Inside every ache is a first cause.         To feel
and acknowledge        feeling it        saying
in a non-violent way         I feel        like a cheap
Italian dream home     on the chain of
natural causes.        I have desire but won’t
put my money down.        I feel the itch of anger
inherited from feeling.        It’s in me         but
it’s not me.      I feel an impetus to say I feel.
The feeling is inheritance        of what men
wrought in time        breathing in my helical
connectedness to whom.       The problem of
male anger        is woven into narrative and
sprung upon         from unintentioned thread.
It aches       in me        is quelled so daily cool.
What violence inside me         is inside me.         O
can’t stitch it         every twitch of it takes a piece
of flesh from me       to suppress it        I watch it
go like smoke         a please       beaten into each
of us        it isn’t intrinsically there.
The first cause        of course        also male
and who made terror        and who remorse
and was it felt        when cause erputed from
not this         into stars one sees when struck.
We call this life           this world  this sky.
Which from the links        the great chain
of things       to every thought within the mind
and each one reels now.        I’m evolving now.
I’m listening still          to wind rattle         to
the engines’ high whirr          some floors below.
Outside forces in my word         I want to find
the inside word  and force it out but fuck.
Unnecessary loud        in nature’s call for spring
rattles me.        What I mean to say        is image
but some beauty vexes me.       I can transmit
a pic        from wherever         and here’s the cat
warm in a slice of sun.          Here’s a new day
in which        I am again          fought for it       my
choler rising  and why choose now.
It withers me         the now of it        the it of it
the same.      I say I          in my deliberate way
and feel selfish for it.         Aware of the self in it
I say it the same.               How a hummingbird
sees a red flower          and knows to probe it
for nectar        but that’s not quite right         not
the metaphor for it    no         perhaps I see it
caught in poetry’s tight knot            as if it could
be untied       from yet another dynamic bind.
We all go     around the sun the same
in this curse-dark space       with half-light
enough to make out forms       in the out there
of unconscious dream      where the self-talk
never shuts up.           When what I mean to say
is that        poetry is    the long getting there
that floods the chambers          that calls
time and temper         to heel like beasts.
Even a stone         has will in it          to be
revealed.      Even I can bare           the soft
line in human musculature     that holds
the waters       of this        insignificant
private world.