I can hear the neighbor walk out on the stoop
The door bangs; shakes the house front.
I turn on all the lights in the house to stave off the dim.
The possibility of sadness.
The day is against me, but bright.
The wind blows my hair into snakes.
I hold the battery cables from the dead car,
and eye the truck passing me by.
It’s going somewhere I’m not going,
leaving behind what I still have to live.
Shapelessness is the mark of abandon; abandon the mark of life.
I pour myself out of their shape, and leave behind all the wretched clattering,
places where silence might have been:
One day I’ll bend down and point and say,
Look, son, that’s where the silence used to be.
They say: pour yourself into this.
Invent a theory and then break it apart. Create for the world a legacy
of bent backs and trained minds,
holding a lens to their eye and straining for more.
I say: your vanity will feed you and starve you alike.
Straighten up. Walk on without greed. Leave your hat on its hook. Slant your body into the wind.
Go up the roadside and take it head on, tossing your looking glass onto the pavement;
admiring the stratified light when it breaks.
2009
