Just as the sun rises in the east
the Yankees win the World Series.
I wonder what it’s like to root for perpetual winners,
to not have loss in your blood,
making it sticky when spilled.

It must be like rooting for God.
You follow that one long game, Good vs. Evil,
every night on the radio ‘til Jesus walks down
and calls the last strike.
Ol’ Lucifer gives him lip about the strike zone
but nobody listens.
You jump on that holy dogpile, your knee
in Mother Teresa’s back, and howl for joy.
On heaven’s loudspeakers Sinatra sings about
little town blues fading away
and your only wish is that you didn’t have to wear pinstripes.

In the fake marble tile by the toilet
the outline of the devil stands on top
a ragged staircase leading to hell.
Satan’s big-horned head is looking
up to heaven with that sappy longing
we’ve all slathered on our faces
at one time or another.
He wanted what we all want:
love on our terms.
But his Lover held the cards —
five aces, all spades —
and ol’ Lucifer had the one heart,
all shriveled with regret.
Now he’s taking the long walk to hell.
It’s all politics,
I tell him from my porcelain perch.
You have to count the votes,
know when to bring the bill to the floor.
Til then you keep your head down
and answer when called.
That’s love.
But Satan’s not listening.
He’s looking to heaven,
sees God talking to some jerk.
He burns God’s profile into his brain
then burns his feet walking down
that lonely stairway.

I see myself as a monk eating an apple
in the doorway of a monastery overlooking
a garden, knowing my life wouldn’t get
any better or worse than that.
I’d consume God as my meals and
like any dish it would become tiresome
with such frequency,
so I’d resort to apples and gardens.
It’s cold in that monastery and the quirks
of the other monks would get to me,
the farting and lack of proper hygiene.
The vow of silence thing was always a farce
and what good can come of celibacy?
The monastic life is spiraling
to hell as I think of it.
I’d have to dynamite the place
and I’m not sure I’d alert
the other monks sleeping inside.
Better I stay away
and eat God as an occasional snack.

A work event swallowed my Saturday, now Monday
has entered my house and I am without rest,
a downtime pauper, the only resident of my alms bowl
a half penny rust-stuck to the bottom.
How will I face this week?
Sleep will help. I must make every moment
of shuteye count. No lollygagging in
dreamy dramas of lovemaking.
I must build restfulness brick by brick. But still
the dam may break and the world flood with duty.
And there go all the other shlubs swimming by,
one hand stroking as they talk business
on their cell phones. How will I survive this week?
Just keep your heart beating, Dan.
Friday will come, eventually.

I have no poems this morning.
I have nothing to compare to something else,
no precious observations.
My tank is empty.
Okay, I have a few metaphors
but I can’t string them together like DNA
to create that living thing.
I walk into the day musicless,
without a soul.
Others sense this and are not amused.
Cats hiss at me.
Blind people see my image burned in their retina.
A priest soaks me with holy water
and commands me to begone.
Someone will take pity on me, out here in the cold.
They’ll stop whipping pop cans at my head
and driving on curbs to hit me.
Someone will toss me a poem. I’ll call it my own,
because if you can’t find a soul
the next best thing is to fake it.

I almost wrecked another Minnesota Vikings game on Sunday and it took only ten seconds of watching. I turned the game on with seven minutes to go in the fourth quarter and the Vikes were up 30 to 17. Instantly the gods of this lifelong curse, sensing my presence, inspired the Ravens running back to catch the ball midfield and crash his way through bowling pin defenders to the Vikings 10 yard line. I turned the TV off quickly but the damage was done. The next time I checked the score the Ravens were winning by a point.

Every time I watch a Vikings game they lose in some agonizing, emasculating way, usually to the Lions. I know this and yet I can’t help causing this annual train wreck.

Why me? I ask the Lord, but He doesn’t deign to answer questions pertaining to contact sports, so I try not to watch football at all to avoid temptation. I do this for you, Minnesota. In my mind I stress the most barbaric aspects of the game: the brutal hits, the tacklers voodoo dancing above their crumpled victims. But eventually the devil puts a tingle in my fingers and I grab the remote, crushing the dreams of woeful Vikings fans weighed down already by the eleven-month Minnesota winter.

The Vikings won on Sunday by two points. They were lucky this time, but if they are to win the Super Bowl they must go through me. Either that or bring about my untimely death, but something tells me I’ll be unintentionally hexing this purple crew for many years to come.

Why does all the sludge of my memory float to the top:
the flashes of psychotic parenting,
the bad roommate experiences,
the job that went south along with my ego?
Why do I insist on replaying these B movies,
with lurching monsters and
fleeing girls tripping over branches?

I want to remake my past into some
fine ornament I can hang proudly in my home,
but the more I touch it the more spider legs it grows,
building webs inside my brain
to catch all flighty bits of happiness.

Perfection is the El Dorado I can’t stop searching for
even as the search itself becomes a beast.

We all live on this uncontrollable ball
whipping through the galaxy.
One day we will lose our grip
and drop into another world.
Perhaps it will be paradise or
perhaps just a hole in the ground.
We don’t have control of that, either.

One day they’ll pop out the old ones and drop perfect new ones in, lickety-split. That’s how the doc made it sound. My research makes it seem more complicated, but I have two brothers who’ve had the same problem at this young age so I know the world isn’t ending. Still, as the early morning windows fog with autumn chill I know a more permanent fog would be descending on my life if I had been born 100 years earlier. My options wouldn’t be complicated; they’d be stillborn in the cold, darkening arms of the world. It humbles me to be so at the whim of time and a horde of genes that goes about its business without an eye to the larger scheme of things. That scheme being me, the only universe those genes will ever know, yet so drastically smaller than that implies, so much more human.

You’ll never talk to me again after reading it.
You’ll report me to the FBI as a terrorist, a false allegation
(I can explain the car bombs).
I’ll rot in a Bulgarian jail
where pulling out prisoner fingernails is a daily event.
You’ll hate me after reading this poem.
You’ll be mad as hell and won’t know what to do about it.
So you’ll kill the ones you love
and then you’ll kill their cats.
Perhaps the cats needed killing
but that doesn’t justify my writing of this poem —
the self-centered shame of it,
the chutzpah turned to shit.
I apologize. For everything.
And I promise to do it all again.

Something wet and cold has fallen on the sun.
A clock tolls and a door slams.
We sharpen our knives and wait for winter.
The devil hums a tune as he strolls down the sidewalk,
pushing a stroller. It’s not his baby
but the child doesn’t cry about it. He can’t cry —
a crow stole his voice. There’s the crow now,
pecking at the voice on the side of the road.
A woman runs toward the crow,
a cloud on her head and a scream in her knife.
The crow darts away on a smear of black
and the woman holds the voice to her chest.
It’s all she has left of her child;
she sold him to the devil for the knife.
She’d call the boy’s name but the name is gone now.
We all stand around the mother,
mourning the boy’s name and
everything else we’ve lost in this dark time.