from A Joyous Hammer of Praise
(2007)

Shadow A meets Shadow B
on a shadowy lane
somewhere usally sunny.
How confusing a face can be
when you don’t know
how much space there should
be between its barrier eyes
and its bottomless thoughts,
those interior motions
marked by their malady-inducing,
maze-like capacity!

‘I’m cold,’ I want to say
out loud, to nobody in particular,
but Shadow C comes courting
me and I swoon
like a loon
hit by a thrown
stone.
It’s still early, early spring, that
is. There’s still plenty of time
for a Shadow D to dare me to speak.

Shadow E is everybody else.
**



It was getting bigger,
the schlong with the bulbous end.

Someone had aroused it.
I was sorry to see it shrink
when it did.

As if a-

-n introspective
moment had broken

its bearer’s concentration,
and cooled

the passion that had
made it swell.
‘Oh well,’

I thought.
‘That’s the way it goes.’

I looked down,
at the toes beneath

it, at the floor
beneath them, and

even went so far as to imagine
the basement beneath
the floor,

the broken bottles
an angry man had
stored
there.
**



‘You can’t be serious!’ exclaimed
the woman in black leather,
bleeding her charge, to his pleasure.
Her cellular phone had just rung,

and she’d reached for it
and picked it up. Why I hesitate
to describe her and her scene
is a mystery. I’m full of
hesitations, of the kind of
self-revealing attitudes
that make a grown man stutter.
I cook with lots of butter.
What else do you need to know?

That I prefer it when
high and low
combine to leave
a customary medium, something
happy like heaven but without
all that

Lent-loving, leery-eyed

redemption? Actually,
the redemption stuff gets me too.
On to my failures:
**



‘You’re going to have to leave,’
a vacuum-wielding man
yelled at me. It was
late at night. I was
trying to enter the office
building where I so

unceremoniously work.
Without being fired,
I’d managed to moon
my boss.

Whether or not he saw my ass
is beside the point.
**



I can’t believe.
It’s as simple as that.
The large themes
are threatening.

I throw myself
against
the
window and wonder
why

I might have been made the way I am.
‘It’s alright,’ I think, ‘my diary
is damning me to a life of pages
glued shut.’
I take a shower.
I send letters,
one to each of the people

who have participated in my life
in some fundamental way:
the bakers, the bankers,
the boys with wool caps
who cut their newspapers
into

little, lingerie-like nothings I
like to wear
when I have a spare
moment to turn myself on.

I also sent one to my friend (that…
word…
again…)
Shawn,
who suggested that I center
these words and italicize.
Somehow this new look
lets me
problematize
the negative nature of my life.

Have you ever heard that
when you give someone
a
knife as a gift
you’re supposed to demand
a penny in return?
That way you’re not responsible
when the recipient cuts himself.