We all die, but do we ever live?
We once were children,
but did we ever grow up?
When we graduated from college,
did we do what we loved,
or did we work on Wall Street
to make millions, if not billions?
When we married our spouses,
were we always faithful,
or did we sleep with others?
When we joined the country club
that never allowed Blacks and Jews,
did we ever think we were racists?
Did we love our children,
or did we prefer playing golf instead?
When we joined the Episcopal church,
did we pray to God, or was it more
important to join the socially elite?
Did we ever come to realize
we have always been fakes.
Did we finally have an epiphany,
or did we follow our hollow ways?
I fear the latter. That's why I pray
for you every night of every day.

TOD HOWARD HAWKS

I think I’ll write
another poem
&
name it after you
use words that still confuse me
& then
use them like they’re glue
throw lids on my good mornings
all misread and reused
pretend every day is Sunday
sleep in &
come to
I’m
driving myself crazy
play the same songs
and peruse
the head I use to love you &
the bones inside me too
I will not rush it like tomorrow
won’t try to
burn a tiny wick
still I just
fall asleep to you
writing a poem like
a wish

Tin cups
rattle steel bars
no birds
no bees
no sounds of cars
on open freeway
far and wide
chains and manacles
stuck inside
a makeshift shiv
of broken picture frame
wrapped in leather
oiled in soap
each passing day
diminishes hope
until I can't
take anymore
I carve each day
on my front door

is gone; no shiny coin
or sacred fawn or star
to set our compass on.

Be reckless with your words to me;
incite, provoke, use words as lips
and teeth and hands and silk restraints.
Press them deep into my skin –
leave marks, leave late, and come again.

What hunger drives us out and back
and walking, walking, free of men,
unquenched enough to taste the lack
that set us going out and back again?

From Riverside you turn on Spring
to stalk a night that will not end,
leaf-hurt, gray grieving thing
in darkness spent -- out and back again.

Alone, a million miles from dawn,
small wonder guiltless ghosts pretend
that hunger guides all exiles gone
out and back -- out and back, my friend.

Say you want a cat. A dog's too easy,
would wag when wag is inappropriate,
and slobber on the guests. You'll take the cat,
so different and strange, it drives you crazy,

its shiftlessness, its ins-and-outs, its chi.
You call. It does not come. Is this a pet,
this Dharma ***? You say you can't accept
its vacant gaze, its scorn, who yearned to be

at home with feral grace, with all you're not.
But you're a Body safely locked from Mind,
that Problem no Mind solves. This point's defined
for you by ****, who's not the pet you thought

but Otherness, one owned by God, or none.
Cat sleeps for hours, wants out. A job well done.