BETTER

All the older poets
are writing their death poems.
I guess I’m writing a few
too. But really,
even though death is vast and final
it isn’t that interesting,
and mostly it’s unknowable.
Better to write
more about life than death.
At least there are maps.FAITH
If anything taught me faith
it was writing, not religion.
Religion had all of the fast answers,
and I have never believed
in easy salvation.
What Main Street knows
can’t help any of us.
Writing taught me
that, eventually, something
always comes out of the nothingness,
that no mind is empty.
And so,
stanza by stanza,
I continue to believe.POEM
I entered the world
where everything was changing
and nothing was stable.
Every well went down until it touched
the waters of sorrow.
I stood at the crossroads,
watching the living enter
and the dying exit.
After a while
I finally said goodbye
to the stupid invulnerability of youth