Beside the busy one-way traffic on Race Street
under the cantilevered Convention Center roof
arrayed opposite the Catholic Hospice and a
bronze homeless Jesus asleep under a bronze
blanket along the entire length of a bronze bench
the flattened cardboard boxes, soiled blanket
wheeled carts heaped with things, an occasional
chair or small table, the living homeless spread out
some on their sides, bodies clenched tight in balls,
others relaxed and sprawled with limbs splayed wide,
others, standing and stomping, aggressive only in their
presence here beside the prosperous looking visitors
on their hurried way to dinner and drinks in Chinatown

to go off road
for cooler air
to flee the valley
test the body
to look around
clear the mind
exercise the body
commune with nature
search for beauty
to pass some time
something to do
to get higher

my head somehow.
Looked everywhere
but couldn't find it.
Without it, how
will I ever
get ahead?

is something you might do even if you
have no religious faith or belief in any kind of afterlife
out of respect for their prior requests perhaps, or simply to affirm
your connection, or even to redeem your many failures toward them.

But if you believe in an afterlife, it invites questions.
Are they, like gods, able to see us all the time and all of us at once?
Or are they like lights that flick on when their names are mentioned?
And do they even know it is you who invokes their names?

Do they each have a celestial account where our prayers are deposited
and for which they get special rewards the higher the balance they maintain?

With the mayhem of the great wars
finally subsided, and the threatened

malfunctioning of digital clocks a simulacrum,
who could have predicted that in the new century

a plague would once again scythe through us,
or that the weary warming planet might produce

frequent cataclysms larger and more dire
than all the intentional destruction that came before

He lived in an apartment
and did not feel that its walls were confining.
Inside, there were things to read.
Outside, the changing seasons.
Beyond the one window
weather played with distant trees.

might be almost any pre-digital image grouped together now online
by earnest curators unable to place them in another category.
For example, an etched illustration of Ursa Major dating from 1825.
Or two smiling girls on a beach in 1987, each holding up her left foot.
The Marx brothers mugging together. Mustachioed bidders at an auction.
A favorite: a 1909 photograph of an "educated horse" before a blackboard.
To its left, a small girl in a white dress pointing to it but looking out at me.

today is sunny and unseasonably cold here
my right knee is sore and I walk with a limp
it is night now in China and almost tomorrow
somewhere children play in sand at the seashore

the car's check engine and tire indicators are on
below my navel there is an ugly patch of inflamed skin
the building lobby is littered with holiday season packages
in bars on every continent people order drinks and tell stories

my hair up top recedes further in a widening circle
down the hall small, vicious dogs bark persistently
the news isn't encouraging: war, famine, terrorism
everywhere the old huddle in whatever warmth they can

the oracles all give muddled answers - or none at all
while I need to feel like the next kiss is the first

Passed away....
Well, of course
- assuming no intent to deceive.

Passed away peacefully...
Possibly. It does occur.
But eight times out of ten?

Slipped the bonds of earth.
Arguably, at least as metaphor.
But literally untrue unless they left by rocket.

Received her angel wings.
Presumably not the ones pilots wear.
And sans certification or formal training.

It is with deep sorrow we announce....
Makes me think someone is protesting too much.
Besides, having left all pain behind, why not with joy?

After a long struggle....
Often true. Often obvious. But nonetheless
my own critics' choice award favorite.

even on this cloudy day
as a ginger cat stalks beside a wooden fence
and an angry dog barks somewhere out of sight

my curious mind stretches
to imagine a life half a world away
teaching children in a cold classroom in Kyiv

Today the wildest sex
I ever had stampeded
my body, a surging
sucking, spinning splendor
that shot me across white water
past obstacles and whirlpools
spitting me over the falls' crest
into the plunge pool of after.

In the strongest currents it is best
to let go and experience the ride.

Stronger in flavor, darker in color than its sister
it is the unrefined, cold-pressed olive oil that
delights the exacting chef in a toque blanche,
or even the discriminating domestic aproned cook,
but is definitely not a favorite of the local rake.

The providential result of someone's careful work, it is a riot
of new colors on a sunny day in early Spring, a celebration
of life bathed in warm light and bordered all around in green.
The solitary crab apple tree at one side accents it all with shade.
That suave dark makes me ask where in the splendor a serpent lurks.

On a Sunday morning walk in a large city,
lost in thought, I'm alone on this side street.
These buildings are old and unremarkable.
The interesting things are all elsewhere.
Then, improbably, I see an adult brown bear
stuffed and standing fully erect behind dusty glass
in the vestibule of a nondescript building.

Some erupt from the elevator,
rushing through the opening crack in the door,
dragging a human behind them.

Some enter or leave calmly,
padding slowly with at most a sidelong glance
to acknowledge your presence.

The happy ones are always frisky,
all scrabbling feet and wildly wagging tails,
wanting to sniff you and be petted.

But once outside, on the walk and in the grass,
with noses down, they are all business,
these pets taking their doggy pleasures.

the black-robed jurists, those second amendment absolutists
who have managed within my lifetime to find rights their predecessors
over centuries never found

also all the public figures offering sorrowful thoughts and prayers
over the latest carnage, especially politicians solicitous of the right
to be armed like warlords

but these are only dead metaphorically, unlike all the American dead:
children, teens, adults, the aged killed over a holiday period
- real deaths both needless and unconscionable

On the surface, they flip their tails and porpoise downward.
Under the water, their forms are all graceful curves and undulations.
But we don't see many.  A few as illustrations in books or comics.
In the odd movie, impersonated by a pert actress or cartoon character.
The occasional roadside attraction in Florida or even in Montana.
One in bronze seated on a harbor rock inspecting us humans.

Much more common is the young girl at the pool,
Her body puffed with water wings, who asks me
If I'd like to see how mermaids swim. Who wouldn't?
And so she demonstrates with a slow, determined doggie paddle
While I wonder if she might someday grow a tail then, someplace far from shore, disappear into the deep ocean.

Like many things that define a life
it began in childhood. A modest Christmas gift,
a colored pencil, from his first-grade teacher.
As he grew, he began to look for pencils at antique
shops and flea markets. A discriminating searcher,
he did not collect the ubiquitous, plain No. 2 pencil.
He enjoyed the stories a distinctive pencil might suggest.
Arriving at middle-age, he created a spreadsheet to
describe each acquisition, where he bought it, what he paid.
Never sated, his collection grows.
He lives enriched by the thrill
of the hunt that defines his life.

That's what the large yellow letters
fixed high up on a white wall at the gym
informs me. I find it reassuring that,
in this ostensibly judgment-free zone,
I have in fact been judged and found worthy.
This verdict rendered independent of whether
I confine my cell phone use to the lobby,
or wipe the equipment down after each use.
Similar to how that we are kindly asked
to return the weights to where they belong,
it seems that some discerning unseen agent
recognizes that this is the place for me,
that I am now in the place I need to be.