A Dude With Questions

Everything is giving me
     pause
these days, like nobody’s business.
What a complication all this
unrequested bonus material.
Early snow has freighted
     the chipper trees.
Before we began this journey
most of this stuff was free.

Anyway, you give me
     feelings
in the pit of me that make
it all worthwhile, this stretching,
this beetroot reaching.
The world is a cloister
     for some of us.
See us out when you come back
from the jungle of your dreams.

Or else it makes the music
     easier
to dismiss as synthetic or
lacking the thing of old tunes,
that ineffable something no
nonhuman can fathom.
     Whatever
it is that makes this drum drum
I’m there for it, come hell or blackwater.

The Deep Life

Smiling as in scorn, I know my efforts
may amount to a charred mess of mac
and cheese if I take my eye off the ball.
I endeavor to please my toothy guests
before I lock them in ironic cages.
Best to keep the metaphoric macaroni
lithe and moist when entertaining
thoughts of testing that bastard gravity,
sitting eight floors down on the lawn,
waiting for you to show your face
edging over the balcony rail and not
just your calloused white knuckles.
Fuck this angle I’m taking tonight.

I’m boring myself to tears with it.
If I could pen something scintillant
I might lose this gnawing in my gut
or lighten this anvil on my head.
Then again, a trumpet with a harmon
mute is filling up my living room
with something deep blue and subdued.
A blood pressure hack, a slack, slow
beating of the heart of things, deep
from the soul of someone sonically
wise and majestic or simply blessed.

I sense no tension there, no reaching
for the lava lamp on the nightstand,
no raspberries blown for light relief,
no groping for the red thermal socks
warming on the clanking radiator.
I could bang it with a club hammer
until my arm felt dead as wood,
announcing to my sleeping neighbours
that the madman in this unit is wide
awake—his night is fucked, his mind
is ticking like a time bomb when it’s
still too early to blow things up.