AT THE EDGE OF HISTORY

I am not really here nor
will I be,

but nonetheless

a bum arrives out of
the thin rain

pushing a shopping cart
jammed with abandoned treasures,

old newspapers, broken idols,
the pale, upturned faces of empties,

and when I lay down
in the afternoon,

suffering from an unspecified
heartache,

I can feel through the floor
of all fifty states

the sobbing of an orphan engine.

- Howie Good

SLEEP RITUALS OF THE DEAD

Tonight, like most nights, she’ll go to bed first,
and I’ll read in the kitchen, where the light is good,

until tired enough to sleep, and when I wake up
without the alarm and somehow before her,

the dawn will be full of birdsong, and the birdsong,
as happens, full of primitive and gratuitous grief.

- Howie Good

MY LIFE IN BRIEF

I breathe on my hands
wonder where that stairway goes
say shhh don’t cry shhh

alarm the birds in the tree
look for a picture of the person
I’ve been told I resemble

an uncle missing since the war

change trains wake up tired
and still trying to think
of another word for all this

- Howie Good

MACHINE IN THE GARDEN

The phone rings. I’m in the garden.
Xylophone, our cat, doesn’t know
the coyotes will soon get her.
She has thirstily thrust
her head into the watering can.
No one else is home.
I can feel the warm flesh
of the sun against my flesh.
Someone must be trying to reach me,
but the weeds have grown back.
This happens whether I want it to
or not. It’s like that dream
where you run and run
through a dark building
and still never escape.
I let the machine pick up.

- Howie Good

SIX PREDICTIONS ABOUT THE FUTURE

1. There will still be wars, but faraway, happening to other people.

2. Your own experiences will feel like stories someone else made up.

3. Children will disappear into silence, flames, the cellars of monsters.

4. Even the dying will believe in the advertised cures for obscure diseases.

5. Crowds will surge to see gods humiliated and animals hurt.

6. The future will be just like the present – so cold it burns.

- howie good

JOB INTERVIEW TIP #3
for Graham

They’ll ask if you have a thief’s heart,
a knife hidden in your boot,
something else you’d rather do.
I myself am bad at riddles,
but before you answer,
consider just how you’ll feel
when the towers begin to rise
and the sky turns impossible colors
from all the ash in the air.

- Howie Good

PREFACE TO A SUICIDE NOTE

I’d kill myself if I were him,
50 years old, unknown,
living in his sister’s basement.
Good thing I don’t have a sister.

- Howie Good