Counting back the years in my life tonight
to a warm February when all things changed.
Maybe it's the early winter, the gas light warmth,
staring into my life as I stare into the space heaters.
No, it's the flames, the loneliness of the evening,
the flames bringing back the smoke and flying wires
of my house burning down, of racing against
the moment and being helpless as it died.
The booms, the crackles, the hiss and snap
as the wood and tin gave way and fell
to the power of absolute indifference.
Fire is indifferent. It doesn't care. It takes.
I leaned on a chinaberry tree, smoked Camel
after Camel, waited as the firemen chopped
and sprayed, and finally said it was all over.
Yeah, it was all over.
Everything I built from earlier losses,
was taken again just as swift and clean
as my California divorce, taken right before me.
A fireman came out with my footlocker,
and bedside table, and there, complete and unharmed
lay all the poems of my life just as crisp and white
as the hours they were written,
a box of condoms unscathed, intact and whole.
Miracle man, poems and sex remain.
That was all that did remain.
And the pages and packages had more life than me.
I wandered the smoldering house and yard
all night alone, stayed there, just looking,
mindless, and terribly, terribly without a word to say.
All had left me. Friends went home,
house went into the earth, and there I was,
me and a chinaberry tree, and a life gone by.
Things die. Yes, things die, and when
the trigger is ready it's fast, sharp and on target.
I built back up in un-ordinary ways,
just books and music, just my soul and my hopes.
Still wander looking for lost things sometimes,
sometimes I forget what is gone and what is here.
Trust isn't easy, I expect it all to fall apart at any time,
and when I do kiss the god and believe in heaven,
and when I do give over to the purity of hope and expectation,
sometimes it comes true, sometimes it doesn't,
and all I can strive for, all I can work for,
all I can put my faith in is that my will grows stronger.
I pray for the love that doesn't lie and doesn't burn.
I take care to show where my thoughts are,
what my wishes and loves are...
and why, why do like this when life
has shown the power of destruction?
Miracle man. To live and live on through all
the events that show only death, to defy the darkness
that stands in us all, and to erect a new soul
where the old soul was, just the way a house
is raised on the foundations of the old,
just as in a life that is filled with chances that must be taken.
Give me the risk, give me the impossible,
I know the truth of the tales in Buddha
and the Old Testament, and even better I know
the truth in words that God is love,
that we can all be reborn in more ways than one.
And should I die now I know that I have lived
the best I can through all obstacle and obstruction.
And isn't that enough, I wonder. I wonder,
have I lived enough, done enough,
have I been a good friend, an honest lover,
a fair employer? Do I give one face to those around me?
And I think, yeah, I've done ok.
I've done ok. I've felt the tongue and fire
of hell, and really, living through it
is whole lot better than falling victim to the wastes
and ashes of terrors gone by.
Resolution by moonbeams and blue orange space heaters,
coming to terms near midnight in a day
that has shown me I am who I am, who I will be,
and who that is purely me.
Thankfully alive, I am purely me.
