EMPTY

There is a space

that is empty.

It is waiting for you—

to move in.

It is waiting for you 

to inhabit it,

but without the clutter

you carry and cart 

around

from place to place,

from space to space,

that is always in

your way.

Empty is where

you want to be.

It is the place

you are trying to get to,

that you will call home

when you arrive.

Only in empty can you

feel unencumbered

and free,   

and a sense of 

serenity. Empty is

not a place

outside you

it is a space

that resides

within you.

Make room for it.

REDACTED

It’s not like playing the lotto

where you can scratch away the black

and there you are holding a winning ticket.

It’s not like that at all.

The censure is indelible.

Words, lines, whole passages

are blotted out.

These are the instructions, you might say,

we were given when we enter this life.

They are incomplete, at best.

More like a riddle than a key.

Hints followed by guesses.

With so much missing 

from the “playbook” of life,

so much veiled from view,

it would be easy to want to redact ourselves,

to find ways to ink over

all the anxiety and dis-ease that

not knowing brings.

What would be the point in that, though?

It would only further confuse the issue

and make the message even more obscure,

harder to read and decipher.

Why stain the pages of our life

with even more black?

Better to accept the handbook as is,

let it pique our curiosity,

overwrite it with our own answers,

and decide our future and fortunes

our own damn selves.

THE VISITOR

He has come to your door  

many times before.

And he is here again.

You will do like you always do:

you will stand there

in the crack you’ve created,

knob in hand,

searching his face, looking

through the latch

into his slivered eyes,

his shit-eating grin,

listening to the sibilant S’s in his voice

try to sweet talk you one more time.

You so much want to trust this visitor.

You want to believe

that everything will be different

this time. And so you make

the mistake you always make:

you invite him in, you step aside,

and he enters.

Next thing you know—and it happens

faster than you remember—he has

thrown the dead bolt

and put the latch back,

he has locked you inside your own home,

taken your family hostage,

cuffed them to the kitchen table.

Where are you in all this?

You are handing him a cold “Oly,”

a bag of Frito Lays, and the remote.

You are now his servant,

at his beacon call,

while he watches the game 

splayed out on your sofa 

with his socks off, as the home team 

loses on their own turf.

You stand there in a daze,

while he hoots and hollers at the “tube,”

having the time of his life.

EMPTY

A mongrel dog

at the dump.

A soup can stuck

to its mangy snout.

It don’t care.

It’s too busy trying

to lick the tin

off every ridge

of the empty insides.

We are like this

with the stuff we can’t

let go of.

Aren’t we?