Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

Dog that won’t stop barking and all I can think:
I don’t know anything about stars—		

not what they’re called or how they form, but how

we turn stars into stickers to surprise
our children and assure them You are better
than normal children. 				

On boat decks, sailors cry out Orion!
			and they see a man,
but they’ve only drawn stick-figure self-portraits
of fire and longing. 


		      I tried to sketch
my face one night with stronger brow lines,
higher cheekbones, but it was all nose, scaly 
water moccasin: a viper me. 

I paid someone who drew me in 
red with big hair, gaunter—
the way he drew me made me

see how lonely he thought I was. I rolled
that portrait with wax paper and a rubber band,

		look at it during the Lenten season—

That same spring or summer on the back of a boat, I caught a sunfish, baited him
with gum. I didn’t like unhooking him—

tore his lip. Astrologists 
shape stars into fish, take cracks at
decoding futures. Palm-reading hocus-pocus: 

on my hand—which is starboard, 
                 port, and which is solar flare?

I could use that hand to throw a tomahawk
from this bed and hit neither boat nor star 

from way down here, 
so far from water.