Sunday, March 10, 2024

Holga.

 Isn’t it funny how memory is presented in memory?

It is given from the past.


Ever forward, ever on: a body falls deep within itself:

Will I be pretty, will I be rich?

Shall I be the shell on top of 

Beauty, this time when it comes up?


Meanwhile, electricity is famous.

Monday, February 26, 2024

Domesticity

 If you’re gonna have a cat, then

Go on and have a cat.


Let your body fall backwards throughout itself,

Clean, out the window:

Dreamily to the ground and your

Certain death. No

Recourse. But

By

All

Means

Fall,

And have a cat near your heart for all life is sacred.

Winter sleep.

A lifetime of behavioral analysis suggests that when

A cat scrubs his ear with his paw 


The ear is the problem.


Anytime I get up from a bedridden sickness I 

Look at everything as a conglomeration of

Ideas


In which I’m never what’s wrong.

If the song wasn’t such a spell

If  the song wasn’t such a spell,

If the garden wasn’t too brief to be

Tended to by fleeting hands 


If the stars were alive

If I didn’t fuck things up so miserably


The half-shell would yet rise with

My idea of conciliatory beauty


In its humble arm, just

Like a baby about to cry itself alive.

The rib.

What dream of life do we fulfill when we carry this bride

Of possibility across the threshold? 


Will we finally be safe? Will the snake finally 

Speaky English?

“If it wasn’t a scalpel…”

Teach them, if you

Must, though it can’t be taught.


Learn with them, but fair warning,

You will learn alone.


You will walk yourself into circles, thinking, 

Blue.

Against the might of a volcano.

Explain this to me,

Two things that seem so innocuously

Similar in my mind, but set

Loose in the world of ideas,

They evolve in discord.


I tried to write a poem about the sun—

It was going to be apocalyptic, with children staring into 

The vocal point of the volcanic Earth.


A robin blushing in opposition 


But I began to think of a painting

John Singer Sargent did of leisure class

Children holding paper lamps after dark.


A robin, somewhere, against the might of a volcano


And suddenly I was cutting my heart in pieces

Against the grain.  You see


I was trying to divide it equally.



Sunday, February 18, 2024

Love dream

The crest is bound to be covered with 

Liars. No cameras on them.


Everybody is looking down from

Their orange spots

At the terrifying volcano, wondering,  

How do we fix love without bothering

The heat we believe in?

Monday, February 12, 2024

A love poem

I think of you anytime

I come across old score keepings

From card games, folded newspapers saved

For the crossword puzzle


In different states of completion. It’s

Hard


To remember in this state of grace that 

We could ever gain so freely from nothing

And give so benevolently to it, as well.


Look at the numbers, blue and random now. Look at the 

Clues as they bury the dead elsewhere.

Saturday, February 3, 2024

Come on slowly

But ready to go at it. But, also, take

A little time look around. Gem. It’s all yours.

What you want is where it already is. 

What you don’t is on the curb where boots speak

Fluent Goethe.


You ever ask a boot about how your parents met?

Sunday, January 28, 2024

Terroir.

The problem with our

Connectivity is that we’re never lost anymore.

Or it’s a different kind of lost. One without

Depth.


The compass is hypersensitive, outfitted with

Expertise on how to

Survive. The leaves that are shaped like almonds

Are poisonous—the earth is edible and specific to

Its place. You could open a sandwich shop with it.

Wildlife has been managed. Lest we wander there

Are adults with flashlights out there,

Grooming the Cezanne-like confusion

To greater effect. The snacks.


The movie begins at seven—silence.

Monday, January 22, 2024

The hummingbird.

Inside the smallest things 

Beat the hearts of gods. Predators

Come with their vast

Ambitions and

They look as the clock of love tells

Time in microscopic, if unromantic, syllables.


No resentment in their ticking towers, but

Neither is there anything like sympathy.


They’re just looking for sugar. 

Sunday, January 14, 2024

Trustworthy doesn’t exist on the map.

Easy, simple, neither.


It is mostly a plain space divided by time on the map.



If you were to prune away enough of the healthy moment

And dig online 

There, you would find the body in a bed of sorry

And no knock warrants.


There you go.

Friday, December 29, 2023

The old tired song.

 I keep telling myself, asshole,

You have this much time, and this much

Money to get it all done.


Imagine, okay, the Devil.


He is clean and red  and you can smell ginger.


His G-d is your G-d so no surprises there—

But the way he looks at you says everything

About how he uses his belt. And he 

Never seems to remember you.




They’d rather lick the clock clean than help me.


Monday, December 4, 2023

Drunk mythology.

Two statuettes complement one another

In my living room.

One is a Goddess of the art deco.


The other one is empty.

Depression.

 The wounds of my judge lie open


I mop but blood abounds. He sees

Me, he remembers me—


And every morning he awakens and he 

Drinks a cold lake of brandy. Once he’s done you can see a depression in the mud where maybe

A meteor landed—or a great beast fell

Fighting for its life. Through the

Sinews of his unconsciousness he sees me

In the quiet of my room.

Off the clock.

There are moments after sunset

Off  the clock

When I find a mouse Tinto killed while

I was at work. I don’t dream about misery.

I dream about Tinto sitting in the pelvic bough

Of a peach tree,


He’s looking down at me with his grey poem 

Left by the couch.


And I am the bounty.

Sunday, December 3, 2023

Goodbye grey.

 A pulpy pink thing came calling

Between my first and third fingers. 


Suddenly, I thought I imagined it.

But in the mirror, dystrophied by the sunset

This expression  was exactly as I remembered it, 

Reversed and less temperamental.

Monday, October 30, 2023

All the heather and the madness.

 All the heather and the madness,

All the heather and the madness,

All the heather and the madness,


Look again. See it again. Look at it, damned dreamer.


Tuesday, October 24, 2023

Diary cryptoid.

 Trouble isn’t trouble til

The hem tears and it’s trouble.


Look at me, not quite fit to come in,


But not entirely turned away. I’m the middle of the night 

The horses will begin to kick the stable walls, and a cat your family loves


Will tip over an ink well. I’ll still lie in the peace of the grave

While you 

Discern kinky butterflies of your own undoing.

Monday, October 23, 2023

Lusitania.

The dream that followed served the first one:


Skulls disintegrated beneath the pearly 

Teeth of an earthmover.


Meanwhile, gladiolas rose in an effort

For peace.


The world and where you work is substandard,

So everybody


Figures fuck it. One day all the dog fighters

And dogs will die in this eminent domain 

Of peace we feel in our bodies.


The swale in which the lively bathe, and the dust in

Which the sedentary sit share a border. But


There, distant past, we worried ourselves breathless 

Remembering history’s Lusitania

And grief crept over us like sunset.


You might never have felt such captive culpability for

Your own breath, but I have.

Monday, October 16, 2023

Ingenuity

 Fewer and far between,


You dropped the house key in the well

To keep it safe.


But later you started to realize you weren’t

The first one with this idea.


That’s the problem with ingenuity. It’s covered

With thorns and it feels like a victory to

Actively avoid them.


But what about the rest of the time. 


You look down into the clear and pure looking water,

And you see your own purple eyes in the poison and the key.

Monday, October 9, 2023

Utopia

The bigger dream has been eclipsed by moonlight

And rotten ass doo wop.


The lesson covers love, old age, and eventually silence. Every 


Great song points us back to the indefatigable 

Globe of a thing.

Bobby soxers get together around me.


I’m nobody, but they see the cosmos. And

In their heels 

And in their malevolent 

Let’s let go,


As if decided at a party for everyone.


Monday, May 15, 2023

The kiss of life.

 I have no responsibilities to tell you about,


This isn’t my job, so if I slip up,

And I’m amateur hour 


It won’t affect my pay.


Maybe I should open myself more to risk.

I love the smell of motorcycles,


And once I saw a gargoyle leaving his post

For swimming water.

Thursday, May 4, 2023

30

One of my headlights is out.

The road clears its own throat:


The radio once I get to a certain point on 30 is 

Satanic gospel.


But when I come down the mountain the 

Sun is there to shine on a world superstitious of loss.


They bake their fallen leaves.

They reimagine the dead in uniform.

There’s a Gulf station in Art Deco

In need of an army.


There’s a duck no one ever saw before but me;

But everyone sticks up for him.


Monday, May 1, 2023

P,Q,R,

The alphabet was made out of mystery. 

I’m sure it wasn’t perfect; I’m sure there were 

Hard feelings shared between

The P and the R people.




But  someone in the Hawthorne village anticipated

The wilderness of their thinking, and A became A thing.

And everybody followed.


The R lost its trunk and the P became 

A predicate form. When the two looked at the Q


They imagined breakfast on their day off.


It was as if in begging, the tongue of

Humanity spoke and did its duty for once.


It was as if the people said for once,

Let us speak for ourselves.

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Dr. Faucci.

 The scientist is so weird—and he owns this place:


The beakers burning, and monkeys bouncing 

In their cages. The next magic is in here somewhere,

He says.  But is he really the guy?


He’s handsome, and women find him sexy at lunch.


Lightning bends as it crosses the window on his ceiling,

And it raises the sleeping skin in the green of his

Greenhouse..


He grows things, this dashing prince.


Where are you from, patient zero? 

What brought you in to us today?

The flag flying above the clinic is ours. The fly

Is infectious. You, through the archway, which is Gothic,

Must dream of a life without all this science,

As you look ahead.




Sunday, April 2, 2023

Spring.

 The hill burped when the toad stirred.

The sky shit on me in Washington D.C.


It was a pigeon, it was rain.


People gathered around a wet, dead baby doll.

As they dispersed one could be heard


Cursing humankind.


She was already crying. On the bank

As a kid she saw the toads shake off


Winter as if waterproof.

Saturday, December 31, 2022

Tintoretto

 Your friends love you but

They’ll never grow into your thistled shoes—

 The suffering you show as you lean into the window.


Up against the sun—they feel small, too. 


The comportment of waiting is based on people who are kind

 and willing to wait.


They don’t understand the fraction of a cat’s life.

Sunday, December 25, 2022

The pink.

This, I thought, is the only dream

I’ll ever have:


Blue purple

Blue red

And the faithful grey binding a short-lived shadow

Of humankind to the green of home.

Strange dream.

 In an unexpected clearing

I heard the voice of God


The moonlight laid bare

And the silver trees all took a side

To where I was.


The voice said, love is important

To love songs. And so love is important.

Sunday, December 18, 2022

Memory game.

 I dream present tense.


The past is August— a series of memories

Mt. Fuji from thirty six points of view,

Wheat fields,

The blue and yellow skin I never

Quite saw.



Wednesday, November 23, 2022

Cataracts.

My science class memory of the Universe, it always

Begins in the dark. There are pinholes

Of misleading promise


—but that could be my eyes.


Have you ever seen a dead sunflower? The kernels

At the heart look like mummy teeth—the backwards-

Withered petals no longer canary yellow.


Instead, they curl away from the earth, like a vanquished

Coven of witches looking elsewhere.


But the point is 

It—the Universe, I mean, always moves to the light.



Act III

 Once and always to the dawn’s light

Where the water balls up

Like mercury at the bottom of a thermometer.


Where the leftover animals get reacquainted.


The bronze leaves break up because 

They’ve been given no lines.

Monday, October 31, 2022

The riverrun.

 The bean from which we get chocolate is good.

And milk is good. And the rivrrrun of everything

We get from milk is, too.


It’s good. But silence appeases a

Different set of Gods. No age, no

Gender, no celebration of appetite.


This embarrassment of riches is different from

The rich folks you know.


They hang out in truckstops

And undo the eating of their own souls.

Sunday, October 9, 2022

Curtain.

Love, be a movie.

Love, be a neighbor.


Show your familiarity to me.

The muses speak.

 How do we understand what they’re saying

In moments of ecstatic undoing?


Think of it like a volcano erupting:

Some folks will run away,

Other to the source of the explosion

To find the others. But everybody runs

Wednesday, September 21, 2022

Sunday, September 11, 2022

Good luck.

The country must have looked like a person once.

Someone landed and said,

You, you remind me enough of home.


That’s how the globe was formed

And little by little the idea of home learned to travel—

And develop its elusive slang,

Saying to the foot, not where you go.


Saying to the letter, maybe.

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Violet.

 I want to see everything, hear everything,

And share it all— how the walls start to smell moldy,

Violet in the drying light.

And no floor could support a living soul

This may only be the beginning;


So, here I am—I want to feel everything.

The clover filling in the blanks

Between the grass,

And the sky tumbling down the wild, clean hill.