Tossing the Sticks

If it is getting colder, I am grateful

although I know that such a mercy won't stay,

because we've tossed the sticks.

We've tossed the sticks and now

we have to read them.

And I snapped those twigs in the night meadow.

I moved those rocks beneath the tent

and woke up raining.

Woke up sweating beneath spattering rain,

woke up from a terrible dream,

the stirring

of deep animal discomfort.

(Mosquitos will feed on the legs

of every lover. They always have

and always will.)

I scrape a scanty barrel these days,

these end days, although we all can agree

that it's always seemed like end days

to the species that invented apocalypse.

I will face this apocalypse with

my salty eyes.

And if I seem hard, it is because

I am hard. I am hardened. In time,

I've been shanked by a bone knife.

I very narrowly made out with my life.

In my strange dream,

there is no room for dead weight.

In my strange dream, I have

a hurricane lamp in my chest.

In my strange dream, I have

a hurricane lamp for a heart.