Clear-Eyed, Valiant, & Full of Shit

Strike me like a match. Write a poem 
without saying ‘blood’ once. Tell me 
that when I got sick you always knew 
I was gonna get better.  

One day every single place 
where anything bad happened 
to anybody will be burned out husk 
or thriving marshland, but who knows 
which? Once, in
between kisses, I said, this 
is a satisfying end 
to narrative tension, but I think
I was wrong about that, too.  

You are 
your goodness, your favorite 
bird, the way you lace your shoes. Somewhere 
in rural Ohio, there is still 
a too-skinny kid in a knee brace 
winning a game of infection after dark. Later 
he limps back to the farmhouse triumphant
without knowing all the grief
he will be.  

In dreams I pop my body 
like a blister, moonwalk backwards 
into space wearing size-four cowboy 
boots. God kisses my head, ruffles 
my uncombed hair.  

And speaking of God, where’s 
the man Himself? Wrestling Jacob 
for his life? But that was last year’s 
story and this year is less fight 
and more fluttering. Enoch 
walked faithfully with God; then 
he was no more, because God
took him away.

I will cry 
for the squashed caterpillar. 
I will wear hollyhock
‘round my brow. I will call you 
a hypocrite to your face 
if you’ll let me. After class 
and dinner and a shower, 
I will go to the sixth floor 
of the parking garage and think
about jumping, but 
I probably won’t do it, not this time. 

Henry Vaughan said death was
like a great ring 
of pure & endless light 
but I want to live oh God, 
I don’t want to blind myself 
on all that endless light. 

In 1887 Elizabeth 
Cochran Seaman, better known 
as Nellie Bly, feigned 
insanity in order to gain 
access to the Women’s Lunatic 
Asylum. Of this she said: What,
excepting torture, would produce insanity 
quicker than this treatment?

I want to live but God 
doesn’t want me to 
or maybe he does.  
Across the table he says 
you’re going 
to be ill forever 
but ill is not dead.  

You are a river and I 
am probably a river, 
too, struggling 
towards the sea, sleep-
less and unsated. So I 
will wind onwards,
will not be lost, will not 
regret myself again. This cannot
be a poem made from blood
so it will have to be water, 
the spray of salt, a breath 
that will not be untaken.  

I don't think much 
about heaven. Give me 
a sunflower, a Polaroid 
picture, a good storm 
in the night.  
God only told us 
half the story, but it's
a half worth retelling 
again 
and again and again.