If a ghost descended and said
“O my America. Watch out, watch out!
There is a great recession ahead!
Heed this warning. Buy not subprime mortgages!
Invest not in Lehman Brothers or Bear Sterns; They are not
Long for this world, soon to join me in the afterlife.
Heed your debt, America! Check your greed!
Keep your eyes on those banks and also on those car companies.”
Is there a chance in hell
Anyone would have believed him?
The ghosts with premonitions of the future
Must have wrung their hands and prepared
To watch as we sank ourselves
Deep into the mire of our Imperial making.
Or else they rejoiced.
If Horatio had begged for knowledge
Would any ghost have thought to give it?
Foreknowledge is useless unless
We believe in foreknowledge.
Even if a person could see into the future
Could report on the fate that awaits us,
We’d first have to believe him.
Every future caster is a Cassandra
And every single one of them knows it.

Can you unlock the cabinet
Where you keep your troubles
And show me the way to ease them?
Will you let me remove what rolls out
Of those drawers and dust or caress
Or whatever will make it better?
Tell me what is to be done and I
Will do it.
For you, of course
But also for me
For grace.
Those scientists have proved that doing good
Deeds for others
Almost does the doer more good
Than the done for.
Will you let the caged worries fly out
And flutter in my hands for a moment?
For me
For my grace
For my improvement
Give me the instructions for loving you.

A prayer for guidance
A ritual for receiving
A plea to the spirit
To cut through the noise of it all and find
A way to express
To tell
To explain
To point the way
A plea as simple as please.

What you are has been made clear to me
I know you are immaterial
A veil
Between me and reality.
I know you have kept me
Blind and deluded
Laboring under false pretenses and impossibilities.
I know everything you told me was a lie
That everything I felt was unreliable
That everything I saw was colored with gauze
And not what it appeared to be.
You are a dream
From which I have awakened
I know there is no substance
No material
No there there.
I know I know I know
But don’t go.

That thing before me,
The one that seems insurmountable,
The obstacle impossible –
I will stand in its sight lines,
Right in its crosshairs,
Between one plane and another.
From this position
I am a target.
I could feel a shaking and a rocking of all
That I have known.
Something could shoot right through me,
Standing in the path,
But stand here I must
Because this is my path, by god and
You cannot sway me from my forward march;
Try though you might.
In earlier times I might have stepped aside,
Let this cup pass,
Turned around around and tried another way
Another route
Another goal
Another end.
But the time has come to stand stalwart,
To build myself like a tower
One with a drawbridge and a moat
With loops and slits for shooting arrows
Arteries and spouts for boiling oil
And giant iron locks.
But this tower has legs
And once it is built it will walk past the blasts
Walk on
Into whatever comes next.

Hush your voices when the spirit arrives.
When it comes
You don’t want to be shouting or
Arguing.
You’ll want to cease your laughter.
No jokes now
No speeches
You may even find that your breath is too loud.
All that prattle is only a distraction
When spirit arrives
You want to do nothing but receive.

Precurse
Feared
Harbingers
Preceding
Prologue
Omen coming on
Word after word
Concept after concept
That whispers “foreshadowing”
Under these five lines
A little voice might as well whisper
“Something’s coming.
Horror’s on its way.
Prepare for something momentous.”
And then the ghost enters.

A little grain of sand
Left in the folds of the brain
Like a pea left under a hundred mattresses
Making a sensitive person
Toss and turn.
The irritant growing and growing
Adding layer of shell
Layer of luminescence
Layer of indestructibility
Over the trouble
Making it harder and more real
But also more beautiful.

Follow the lines back to the center and you find
The motive, the source, the chief head.
Like the Pleiades shooting all those stars from the same sun
It all comes from the same fountain.
The way creeks come from streams come from
Rivers come from the ocean
All are all are all are.