The sad of it Is lonesome sky The heart on a hill Frost on a barbed wire fence Where to begin to repair The midlife heart In what room to begin to laugh And when to say This has passed And it will be one with us What hole is deep enough To make permanent the moonlight And if the stars Come looking for alms I will remind them I have only the sense Of infinity For purse strings
Author: Bob
Neighborhood Pool
God jumps in first with a belly flop. But everything God does is beautiful, and this starts all of creation. Just don’t tell this to the Abyss. Not that you can. Be certain of this. You can’t. Next the swimmers, tattoos of birds on their bodies, in search of fish, Along the roads in the air of October the first frost between their teeth, As the sky unfurls into handfuls of dusk. At night, the moon is the butterfly on the city stoop, Crayon crossed out by crayon. The wind is the blueprint, said the parachute. And the Earth is our wind. The sunlight is both even and odd. I purchase sheet music, and some boxes, Because my head is cluttered With the snow Falling into the street lamps, With unsighted poems and handfuls of dusk. What else can I do? In this city, and this poem like a periscope. And When beauty hurts, when it is ugly, ferociously so, and it will be, Try a belly flop in the neighborhood pool. Mouthing your every adieu to the Abyss.
A November Manifesto
The vagrant blue in the November fields. I have that. At least I have That. The lost arms of flowers, though nothing weeps. And the only Color is the gray electrical structures and the graffiti. There is dire in the blue, directly in this wandering. I will work out the Equations later. At this rate, by the end of the year, the moon will have enough to buy A helicopter. And have that ankle looked at. Part of it is the dust from stars. Part of it rolls in the ground, Like a season. This is the part how each leaf before it catches hold Of the earth Says hello.
A Symphony for a Fake Piano
The foot is disheveled. The armpit is the moon. And what lessons have the rain To letter at night alone without Legs or thoughts? What does it mean to be human When the heart and lungs are a marathon Of leaves? You cannot cross out the distance. Cup sorrow in your hands But to be abbreviated in this light Is life. If death cannot cull these questions At least the ice cream truck tonight rings A symphony for a fake piano In pencil in the night in a sky that cannot be seen.
The Cosmic Microwave Background Blues
The abyss is flat
And has no bottom.
It is a vagrant simile
Loitering on two
Legs carrying a bowl
Of wishes,
A grocery basket
At the elbow.
Isn’t that nice?
But don’t ask me to look back. There would be too many
Other of me in the way.
I’ve the multiverse blues too.
Squeezing Cosmic Folds into the Joints of Neurons
“Truce,” said the wind. “Never!” declared a psychological Pear, “I am the table and the chair.” But you insist, Do shapes have addresses? Can they be reached By letter? What if there is an emergency Of lines And geometry is busy Can’t be reached By post? What if I am asked by wind If there is truth in the wind? You say that, The Wind Carries a stone fist. And a broken leg For a tattoo. That darkness has no wires. No boxes. No caves. No under the bed. No above the stars. It is as shirtless as a penny. It grows with the grass. It offers a chance To look around. It picks up the rain into the Ground. But I remember most The seams Of asteroids In the darkness.
The Birds Make Up My Hands
The birds make up my hands.
You can’t see my hands.
My hands are invisible.
But not the birds.
They have kept their feathers.
They have kept their language.
But stopped using words.
Words are all I have.
Now that the birds are gone.
Escaped into the outlines of wings.
The bone structure of silence.
Future City
Even worse. I found pieces Of the moon under my pillow. In my city you could be arrested For breaking the moon. There are few of us left. I draw wings on the old walls. I will never tell them. I write about pieces of the Moon on paper with lead. Memorize 864,000. It is The diameter of the sun In miles. Even worse. The pieces are gone. Rumor Has it I never found them. That I don’t even know what Wings are. I’ll never tell them. Silent like a falsetto In a parking lot of album covers. And if this poem had a sharpie Spell up the trestles With the forgotten the names of every flower How they haw and look at the sky And, like me, never tell what they see.
Rain Water
A reflection In the rain water. Is The banter of something. In the Sentiment of somewhere else. This is true. A reflection is the sentiment of somewhere else. Pretending to be something near. Gave me your hand. So I can trace the serial numbers of your favorite poems. The umbrella Is a reflection in the rain. Standing there with its hands on its head. Let swim the daft fractals. Tie tight the headbands of angels. A reflection is A four handed polonaise On a two-legged piano. The fire from a star in a spring tree. We Who importune With joy.
Always With Us
The rain sounds out the road, into the windy streets, The cosmos of walking. In the end we hear the decibels Of the sun, without the roots Of dust. Till then, Life is the square of tree and moon, A squint, a DIY cassette, A messy aim, a stupefied grin, and perfection. That’s why there are stars, Over and over love is something else.
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