After I get off the subway, I go to my job as a therapist at the community clinic. You can walk  outside between sessions, but it is Dorchester, and Dorchester in December is ugly and cold.  

The clouds have already moved in on the housetops. It’ll be dark by four. There is nothing more  forlorn than group room after group. Yellow walls. Crumpled strips of worksheets on Setting  Intentions lie about like used prophylactics. 

It seemed at first things might come to a point, but they did not. It’s only 3:11 PM. One finds it  hard to imagine existing until 5. 

In the fluorescent light, behind a door, beyond the white noise machine, when I should be  completing clinical notes, I am writing honestly of the occasion of my life.  

I’m really trying. 

St. John of the Bridge 

When I started talking 

to passing cars,  

that’s when I knew. 

From the bridge  

over I-90,  

through the chain-link littered 

with fastened locks, 

I have seen headlights filing 

like the unblinking gaze 

of the Son of Man. 

They all have different  

sorts of eyes: 

the Challengers  

are leering, 

the Priuses are smug. 

I could have sworn 

you drove by last night—oh yes 

God—He’s coming  

for you too, 

therapist— 

You better stitch me back up 

before Christmas,  

or The Christ-Child will frown, 

then pluck out your eyes. 

He told me so.

Some people say that poetry is a form of therapy. I do not agree. For one thing, poetry doesn’t  make you well. But then again, this is often the case with therapy. Come to think of it, I do agree.  They are exactly alike. 

You only truly come to either when there’s nothing left. At their best, one gets the sense that one  is one of two people, alone, in a room. Sure—there are words at first, even the ritual of naming.  But over time they are ground in the steady downward pressure of fluorescent light, the enforced  white noise, a gaze grown steadily averted, the growing sound of the keyboard from the farther  room.  

The blank guilt before one another we can only stand to face for a moment. Then, more words.  Another attempt.

St. Lucy 

Father you can do all things 

but you never made me pure 

even at seventy-seven. 

I’m sorry for spilling 

Burger King on myself yesterday 

it’s just I get so excited 

when I see all those 

bright angry joyful 

mustards and reds 

squirm out from between. 

They denied me a hot dog 

at the Central today—I suspect 

they’ve been in touch with you. 

Regarding the urination on the subway

I told you I’m sorry 

but it’s a regular thing now 

and these days it’s become easier

to find opportune corners. 

But we both know 

I have real sins to confess. I was 

trying to seduce him. I wore 

my white tube socks, my loose red

slit-sleeve, slowly recrossed 

my legs while he squirmed, tried 

to stay on my eyes. There was no way 

I was going to cry 

about a fake Parkinson’s diagnosis

and no way he’s going to make me. Besides 

I don’t have as much pep these 

days and fights with therapists got old 

long before ours did. Instead, we talked

about the time I occupied Liz Taylor’s body,

got kicked out for growing too fat, 

then got chased 

out of the Empire State Building 

for fornication.  

He seemed pleased with himself. Almost

satisfied. And besides,

you can’t blame a girl for trying.

It may surprise you to know that the most frequent topic in therapy with those suffering from  serious mental illness in the twenty-first century is a tie between eschatology and public  transportation. There is something to be said for both, insofar as they both have to do with  departure—not just from the therapy room, the currents of one’s own and another’s inchoate yet  evident murderous and libidinous pre-verbal desires, the sense of responsibility for explaining  oneself in the company and eye contact of others, but perhaps most importantly from the niggling  futility, contingency, and indecision of the present moment, a state of affairs scarcely bearable  even for those with normally developed prefrontal cortices. 

The Calling of St. Benjamin 

“You called and cried out loud and shattered my deafness. You were radiant and resplendent, you put to flight my blindness. You were fragrant, and I drew in my breath and now pant after you.”

—St. Augustine of Hippo

It’s already too crowded. 

They really should fix the AC in here. 

Blue plastic seats 

suppurating. The heat unvanquished. 

Even more at the Park Street stop. 

They’ll somehow get on, 

but there’s only one face. 

Yours. Loose Tims. Busy lips. Shirt weeping. Self-dialoguing. The main thing 

is not to make eye contact. 

Here I am—hiding behind at least three other candidates, hoping 

you’re not my fate. 

Of course you are. 

So that now is your ass, half-bare & pressed to the clear 

partition near my head, 

the yelp of belt-leather on plexiglass 

at every stop. Your smell 

is fact, 

becoming my breath, sediment 

I can taste, no—feel 

on my tongue. So that now— 

I won’t move. Will endure it, will 

breathe you in deeper,

though again & again 

some part of me denies you, 

other & vague familiar, sinuses 

rawly waking 

to your vinegar & myrrh. Crusts of a thousand

mornings after. Pot-roast memory 

of childhood sickness, curdling, 

the body’s evil, quod erat demonstrandum. 

I know where it comes from. That smell. 

From the same place 

I now itch. No-man’s land. Perineal furnace

between gland & hole. 

Usurper. Descanting through 

our curated sense, the earbuds’ hymen, resolving images 

of odorless light, furtive forays into shaven loins, hope 

for stainless air, voice of the rapture—Change here 

for connections.  

The seat across clears. 

I betray you.

It recently occurred to me that the Catholic practice of sitting in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament  (which I almost never do any more, but essentially involves sitting in a chapel before the Eucharist,  i.e., bread that, having undergone transubstantiation, has become the Body of Christ, which is  locked in a tabernacle at the front of the room) and psychotherapy with hebephrenic schizophrenics  (which I do quite a bit more often now, and typically takes place in a smaller room) are not all that  different.  

Both are predicated on an act of faith that there is in fact someone else in the room with something  to say, despite numerous suggestions to the contrary, not the least of which is the potential  interlocutor’s uncanny ability to absent any sign of their personhood from the room (don’t get me  wrong – this is not to say that schizophrenics—or gods—don’t have their reasons), to say nothing  of the desperate futility of sitting for long periods of silence, wondering if one is either a fool with  an unfortunate penchant toward sentimentality or someone in the grip of a grandiose savior delusion who would do best to leave the situation alone entirely.  

Either that, or there is something within me terrified of the suffering I might witness and would  have no ability to alter or adequately describe should the blank lift, and true presence to the other  actually be achieved. Whenever this has happened (in either adoration or psychotherapy), it has  always been an experience of mixed exhilaration and terror during which I haven’t the slightest  clue what to do, and which is liable at any moment to disappear back into the blank just as  arbitrarily and suddenly as it arose. 

Either way, it’s not easy. 

~

As we sat at your group home, Gunsmoke was on in the common room. It was three PM on a  Wednesday in December, the point-blank light of utter afternoon. From that dust-moted enclosure,  a man named David repeated his name. The sky, white, had moved all the way up to the window,  as if to peer in. I tried a question about basketball. “Timberwolves” was all you said, turning again  to face the screen. I could feel you trying not to laugh. You and me both, brother.

St. David 

Can I buy a cigarette? Call me David. 

I fix things up like new. 

I had got a good hustle going, 

all the way to the bus stop when I came 

to see my parents underground. 

After the car put the crunch on 

my shin I was looking up 

like Mickey Mouse at the clearest blue 

you or I ever seen, almost 

remembered the words to a song. 

My son used to like to put his finger  

in this notch here 

where the fender rolled. 

But man I needed this, thrown  

every which other way and can’t even stand

in crosswalks. See, 

I can fix near anything.  

They call me King David, like 

to work with my hands.  

I got nonspecific labor skills, 

least that’s what they told me, 

out here with nothing but labor pains, see. 

So that means I hustle a bit. I fix things 

like new. Sometimes I got the poetry in me,

sometimes it’s just halfway down my leg

when the bastards catch you in the crosswalk

and that just for pissing, what else 

they make drains for anyways. The last thing

I needed, and my son living back  

in New Waltham and for that 

and all other matters my wife. 

But see I got a place prepared. Saw it 

when I was laying there, wondering 

when he would let me stand  

and that kid looking like an idiot Big Bird,

asking if I was ok. It was a place 

of my own I could work with my hands, 

a time before the sins of my knuckles, 

me and my son, walk signals on  

at every crosswalk, just stare up at the sky

when we’re walking across, hand in hand,

arm in arm where even fenders 

bend to our knees, say take your time

old son and the pigs and priests  

hand out trophies at the stream.

Sometime I wish they’d try it again.

Every last one of us to kingdom come,

let ‘em all scream and let me  

rest in peace ’cause I’m The Second David,

I stoop now sure, but not too low to see.

You just wait, give me one more cigarette,

half a chance, time to cross,  

a light to read. 

I’m gonna make all things new.

Our old project of broken praise, or complaint. I’m not trying to talk badly about my patients,  although—rest assured—therapists do have horrible, hateful thoughts about their patients every  day. Trying to turn the insane, and especially the insane poor, into angels is just the sort of  privileged religiosity that denies their humanity and betrays a lack of any actual contact with the  poor or the insane on an individual level. What I’m trying to get at is the problem of encounter that  obtains with any god or human with whom we seek contact (i.e, transubstantiation from the state  of nothingness to presence), whether one is trying to get through a therapy session, sit still in a  church, or make love to one’s spouse.  

What I guess I’m also trying to say is that whenever I get back on the subway from the community  clinic in Dorchester to go back to my apartment in Cambridge, a journey during which both the  smells and conversation steadily proceed from the vulgarly straightforward to the ostensibly  compassionate and euphemistic, I feel like a fraud, but I do also feel—and of this I am ashamed—relief.

~

At 5 PM, you will close the door to the community clinic. The keycard scanner clicks, so simply,  behind you. When you go into the subway station, you pass your card over a transponder that  opens miniature plexiglass doors in front of you. You pass through. 

They close, neatly, behind you. You just—pass through. 

Go deeper. Downstairs, in the ground, it’s warm. Claim a seat if you can. This gives you leave to  relax your face, and look sad and blank as everyone else. Or—imagine that you are chosen, the  latent consciousness in a story populated by a lot of very sad, repetitive people.  

Most importantly, you will instantly—and entirely—be relieved of the nagging suspicion that  things might have been better. We all have to be here, as bodies. Furthermore—it smells. 

The smell appears to be some general-issue alkaline funk. However, every now and then, you may  suffer the shock of Dr. Bronners or Ocean Breeze, some adolescent mall-fume glamour that tends  to remind you of at one point having been seventeen, at once subject and object of some manifold,  inevitable desire, eternally coming into the blear-eyed possible.  

Watch out for that. You want underground to be the underground—the point of a clean departure,  absolution from memory and desire. The little glass doors click, neatly, behind you. You go down  into a place. A place where people have to be.  

And stand. Or sit. There is talking, but no speech. 

We’re all waiting for it—that gaining rail-scrape, tumbling dysrhythmic, voice of the rapture. Those two lights, intent.

110 to Wonderland 

Like fish  

to sudden shadow  

the faces of the bus  

when conscious of scrutiny,  

correct themselves in a flash  

from heartbreak to vague interest,  

jostled and panting into the last  

of a necessary kindness.  

At the time, it seemed  

just a place 

to grieve quietly  

to ourselves  

between bothers.  

We had no idea  

what we had.

Time together as bodies,  

albeit arbitrary.  

Bound to one place 

by virtue of the sub-optimal,  

bound to move through space  

at the same speed, 

all bearing mute witness  

to each other, ourselves,  

the present a fatuous  

non-sequitur  

we could be  

guilty of, together.