Mostly Ash

Faded tie-dye t-shirts on hippies whose brains are permanently ditched by acid, whose arms flail precisely the way Jerry Garcia's fingers did not.

Monks who are so terrified of their bitterness and loneliness that they no longer dream.

Old men who don't admire any young men and young men who despise age in all its forms.

Poems about grandfathers that are basically vast canyons pretending to be deserts in which serious sanctified men write poems about the Lord.

Rosary beads stained with semen.

Getting and giving head on the floor of an apartment in Burlington Vermont as a means of intensifying one's personal experience of irrevocable loss.

Scavenging dumpsters.

A studied disinterest in cures pitted against an avowed commitment to healing.

Walking all night in Dublin Ireland, Bloomsday 1989, exhausted and exuberant.

Incapable of sleep.

Incapable of imagining but pretending otherwise.

Sure of the Lord, beholden to the Lord, abandoned by the Lord.

Playing guitar in Galway Ireland to respectful audiences, walking hours after alone in the dark summer night, learning for the first time that the only gift I had was the gift for not being lost no matter what the exterior landscape.

Learning how not to be lost in a landscape by entering every landscape alone without any plan to return.

Confused about mothers, homes, hope and love.

Confused about work.

Good at burial, good at not freaking out around death, good at cooking peasant food, good at being slapped and spanked and punished.

Partial to soap bubbles, snowflakes, antique glass, prisms.

Mostly lost, mostly gone, mostly ash.

A late juncture where one says it at last.