Notes for Auto Bio

i take my pasts     each
examine them
each in a sepia of its own dust
through which i can see
only when i look away

    one was college     natural but sometimes it stressed
    once my father called me
    a communist drug addict
    and generations of hands came down
    in the flick of a half second’s time
    and decades later i found myself asking
    exactly whose political mechanics i’d betrayed
    and how many of his own ancestors
    my father was betraying

in another i slogged on through thirty years
of full-time work on the gravity of nothingness
my fingerprints are all over its surface
but the box seems completely hollow
all but the details grown over
by layers of mechanical dust
seen through the stone age of my imagination
as on the mechanical back of someone else’s android hand

and the lifetimes of memories of people i’ve loved
    of your lives entangled with mine
    so many of you freed now
    in the mechanics of what could be called fate
    but is only a weird form of temporal physics

and my rage that time’s just another machine
with my and everybody else’s living meat
throbbing like pain momentarily held within it

from Auto Bio (2010)

Listen

listen to me    
i’ll listen to you
i’ll try to listen to everyone
who isn’t me
if you will too

so know    then
that we are all different joints
on different fingers of the same hand
and that there’s another hand as well
that we have never heard of
so listen    listen
if you speak i will listen
so that both hands can speak
and listen    and move
as two hands together

Written in late 2023