Always Include a Dog

An Irish song. A friend in Jesus anchoring us in history. Smoking at night outside, the city asleep around you, quiet as the orphanage was quiet on certain weekends and holidays.

This prayer turns your tongue into a prism which needs the light of your open mouth praising Her first and last!

What a hot glorious mess we are.

Shifts in volume.

Ron Atkinson, yet another brother who left me only obscurantist poems to intuit next steps.

I walk a long time away from the cave, many days and nights all the way to where a different smoke appears on the horizon.

Pretending to go along - what happens when you don't?

Unsure of what goes on in the black box others are, I am reliably brought to the black box (why so many nightmares and photographs) I am.

Light in the socket of the blind horse's skull.

The suicides begin stacking up and not for the last time I curse my habit of seeking pattern in all things.

Christ, you don't have to keep climbing that hill with all those empty crosses on it, you can stop, sit with us a while, you can tell us the story of how you got here. 

How do mothers know when to die? 

Grandmother says "always include a dog and also, live with a woman who won't be unhappy you include a dog." 

Falling again, going down again, into the stillness past the angels and demons of which we are pledged to never speak, save obscurely every seven poems.

Sleeping as if forgiven.

Or was it sentences.

Making love as if floating in a sea that does not distinguish between bodies the way I do. 

Moonlight, winter rain, lukewarm tea: beginnings.