As Chimney Sweepers Must

Young men grown old, now dead, parade
Across the hotel TV screen,
Throwing footballs, catching footballs,
Bellowing at their opponents,

Celebrating with their teammates,
Gesticulating to their fans
To roar louder, to exhort them,
But not to beg them to survive.

Under each clip, whether grainy
Duplicate of old film footage
Or garish wash of video,
Run the tombstone years, birth dash death.

Enough of these, it dawns on me,
Though they were not true warriors,
To put it euphemistically,
Came quickly to grave nonetheless.

They died to their sport, then their fame,
Then their ability to move,
And at last, young to the world,
Ghosts to their own names, they left.

Our Time Is Up

Down around Castle Valley we have
Our share of the wild and the feral:
Skunks, deer mice, pinyon mice, scorpions,
Black widows, coyotes, and foxes;
Ravens, turkeys, mourning doves, magpies;
Early summer plagues of grasshoppers,
Interlocking colonies of ants,
The weird scream of a mountain lion
One cold night, floating down from the Rim,

All sorts of creatures that frighten us,
Annoy us, delight us, disgust us,
Uncontrolled or uncontrollable.
None of them seem stranger, in context,
Than any of our domesticates--
Cows, goats, horses, peacocks, dogs and cats--
Except for the grazing herds of deer
Wandering the valley by the dozens,
Big, scruffy, insolent and mule-eared.

They're wrong, somehow, for any context,
Bred placid from decades without wolves,
More numerous than the goats and cows,
Big as mares, pestiferous as mice,
They crowd the road's shoulder, fill the fields,
Look almost beautiful in half light,
Prick their ears at the hunger of life,
Pack shadows into silver moonlight,
Startle me with hooved thunder at night

Leave Me the World to Bustle In

"he is not capable of bustling, he hobbles.... he casts away his cane and immediately lurches forward, falling flat on his face"

"bustle (1) 'be active,'mid-14c., frequentative of M.E.,bresten 'to rush, break, from O.E. bersten (see burst)"

Insert your own personal anecdote
Of physical disability here. (Yes,
Norm, a story of a friend or relative
Will do.) One: was King Richard

The Third a moral villain because
Of his physical defect? Or, was
He a defect because of his twisted
Soul? Two: was the young William

Shakespeare an astute toady 
Of the Tudor monarchy, casting
An hereditary enemy of Elizabeth
As a monstrous, hump-backed

Toad? Or, was he an artist trapped
In a nascent police state, wriggling
His way to free, remunerative
Expression on the hillocky back

Of his Plantagenet marionette?
Three, does it matter whether real
King Richard was able-bodied and
Or good, albeit ill-served by history?

Four: answer every possible,
Previous question in both 
The affirmative and negative, as
You wish. Leave me the world.

Pavanne for a Small Breakdown

Wisdom is a drop of oil
Spread on the churning ocean.
It soothes the local turmoil
An instant, then it's broken,
Ripped open by currents coiled
In the deep and unspoken
World of hunger, wisdom's foil.

Moonlight Is Sunlight

Edward Day Pheeks, who signed himself E. Day
And went by Day, couldn't get around

How everything was always leaving him
In exactly the act of arriving,

How so many things managed to come back
To haunt him, when nothing remained the same,

How the light on the river was the green light
On the river yesterday, an old green

He knew from day after day, and a new
And blue now that let him know green was gone.

Big Blank Book Made of Paper

A why never moves.
Even when you think
You've answered one,
Look closely. All you've done
Is shifted a new how.

Lying as Metaphor

For telling the truth
For laying it all out
For not standing for this anymore

For loving
For the little death
For delivery

For fiction
For gossip
For drama

For language
For being human
For believing

For in the beginning was Word
And Word was God
For a metaphor