Strange thought before a surgery:
we're all guests signed in to visit  

at a nursing home for the gods -
we make our obeisance and tell them

of our doings and goings,
but they're feeble-minded, rheumy,

ensconced in cloudy rockers,
not watching or listening, perhaps

they reminisce on discarded cosmos;
we're forgotten, or, worse,

acknowledged but irrelevant -
either way they'll share no wise.

I feel only silence without and within
as I lie down on the paper bed -

casual as ice, the doctor carves
away the excess swim from my *****,

by needle, knife, and fire -  
his third on a humdrum Friday.

I gaze through ache at pock-faced ceiling -
it gazes back with dead fluorescence.

I sneak a look at a lustrous dwarf star
that caught me in its shining net

like an uncommonly nonchalant fish.
I limp to the car, up the stairs,

befriend the bottles of null,
the pocketless black: the new me.

X is dragging the body of the
dead history professor, a man of
enormous girth and monstrous
height, through the empty

landscape, then the vast ocean
appears and X drops the body
into the water, where a shark
whose ancestry is four hundred

million years old, eats it, as X
recalls the professor’s sleepy
eyes, artificial smile, and
remarkably unreliable memory.

on the hammock this evening
the west pasture filled with thick
mulberry clouds, framed by sheathes of
apricot mist in drapes

I am watching the leaves of The Cottonwood
shimmer, flip their golden underbellies up
like schools of danios

And I’m talking to God about being alone—
I send a couple videos to Alyssa

Somewhere on Central some young boys
rip down the backroads up Fields on
their little bikes, setting every dog off in
the copse mobile home park

it’s not that I’m not grateful

No messages. Just wind, late evening.
Sunday with the Lord.

it has been storming so often

in the evenings he rolls over the city

so come down and meet me;
in the rain if you must--

I am too raw to do much else

most things ***** and push

but if this is the dust of your feet
then I'd lie in your wake

here's a neat trick:

evry time you have to say my name

replace it with RADIOHEAD

"RADIOHEAD has been staring at rooftops again. i'm worried."

"RADIOHEAD just walked into my kitchen and took all my matches!"

"i'd like my hexing stone back now, RADIOHEAD."

"RADIOHEAD, have you been drinking?"

anyway

you should try it

i'm not quite sure what will happen

but it's gonna rain no matter what you do

"Love is the worst religion,"
croons the dying television,

with no further explanation;
well, thanks for the news -

I see myself in emptied glass,
a bust carved rude and inchoate,

poet, captain, lost apostle
of the worst religion,

baptized in changeling pools
of day and week, scribbling

my night's peak breath
on the flypapers of insomnia.

Sun over sainted skin,
stars where evening eyes were,

swain's vespers, all of it
splitting like new ripe fruit

in sticky hands of the acolyte,
ardent hands of little silver.

I breathe here—in this house
someone else built.

And I’ve lived in houses
built by others—

some far, some near,
but never mine.

I call this room mine—
these things, these clothes,
these books—
they are mine.

Aren’t they?

I look out the window
and see the trees, the sky,
the birds—

they’re not mine,
but I keep them close anyway.

I have loved,
and I have cried.
I’ve made others cry.

It’s not a fair deal.
It comes and it goes—
it rarely stays.

Like the words I bleed—
I confess,
I rarely know what to write,
but I write anyway.

And why do we write?

For someone to find us?
For us to find them?

For them to see us—
just see us?

There’s no art in this world
that isn’t a longing.

There are no happy songs,
or paintings, or photographs—

they’re all fleeting.

They don’t exist
the way we do.

You don’t have to believe me.

It doesn’t matter.
I do not matter.

My thoughts,
my dreams,
my words—

they do not matter.

Nothing rarely does.

But I write anyway—
maybe you’ll find me,
and none of this will matter.