I want to carry everyone
to haul water up the hill to you
to open doors for the world
as they stumble in, grocery bags tumbling
I want to be an honest man and a good writer
or is it a good man and an honest writer?
Whichever one Baldwin said, since he is
my hero
I want to stay up late, converse with
Whitman and Hughes
Oliver and Olds
drink cheap, scorching whiskey
then sit in my underwear and paint
berserk, giant portraits. Wait, I don’t paint,
hate “art” in fact. No, I would bang
on a Smith Corona, toss the computer
in the gully, watch it sink in the oily mud,
have another drink, scotch now,
then say screw it and take the
dog around the block
I want to be a hardass
that stern respected mess you up with a
twitch and a glare teacher (which is
to say, my dad)
I want moral suasion, my mere voice
just enough
to make you shut up and do the right thing
I want to know what the right thing
I don’t want to be this guy, the perseverator
swooping in circles, vulture like, tighter
and tighter, unseemly and spinny (what a stupid word)
seeking out the carcass of a decision
that, by the time I reach it, is picked
clean by others
yet here I slump, rumpled and ready, wanting
you to write, all of you, to receive another
cranked up, fissured story, sent
at 3 a.m., you, wobbly and hopped up on the word
I want to be a good dad
to smile at the right time
to say the wrong things
in front of your friends
to have you listen and
not heed, to hear
everything you utter
even as I kiss your feverish
forehead, straining to
decipher the
indecipherable you. I want
to look from afar,
see you stride off, maybe
wave, just an
afterthought
I’ll hold on to
til I die
even as you live. No dying
today. Please. Swim in these liminal
blues, these swampy creek greens:
thrash hard and do not go
under. I am sorry it hurts.
Love others, love your
churning, doubting innards.
And me? I want love or to be
beloved, as Ray Carver,
my other hero, had etched
on his tombstone. Or
both. Maybe I want it all,
but could be content with a thick
piece of apple pie she offers
just to me
and her darkness, her verse,
a shared starless night, walls and
tears falling. Yes, I want that
too. Need
that. I want to die
without a fuss.
Don’t we all?
To evade the tubes
the papers, the mess,
the drugs that skim
off the best of you.
I want to die near
the creek, some dog
nearby lapping up
the mossy water,
wrestling
some interloper
for my bones
til they growl themselves
to sleep on the rocky
heart strewn bank