things that are lost are all equal

take me out to the fields of wheatgrass! where we will lie down beneath the sky our young bodies parallel to young gods and the future slowly passing between us we will be free to think of the wind and trees we will be free to think of new names for ourselves (having left our old ones on the bedside table) and the clouds will form shapes and faces so we can try to guess who they are there's Woody Guthrie! there's Walt Whitman's beard! and all the mornings are cool and crisp carrying some secret song where's the man with the horrible hands? he's on foot! and now the cops have him bent over the car no rape today thankfully just handcuffs this man has patches of grey sky in his hair he knows true silence he knows real darkness he knows well the taste of whiskey and blood and centuries from now i will remember his face toothless and free even in confinement the phone was ringing off the hook and planes were constantly taking off but i heard nothing i was in the forest! taking inventory of my dreams i was free to think of all the passed midnights and staying up late and i saw every answer you've longed for in the shadows of a billion busy lives (i stand unknown behind each of their mirrors and i have love for each of them in the pockets of my jeans) and i saw that faith you spoke of once not in fallen monuments or countless dead there are no funerals! there is no crucifix from which to hang look down, you are floating now take me out to stand in the river! to daydream and dance beneath the sweet sun with my pants rolled up to my knees i'll find a smooth black rock it must be a million years old and i'll throw it into the current with no regard for fate and i am free to think of ways the world will end what was that word? i knew it once! it is older than god (and better dressed) it sounded sweet and kind and soaked in summer when i heard it first, years ago when i walked alone through sleeping cities giving my old names to the windows on buildings and the sidewalks were encrypted with a billion footprints worth of stories now i find myself in the mountains amongst a gathering of pine trees where i am free to think of static TV screens i am free to think simply of yellow moons and the clouds pass above me there's Tennessee Williams! there's Robinson Jeffers! you often wrote of hawks and of being a great sculptor and of waves crashing against rocks you were certain of death just as you were certain that granite and marble are solid did you also sleep strangely last night? did we dream each other's dream? it was Thoreau and Emerson! out to dinner with Cain and Abel! they were dressed magnificently in 3-button suits their initials engraved in gold cufflinks and their brilliant white smiles flashing in the flickering candlelight but what was it they spoke of? not of sin or virtue or war is kind not of the faces forming in smoke (Faulkner and Fitzgerald) not of the degenerate poets yet to come (i sat quietly at the next table tipping my cap toward the flame) they spoke of their new names and yellow moons they spoke of static smiles, white noise and true silence and of one word which would encompass all things i woke up as someone blew out the candle and i woke to a series of nothings: a blank white wall, a clear sky and an empty heart i was free to think of my past lives and those i have yet to live i was free to believe in only chaos, in endless numbers and another dream where im sitting at the bottom of the sea crushed beneath the enormous weight of prayers i say that you will not change the world but the world will change regardless and i long to be in uncharted spaces only finding joy in absences maps! outlines! blueprints! but what is the nature of nothingness? have you not pondered the value of infinity? have you not wished to paint question marks on every single step of sidewalk? you called last night just to say god's not watching but the sparrows watch and the owls watch with yellow eyes like full moons you said we'd all be gone to ghosts soon our skin like plaster our voices the depths of all oceans secretly stashed in 4-track machines do you remember that night in the graveyard? the strange cold mist of ghosts who couldn't sleep do you ever think of the messages written on stones? and when the clocks went forward at midnight how we figured we had traveled through time (and we always had been) do you remember the edge of that road? how we stared into the real darkness not expecting it to smile at us but it did and the long ride home was quiet and comfortable and filled with silent joy i will remember our young faces funny and framed in the car's rearview mirror i think we almost felt alive on nights like that they were fuzzy and grey but full of moonlight and we left our voices on memories like message machines we were bathed in neon, empty and untitled waiting for an end i can recall all those railroad track wheatgrass summers and the strange, wild never-tired nights running windward through the darkness without reason when we were free to think of badblood and roadsides and roses and outlines and how every single moment is in the past we felt the weight of empty ages lives they chose not to live we couldn't say we'd live for them only promised to tell about them we used to search for a few perfect stanzas now we just write to keep out the silence in the shower, the steam rises forming faces in the mirrors there's John Berryman and Allen Ginsberg! and that's my father as a child he's banging on coffee cans with wooden spoons his bookbag remains untouched on the floor where he left it hours ago and my grandma's in the kitchen she's full of youth and beauty, joyful and illuminating in a yellow dress and i find myself on the edge of the earth with my feet in the sand i was free to think of all that's not lost i was free to think of sadness just as much as happiness you've seen me there before, years ago! running along the shoreline, bare-legged and lucky to be there when the clouds reflected off that bright sleeping sea there's your inner-child! there's my true self! they're swimming on their backs and waving at us do you remember all the windblown- winter, cold desert mornings? the sunrises tied with red bows, death and life visiting always but dressing like gentleman on Sundays they spoke of the clock always ticking they spoke of the origin of all poems (they said why not let the hands of time be of use to you? why not be good company to rooftops and one-eyed cats? why stand still while the earth spins tilted and the universe is ever-expanding? smile and expand infinitely) today i heard all hope was lost they were saying it in supermarkets and the city bus it is true, but you shouldn't worry it was hiding in a dumpster behind your apartment and the garbagemen were laughing and singing when they threw it on the truck (their orange jumpsuits protesting the sun) and it lies in a landfill now it is food for the hawks and the people have moved on they remember those prophets wandering so many years in that desert (strangely familiar to you) they remember the faces they saw passing in clouds and they continue coming home after sunrise

Near the wall of a house painted to look like stone, I saw visions of God. A sleepless night that gives others a headache gave me flowers opening beautifully inside my brain. And he who was lost like a dog will be found like a human being and brought back home again. Love is not the last room: there are others after it, the whole length of the corridor that has no end.

They miss the whisper that runs any day in your mind, “Who are you really, wanderer?”— and the answer you have to give no matter how dark and cold the world around you is: “Maybe I’m a king.”

Whatever the foghorns are the voices of feels terrible tonight, just terrible, and here by the window that looks out on the waters but is blind, I have been sleeping, but I am awake now. In the night I watch how the little lights of boats come out to us and are lost again in the fog wallowing on the sea: it is as if in that absence not many but a single light gestures and diminishes like meaning through speech, negligently adance to the calling of the foghorns like the one note they lend from voice to voice. And so does my life tremble, and when I turn from the window and from the sea’s grief, the room fills with a dark lushness and foliage nobody will ever be plucked from, and the feelings I have must never be given speech. Darkness, my name is Denis Johnson, and I am almost ready to confess it is not some awful misunderstanding that has carried me here, my arms full of the ghosts of flowers, to kneel at your feet; almost ready to see how at each turning I chose this way, this place and this verging of ocean on earth with the horns claiming I can keep on if only I step where I cannot breathe. My coat is leprosy and my dagger is a lie; must I shed them? Do I have to end my life in order to begin? Music, you are light. Agony, you are only what tips me from moment to moment, light to light and word to word, and I am here at the waters because in this space between spaces where nothing speaks, I am what it says.

But now I am afraid I know too much to kill myself Though I would still like to jump off a high bridge At midnight, or paddle a kayak out to sea Until I turn into a speck, or wear a necktie made of knotted rope But people would squirm, it would hurt them in some way, And I am too knowledgeable now to hurt people imprecisely. No longer do I live by the law of me, No longer having the excuse of youth or craziness, And dying you know shows a serious ingratitude For sunsets and beehive hairdos and the precious green corrugated Pickles they place at the edge of your plate. Killing yourself is wasteful, like spilling oil At sea or not recycling all the kisses you’ve been given, And anyway, who has clothes nice enough to be caught dead in? Not me. You stay alive you stupid asshole Because you haven’t been excused, You haven’t finished though it takes a mulish stubbornness To chew this food. It is a stone, it is an inconvenience, it is an innocence, And I turn against it like a record Turns against the needle That makes it play.

You are falling in love again. This time it is a South American general's daughter. You want to be stretched on the rack again. You want to hear awful things said to you and to admit these things are true. You want to have unspeakable acts committed against your person, things nice people don't talk about in classrooms. You want to tell everything you know on Simon Bolivar, on Jorge Luis Borges, on yourself most of all. You want to implicate everyone in this! Even when it's four o'clock in the morning and the lights are burning still - those lights that have been burning night and day in your eyes and brain for two weeks - and you are dying for a smoke and a lemonade, but she won't turn off the lights that woman with the green eyes and little ways about her, even when you want to be her gaucho. Dance with me, you imagine hearing her say as you reach for the empty beaker of water. Dance with me, she says again and no mistake. She picks this minute to ask you, hombre, to get up and dance with her in the nude. No, you don't have the strength of a fallen leaf, not the strength of a little reed basket battered by waves on Lake Titicaca. But you bound out of bed just the same, amigo, you dance across wide open spaces.