In times like these
I clean the gutters monthly
and the lint trap every day;
buy a time-share in the
Ojai Public Library, invest my life
savings in the Ventura Arboretum;
This is a time for bravery.
Not the human-cannonball kind.
Not the free-diver nor the free-soloist.
Keys, wallet, phone.
The Collected Works of Federico García Lorca.
Moleskin journal and ballpoint pen.
Mahogany chess board, Rubik’s Cub,…
I am awakened too early. I cannot be awake.
The growl of my neighbor’s leaf-blower is what prehistoric man,
cowering in his cave, cowered from.
How do you forgive your neighbor?
Remember when bumper stickers read
Free Tibet or End Apartheid, and we agreed?
Remember when there was just one war on TV,
like a movie whose plot you knew by heart?
For once, I throw my lot in with the rest.
At the bleak store that sells tobacco and liquor,
two bucks buys me this slip that feels sinful and
foolish in my hands…
I abhor the grass, the leaves that turn to blades
under the whetstone of heat, the worms, blind
and desperate and slippery, that wriggle forth
in the wet, the sucking of mud on bare feet…
You don’t need to watch the news. Walk the
dog. Lay in the grass. Watch a cloud settle
into evening’s funereal pews. That terror which
lies in wait will be there when you return…
We are all mourners now, our clothes
funeral shrouds we tear off our backs
when the time comes (and it will come);
in one pocket we carry brushes for tidying
the graves we stumble on in schools, churches,
nightclubs, concerts, grocery stores, streetcorners…
If life is a lucid dream or some near-perfect
computer simulation, do I risk waking up
to a world in which I can’t embrace you?