the questions are
also the answers.

i seen all good people
turn their heads to stay so
satisfied i'm on my way.

Franz Schubert Piano Sonata No. 21 B Flat

never never never never

There is a disney world perpetually
living inside the pretty snow globe
of Other Choices. Accept this and
you will be happy.

i have been feeling

lately well whatever

at least i can feel even feeling like

shit is better than who

am i kidding, i hate feeling like 

i could have done something

better different been meaner

or played the game like a man, as

if being a man would have made things

easier. i dreamed i had a son. i dreamed 

things were stolen from me, my wallet

my ID, my purse rifled through by

an unknown hand. maybe the

dream was telling me that the things

i'd been protecting, the things i'd been

hanging on to were running me

while i'd been driving with the window

down, one arm browner than the other,

as if all was well.

owning the road here while all 

around me, things were falling into the ground

just like the old house now just a toy
in the attics of memory.

never the end

when the universe comes down hard on
you and gifts your enemies with
your very best friends so that their laughter
echoes down the hall where you are left standing
alone and you feel the world has begun to spin
backwards and you question what day it even is
anymore, or if there was ever such a thing as
a day since your despair has blinded you into believing
this long night will never end, listen: don't believe
those voices that you hear. those voices that are
telling you how they've won the prize of
togetherness meant for only them.
don't sing out your chorus
of agony and broken hearts because this is not the end.
the end is never the end. the universe will go on
and so will you. the sun will become bright again and
you will see the shadows this brightness has now cast
upon your face. you will be wiser to the treachery
of happiness and understand that nothing forever
stays in its place except the dead. and even they are crumbling
and shifting in their place as only the dead can. so go on with
your life. be wise be free. don't give up on the idea that life is meant
for living.

knowledge is a slow burn

Question: Do people in russia kiss the police?

Answer: Only when they're angry.

The worst of it often is that, while we are in it, we don't want to get out of it. We hate it, and yet we prefer staying in it—that is a part of the disease. If we find ourselves like that, we must make ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set ourselves to some hard work, make ourselves sweat, etc.; and that is the good way of reacting that makes of us a valuable character. The disease makes you think of yourself all the time; and the way out of it is to keep as busy as we can thinking of things and of other people—no matter what's the matter with our self.-William James, to his daughter Peg, from Letters of Note

how can you teach anybody how to write

salam alaykum

words to live by

apeshit
global warming
dingy
quit your job
honey

There is a sadness in every note's beginning

"And when you think about it, poets always want us to be moved by something, until in the end, you begin to suspect that a poet is someone who is moved by everything, who just stands in front of the world and weeps and laughs and laughs and weeps . . . "
 - Mary Ruefle

Back then

I realized only quite recently that I had finally gotten truthful about a near-relationship from long ago.  Up to that point,I'd glazed over the memory, making him much nicer and kinder than was accurate. But the truth back then was that he'd been rather cavalier about whether we were "together" or not until it was clear that we were not; and then at the first public meeting afterward, I with new date in tow and he with his typical posse of male miscreants, he'd publicly denounced me as though I had proverbially fucked him over, all for the benefit of those he'd allowed to construe that we were together when, in fact, we were not. Indeed, apologies (from him) were extended and accepted (by me) later and we'd gone our own ways and let each other be although always with the thought that things could have been different, or worked out somehow, and that we might have had a happy successful life together or some similar kind of nonsense.  It's stupid, you might say, to take this long to get over this business. But back then, I was even stupider. 

don't walk

save yourself

the secret is we know more than we say

sleep dammit

don't wait

13 hand poems

embrace the paradox of doubt as the key

green ball

somewhere a green ball bounces

while clocks go on unwound

not only by time because you

never left, really

just ask the leaves.

down secret streets of memory

untravelled by words

as i lived up to the highest light I had

higher and higher light came to me--the peace pilgrim

quarters

we're all mad here

No one should ask the other,

what were you thinking?

No one, that is,

who doesn't want to hear about the past

and its inhabitants,

or the strange loneliness of the present.

--After Making Love, Stephen Dunn

No

between the horses of love and lust
we are trampled underfoot
--so cruel, U2

There is some kiss we want with our whole lives,
the touch of spirit on the body.
Rumi

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They're done before you realize it. And once they're done, they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you'd like to be, and you've lost your true self forever...

--Eugene O' Neil, Long Day's Journey Into Night

hurt leaves

O sky you have been

made a canvas for them

who unfurl their flags atop
their castles and plant their
gardens of many

colors though not for the

joy but for the victory

over their conquered
territory.

look, this is love

age was once when

we were not afraid

to look down from

teetering high or

on the brink of the end

or the beginning, stop
or start, what the hell

anything would do

and we were not afraid

to stare down

barbed wire consequences

of cutting through

unassaulted by experience

swimming naked in the ocean of

what we thought we knew

but that's a shadow

from a sun long

set now the evening's

hunger has laid

the table and the worry

thirst is enough

to keep some of

us bolted to the well.

Solve for Ex
to find the distance between here and you
calculate without logic the number we
said we would remember if we divided the
secrets we shared without telling, by the hurts
no number of apologies will undo.