The wide open
cosmos
simply does not
(or will not)
care
about any of our
feelings
and thus cannot
act
with intent to protect
or harm —
it is plainly and coldly
unperturbed
by our aching
condition.

But
if we can make ourselves
aware
of this stifling fact,
a tiny crack opens
to a rush of fresh air
to a clear breathing choice —
either we respond
to this tower of
indifference
with cynicism and
self-pity
or we tilt our
head upwards
fixing our gaze upon
the blank face
of this unfeeling void
and open our hearts to it
all the fucking
same.

This act of
sheer defiance
of insurrectional
optimism
of insubordinate
love —
this may be the greatest
act of strength
and beauty
of generosity
and grace
that we
poor dizzy primates
can ever hope to
perform.

but no
we can’t ever surrender
in our daily dogfight
with our deadened selves
even (especially) when we feel
dead-ended ourselves
we’ve got to
we get to
wrestle back control over
this precious flame
this fickle delicious flame
the one that lights up
just enough fog
on the slippery path ahead
so that our greater selves
can take another
brave
step
forward

The story of humanity
is the story of
migration
from the wood to
the hood
all of it
in a geological
blink
lurching us forward
yet leaving our hearts
in limbo
halfway between
the Eastside
and Eden.

Which goes some ways
I guess
to explaining this
dull persistent 
ache
this desperate
longing for the 
unmade
this violent urge
to abandon my car in traffic
and flee —
back to the hinterlands
to feed off the
unsullied soil
to consume
nature
without commercial
interruption.

That is of course
until I spent my
first night
under these laughing stars
beside this cackling flame
I built proudly with
my own city-softened hands
that is until
I rest my head on this
cold hard ground
I can hear the strange
awful sounds
of the ancient forest
moving in
closer
closer
closer
to swallow me
whole.

That is when
the night finally
gives way
and morning the sun
stikes me
clear as day —
becoming one with
nature 
really means becoming
prey.

But today —
I paid this idea a revisit
and like a bolt
from heaven
it struck me that
praying need not be
a religious practice at all,
it does not even depend on
the existence of a subject 
(you need not pray to anyone)
for at its soft, hopeful center,
a prayer is not an encounter with
an external being
as much as a reckoning
with oneself.
The act of praying asks
something of us
alone
as we present ourselves 
naked and vulnerable,
devoid of pretense or irony,
rendering each of us
raw, essential
before the sweet mercy of 
whatever may rise alongside
tomorrow’s sun.

So hell —
let us pray indeed,
for when we do 
we are offering up our
purest selves
to the unknown,
and most times 
that is all the answer
we need.

Gazing across the river
I zero in
on a lone Jersey traffic light
blinking slowly
from green
to yellow
to red,
but nobody stops
for there’s
nobody around
to stop,
except 
me.

Over there —
in the river's
swollen middle,
I can trace
the dark outline 
of a fat grey
duck
bobbing up and down
on the liquid surface,
a look of abject
resignation
on it’s tired mallard face,
like it just went
you know what?
to hell with this
and gave up
the flight.

Closer now —
I can hear the waves
lick the swollen pillars
of pier beneath my feet,
a shaggy dog
lapping at her dish.
The sun peaks out now
from a heavy curtain
of cloud
and right here —
right in front of my face,
jots of excited spring air
vibrate alive
with shimmering
urgency.

Moving even closer
still —
the faint outline
of my nose 
defocused
before my eyes
but only the right
flank of it, oddly
and then
the sudden
blink of my eyes
instantly
destroys the world
only to
rebuild it again
in the fraction
of a silent
wingbeat.

Dropping all the way
back here now —
from the closest point
I can find,
looking out at the world
from zero distance,
from this empty
open space
this boundless
timeless place
for everything to simply
appear within —
including my nose,
this thirsty pier,
that fed-up duck,
and the lonely
Jersey traffic light,
turning green for me
now, in an
entirely different
state.

This is tired
worn-out
hopeless metaphor,
unnecessarily violent,
ultimately infertile.
All of us are
born on the battlefield,
reluctant child soldiers,
drafted into tired and ugly 
battles of opinion and fact,
waged across the bloodied nose
of our collective
face.

But —
imagine instead
a culture where arguments
are framed by something
else entirely,
a far less hostile metaphor.
What do you suggest?
I propose DANCE.
Lights on —
all of a sudden we are performers
and our goal is to engage
in a balanced, aesthetically
pleasing exchange of ideas
colliding,
combining,
combusting.

We’d view our
differences differently —
Her criticisms are keeping me on my toes.
We'd experience them differently —
He's dancing to a different tune and
I may be out of step.
We'd carry them out differently —
Now that I'm thinking on my feet…
And maybe we'd live together
altogether differently —
Let me give your
wild idea a whirl.

Like a anxious child
on her way up to a big stage,
our thought travels through
labyrinthian halls of mental mirrors,
layers upon layers of promise and threat,
yearning and fear
before it imprints itself upon our soft cortex —
before we finally adopt it
as our own.

It is both a funny and sad fact
that we stroll through our entires lives
with other people's thoughts
inside our heads — and worse,
that we convince ourselves
these thoughts are our own.
This drunken happy hour of
ideas, opinions, predictions, zingers —
like uninvited dinner guests,
we let them become the
life of our party.

But what if we take
a closer look,
closer even still —
we might make out our own
first thought
hiding, crouching
deep down there
in the fertile soil,
locked behind that mossy
little door we’ve bolted shut so
many years ago.

The doorway to our freedom.

Oh, all those precious years
listening to those who had
nothing to say.
If we could only take our
first brave step back again,
back to that little door
and confront those
painful questions
we’ve been too afraid to ask.

If we can only summon the strength to
crack that lock wide open again,
we can speak our mind truthfully
like back when we were no taller
than that door itself,
gamboling through our budding lives
with no one’s thoughts
but our own.

We all know the striking kind,
the sharp shudder of silence attending
a moment of awe,
that gobsmacked gulp that steals your breath
atop a wine-soaked canyon,
under a canopy of stars,
or witnessing your toddler nail the C chord
on her shiny pink guitar.

Takes me back to that momentary hush
in the delivery room,
even the doctors we met just minutes before,
they held their breath too,
counting the silent beats between birth
and the sweet release of her
first gorgeous cry.

Then, there’s the sharpness of that
stabbing silence —
when you hear the news
of a loved one’s death,
your mind hurtling through soundless space
like a stunned cosmonaut,
tumbling tumbling tumbling
before gravity rushes in
to reel you back.

And of course, we can't forget
the old classic silence, the one for due respect —
following a performance, a speech, a film, a buzzer-beater,
between that final note or word, or scene, or shot
and the glorious eruption of the crowd,
the beauty of what we all just witnessed
measured pricelessly by the weight
of the slice of silence
that follows.

And while we're on the subject of respect,
there’s the kind we try to forget,
that dull, aching silence
you know the one —
the kind that clings to the humid air,
that choking deafness hanging
between two broken people
who've got nothing left
to say.

Instead, tonight I’m celebrating
my favorite kind of quiet,
the one I'm floating in now,
on this warm summer night,
family tucked safely in bed,
it’s just me and this notebook,
maybe a glass of wine,
and if I listen real close —
I can hear that sweet, grateful silence
of no sirens inside
my head.

In your mind,
of course.

Gently or violently,
whatever feels right.
Maybe you keel
over your chair
onto that same stone floor,
hands clutching your chest
in dramatic display, your own
cardiac opera.
Or slip your fingers
across the cool metal of a revolver
hidden in an imaginary shoebox
at the back of your closet –
if that’s your speed, of course.
Simply kill yourself.
Let your mind go wild with it,
it’s your turn to take a bow, after all.
Big or small,
a drop of poison,
a dramatic flop
out of a second story
window, a kiss of
lead –

And now.
Now that we’re good
and gone
and our slates are sanitized –
Now. In this next moment,
come alive again.
Sit up off the floor,
straighten your pants,
pick up the phone or book
you’ve been drifting though
and breath in these next
moments,
these plump newborn
moments.

How would you walk
into the kitchen now,
on the wings of your
spectacular resurrection?
How grateful would you be to see
the incandescent smiles
of the ones you love?
The mother of pearl
dances across my daughter’s
fingertips, her laugh cracking
the sky wide open for me
once again.
When she was three
she had a little lisp,
she called it
free.

So now –
without making
any grand declaration
to those around you,
you get to descend from heaven
into your own post-ordinary life
once more.
But in a way that treats it
with the care and gratitude
you let slip away.
Now, you get to call back
all those lost parts of yourself
and live in them anew,
in a wiser, more experienced way,
instead of wasting yet
another day
another minute,
in pointless competition
with the past.

goodbye goodbye goodbye goodbye

Each plump grain tumbles
through the narrow neck,
every tick of the clock 
a tiny farewell —
giggles and squeals
while squeezing their toes
I'm gonna miss you
and you and you and you
and yes
even the little one,
too.

With each morning stretch
the tips of their fingers
a fraction closer to
poking the sun —
they’re too busy crossing
a million little bridges
so easy to ignore,
invisible thresholds
we're too busy to notice
until it’s the one
out our front
door.

This voice,
bouncing off the blunt
inner bone of our
skull-sized kingdoms,
this buzz that began
babbling back when
we did,
this incessant drivel of
dialogue drowning us in
daily doubt
dammit, even when we
dream –

It was designed for
one thing:
to keep us breathing
Is that a snake in the grass?
No, just a coiled garden hose.
Carry on then.
It is not who
we are.

But there’s a hack
if you can hack it,
if you can just drop
back
way back
behind all that clatter,
all the way
down here
near the stem of the brain,
at its soft, quiet kernel –
we get to observe these
thoughts as they pass
through, unfurling
like vapor trails
under the clear,
cloudless sky
of our minds.

Or, next time you’re at
a funeral
you might steal a sneaky peak
toward those mourning
and notice
underneath the grief
or show-of-grief
there is another, quieter cry
a lonely call to the sky
a plea that says
I’m doing this for them
but in the end
who will show up
for me?

How close does the
rattlesnake’s forked tongue
have to come? How loud does
the thunder need to clap?
This is what it looks like
when we see people
as they are
as we are –
bathed in light
soaked in caffeine
tumbling through time
doing whatever we can
where we are
with what we’ve
got.

mistakes made
relationships
turned
a silent series of
small slips sideways
into this dark
place, but –
there’s no rule
demanding that all
that swallows
the past
gets to devour
our future
too

so, begin again

like the sun
cracking
our horizon open
each morning
like winter’s
snowpack
lowering her
icy shoulders
giving herself over
to spring
again

there’s always a
choice
in this beat between
here and there
between this
and the next
this next moment
these next words –
a precious chance
to stop
take a breath
and simply begin
again