

The brook gushes white beneath a honeysuckle overhang. Still no sign of crabapples. According to a four year-old beavers are both cute and silly. Forget-me-nots have tough stems. The field awash with black-eyed susans.

The field alit in a brief splash of sunlight. Another person I don't know who knows my name which pleases me. We always have to chase the dog where the logging trail ends. Wild strawberries. The depth of my anger and fear never ceases to amaze me.

Sentences are not as appealing as they used to be. I studied some bad fiction yesterday, concluding the real flaw lay in the use of characters as chess pieces, and the awkward end (exposition) to which the dialogue was put. People talk. Much of what I profess to believe I simply don't believe. Push inevitably comes to shove, especially when the ground is muddy.

Yet there are moments. No salamanders - actually newts - but who's counting. Your little legs grew tired and instead of asking for water you asked for chocolate. We scoured the tall grass for fawns and found only a suggestion. I love the idea of God but you are here, aren't you?

A Question of When

I thought it was late but it was early. The game board we use is warped as if left out in rain or just old. In my dream, you died and I missed the memo. I am never sure if it is okay to cry. Five in a row.

The chickens slept in, content at last with sawdust. Unfamiliar sun in the middle of June. The neighbors leave their barn door open a crack. Swallows loop in and out and cross the sky. I still don't know who was having a party last night but I'm glad I wasn't invited.

Dreams are poor guides. I woke early and did other people's chores. God is not who I think God is but I forget that all the time. No gas for the mower. In the corner of the yard, a plosion of bluets.

The cats wake you and you scratch their shoulders, making them purr. The smell of coffee at 6 a.m. is definitely not an illusion! A lot of people say I read too much. I stripped outside and hung muddy clothes on the line. We are all going home, it's a question of when.

Bored, Committed to Prose

It's morning and this is not the morning I wanted. I spent the day reading about criminals on the lam. Woke up bored, committed to prose. Damn commercialism!

Damn rain which makes walking the dog so undesirable. Racist basset hounds. A game of battleship left out all night. Depending on how you look at it, no options is the best option.

A speck of dust confused with a period. What you write with writes you or at least it's fun to think so. Strands of gray. Yet more denial.

I always cross the gossip line second and pretend that makes it right. People who leave tend not to come back. Statistics will kill you. Will the woman in Colorado please stand up?

Ignore me but not my backgammon. This morning is the only one I have, right? The textual evidence indicates that Tony Soprano died, period. Emily Dickinson does not attend.

A Last Time Before Eden

Take your forty and a shovel and go to work and shut up. Doubt contains many details. Here now is the prismatic sonship.

Humming along with crystal singing bowls, eyes closed. Pin cushions buttress the faint of heart. A good movie is God's back door.

I won't be the first to say grace. Where is that letter again, the one from the treasurer? Oh to see the Nile a last time before Eden.

I'm not real interested. I'm never reaching in. Into nirvana, risking investment.

Day laborers see a long row one way, you see it another. Your train tracks are my Hank Williams. Folding chairs in the basement, the rank smell of standing water.

Drunk on wine that was opened last week. Into the garden go the grackles. The disciples didn't - don't - know shit.

Can I say that that way? How the anti-political sage beckons during interesting times?

More Disappointment God

Dogs. Sunset. Field and forest. An old woman laughing, smoking a cig.

Nothing happens. This matters. Expectation gets high on disappointment. I did let go only to learn to let go.

That pressing illusion. A cat suffering from dementia. A bad night's sleep or a night of bad sleep. This or that or nothing.

If resistance is strong, take that as a sign. Avoid signs. You see with what eye what I have to deal with? A shambling black bear at the hen house.

After midnight, more disappointment. God is not aware of God. Bible study is b.s.. Essence of lilac, many days of rain.

Smooth Folds Elsewhere

The condom had an oddly medicinal smell. We left a single light on. My right ear hurt, as if filled with water. This then is love in the country of dogs.

Your email list is my fond memory. Strands of hair that tickled my nose. A demon stalks one's dreams yet cannot impair the fundamental desire for God. That remuneration.

Grace is knowing there's nothing you need to do. No kisses because of stubble. Yet there were smooth folds elsewhere. Later a new love, a better one.

Musing on errands in days to come. "I thought you were going to die." Our expectations are murderous indeed! In 1987 I invented a drink called what's next.

A childlike obsession with rewards. Even the conqueror feels small when seriously looking at stars. The dog came back bloody after tussling with a bear. We sleep alone and it's okay, it's alright for now.

A Tournament of Waifs

What constitutes a good feeling? Dry snow on the blacktop late on Halloween? A shriveled monkey's paw ripe with fury?

Books piled high on a circular table, a half-melted candle, broken monocles, an antique pen. We fell asleep inside a tournament of waifs. Come back in an hour if you still want to go.

Beneath water, still breathing. The difference is measured in spoonfuls of sugar. Halfway to hell we stopped to take notes.

I remember you, yes, but not that precise mask. Quartz is familiar, daisies are nice. Nobody follows the news anymore.

A pile of stuffing next to dismembered dolls. We laughed until we were hoarse and still couldn't make it funny. A book with both pentagrams and caveats.

All night, the shutters swing back and forth without a breeze. A dull infiltration of the familiar. Bold talk with a spark out back.

Seven wishes cut in half. The kids asleep, a knock at the door.

Talking About Our Fathers

Was it pearl or was it albumen? A sure talk that bled into profiles. We made hay while it rained, then drank coffee in the barn talking about our fathers. It was fate, it was a hut, it was aces in the dark.

It was the Maine Coast in 1932. Gorgeous angels leaning on rakes, their faces tilted to the sky. My generation left tires on the trail but yours left shit and bullet casings. All culls will be addressed at noon.

The landscape assured death, it was that kind of place. A cotton mouse, a wily blouse. Fried eggs in place of fingers, ginger tea by the lake at dawn. Love in place of anger, that old dream.

Hell is a total mess. We drove to the capitol city searching for pizza, stoked on coffee. No doubt equals whose kingdom? A trailer park in which a young Hemingway dutifully plugs away at himself.

Bathtub suicide. Weather mercy. Bored horses watched at a distance. Yours they still tell stories about.

Museum Sensibility

Photography is the devil's best invention. Lost on a mountain, dying of thirst, dreaming of fields of irises. One always returns to the Holocaust, doesn't one. Eschew museum sensibility please and face what is.

The words are always echoes but of what. Shivering on the dawn firn, remembering tea with my daughter. A fallible memory buttressed by images explicates how. At dawn moreover accordingly.

We played a variant of baseball in my youth. Your switchback is my arthritic camel. Goats are oblivious to landscape views. A certain loneliness was thus multiplied.

A certain solitude bankrupted. The mind which perceives God is God-like maybe? I mean jasmine, maybe, or maybe fennel. Tanks rumble down the hill's far side.

You want to hear back from me? All the devil ever does is memorialize doubt in the interest of permanence. Love in a time of walruses. Or something like that.