Rain on imaginary roofs. A feral cat
Under the spell of the moon. Besides,
We have passed this way before. The best
Of the railroad dusk, the tee shirts
Sweaty with the miles spent.
What are these thoughts
Chords through the verse, not seen, faintly heard,
Like gravity. What we put together and what
Is pulled apart.

Regardless of words, poetry is forever
Without a portrait,

A steering column in the void, poetry
Cannot vanish into verse,

A terrible silence upends your sleep,
You are desperate to wake up poetry,

The periodic table of poetry, one element
Next to another element is metaphor,

Poetry is your lunch guest eating with
Its hands, you think to imitate this
But necessarily make a buffoon of yourself,

Poetry is under no obligation to value sense,
It is to image and rhythm it gives its blood,

Poetry tosses pennies into craters on the moon
But makes no wish, only the feathered fire of
Its reaching out to something other than itself.

A chickadee on the chain link fence.
A clarinet of pennies, like the reflection of stars
In the fountain.
Analytics for breakfast. Yet synthesis keeps one regular.
The murmurings at dawn spill out like headlights
On an inter-dimensional wanderlust.
It’s all the universe can do, lengthen its stay. That’s expansion.
If I was really a poet, I would walk to the next town
Wearing a blue scarf, teed in an ironic shirt,
With only what I’ve never known.
The moon is sibling to the Earth. Black coffee, spring porch.
Does one bother to tie it all together anymore?
Or does one tie it all up with one of those long walks
Trying to forget everything but the clouds.
A bluejay, quantum entanglement, another black coffee,
The porch at dusk.
The river, like an arpeggio,
Notes the difference in scale
Between the sea and the moon.
That we cannot stay, for not-staying’s sake.
Dietary advice, the roughage of poetic afternoons.

Typewriter perfume and a single bulb light. The proliferate
Seahorse. The robin’s return. These are the stems
And these the petals (flowers). These are the atoms
And these the velocities (physics). Light teaches
Like a bicycle (DIY). Regardless, a poem
Teaches it’s not so good to be flat footed,
To be askance to one’s heart.
In the attic-darkness of the cinema
The flickering lights on the screen.
I like going to the movies.
Hum along with strain and happenstance.
Dreams are tactile and stayed by contingency.
The dawn is cobweb-still,
And yet unafraid of ghosts. A charming
Dandelion at the curbside. The ritual of graffiti
Going back millennium, in such amateurish hands.
Just like these amateurish poems.

The weather is unique
To each comet, would you like salad?

The distances between
Stars have deserted addition and fled
Into the open fields.

In the distortions of Mozart,
The poet sneezes.
Is your raincoat famous?

The cratered
Moon is capable of great intelligence.
Which you are aware of.

The poem reinhabits itself
Like spring, the poem casts off
Its own hemisphere
Like an egg hatching,
Fumbles for its voice, cedes
Its boundaries to the roofs of the sun.
Sees to and bundles up its
Colorful strings into verse.

Not for nothing have I
Summed up everything I can
Hinge on the turning of my head
On walks, the leaves chirping,
The birds rustling, native space
Tingling with countless particles.

Of simple debris: starlight
Gleaming off the rainy pavement,
Or is it the streetlights gleaming? Or both?
The filigree of darkness
Which is beyond sorts,
A broken pane on the lawn-field
Of an abandoned
House, dandelion
Parachutes, a fire hydrant scrimmaged
With the play calling
Of street poets, a rummage
Of junkyard afternoons
Strung like bottle caps on a string
For a necklace, the Milky Way,
Autumn apples,
A spring rain its naked toes
And feathered dreams, hot coffee,
Oatmeal, dreams cast
Across the cosmic
Fields, sun-drenched tee-shirt
Of all day walking,
Time’s headlights,
A feral branch of moonlight
In from the open window-
Or how unknowing stands
Oblique in the rain, an umbrella in pocket, and the skyline
Of the city for a grin.