FACE FIRST

To "please deliver us 

from fiction's 

necessary evil"

is a tricky slope 

down a bald

cliff face of "seems." 

And to declare yourself

"a nonbeliever"

is tantamount
to saying that you
don’t need sleep.

From one second
to the next, both 

feel oddly

doable—but, 

speaking of fact-

based: sooner 

or later,

every living
body slips and falls
into a dream.

LIBER NOVUS DIAGNOSIS

your results 

have just come back 

from the lab.

Just as random

charged particles
colliding in a blackbox

neither describe 

nor resolve the plot 

of anxiety,

what we’re dealing with here

is not 

nostalgia,

since nostalgia 

is a feeling
that requires a spot

in space and/or
time to which you’d want
to go back. No,

the problem you’ve got,
is worse, 

I'm afraid—and 

a whole lot less

sophisticated 

than that: it's

your past—not as 

want ad, or concussed,

or collectible,

but irrevocably
scalded and
cauterized shut. Think of it as

an Imaginal mic drop.
But to be 

more upfront: 

what you caught
is called 

mythlessness. Period. Full stop.

SEMASIOLOGICAL DIGEST

And in the beginning
wasn’t the word,

since before the word

was the letter.

It must’ve been like
a rehearsal

for rehearsal;

picture: graphemes

begetting

phonemes

begetting

morphemes

begetting

pairs of each other—

like the clean
and the base,

and the bass

and the treble,

and the troubled

and the saved,

and the pained
and the clever—

all of which, 

despite being cousins,

first mimed 

kissing, 

then loving, 

then marriage—

then, buying land 

for a farmyard and settling.

They soon mouthed
giving birth, 

and finally, toiling 

to separate 

substance
from purport—or

the wheat of the precious

little bit that matters

from the chaff of all 

that doesn’t.

WHY LIFE SUCKS

You were not expecting
a scientific
answer to this, I know—

but lately, 

it seems to take
so damn much energy

just to ask the right question,

that the mass of every well-

intentioned 

(not to 

mention simple 

blithe) inquiry

tends to collapse
in on itself and
form a small black hole.

And of course, 

once you get enough 

of those little 

fuckers all 

up in your

system, woe betide you—

because the galaxies
of every good
intention and conviction

which were floating
in the synaptic
gaps between your neurons,

alas, can’t
outweigh, outrace,
or outlast

the density 

of cynical 

disbelief—nor 

the suction 

of such deep 

suspicion.

LEARNING HOW TO LOOK BACK

You are told 

that, after many years

of rehearsal, 

you'll see better— 

depth will come 

in clearer, and even

small things 

will grow bigger. So 

day and night, 

you stare, until 

your learn

to pull the trigger

and shoot 

a bullet, for example,

straight through the heart 

of a louse.

Only now, there’s all 

the shrapnel—ah, the shrapnel 

is a nightmare;

you miss more 

little flecks of her

than your dead-

eye now knows 

how to count.

OCTOBER EMPYREAN

If what the say about heaven
is accepted

on faith as
what waits at the end

of the path, then:

every face 

reps an abstract expression,

and what used to pass

for pumpkins 

don’t now sit deflated—

reverse-skinned

by psychopaths, 

garish smiles
childishly gashed—

in their new patch

made of concrete

at the top
of Valhalla’s steps.

THE REDUNDANT COMING

Forget about the center—really
it’s the edges now
which cannot hold.

The slaughter rule
has gone
out the window,

and the refs grow
less bold
than a chessboard pawn,

while the worst
of us don’t even
sneak around anymore.

We all see them
showboat and 

weave around the lines,

scoring touchdown
after touchdown
while the clock winds down;

It’s easier than running
for office unopposed.
But the silence

from the crowd isn’t
stunned; it’s just
bored, because

a circus that truly
goes “maximus”
is meaningless, and

even pure diversion

will fail to meet its
stated goal when

all the world’s
a grudge match, but
nothing’s out of bounds.