Bike
Night
Home
Through puddles of clouds,
Across galaxies of yesterdays.
The sky
Orange peels defiantly orange!
~
Death is butterflies
And karate moons,
Till we too are on our feet
Whispering to stars.
Category: poetry
The Opportunity
There is an oblivion
Just next door
Recently relocated.
Here one visits
If one is willing,
A returning
From the future
That’s been with you
Before you were born.
A pumpernickel dawn
Of abandoned hospitals.
But some fool
Cut off the wings.
And misplaced
The spelling bee.
So, you hold up
The rainy bicycle
With the perfume
Of your arms, and
Into this pinch of creation,
And pinched by creation,
Till your knuckles have as
Many stars as a galaxy.
Laughter is a tree truck
Without a ride home.
Shapes of Self
I know how the clouds fall into place.
And it matters now most of all because it is over.
Put all your tears back into the pockets of your brain, put back
The shadows and fevers, put away the stubborn impossible
Flowers, the trembling,
The not yet beaten-
The sudden is spent
Without preparation,
Like a crescent of light that holds the moon
in place.
And it matters now most of all.
We haul the ingenuity of our lives,
In shapes of self that cannot keep pace.
The pain is such that we will have to wobble home
Uncanny with bliss.
And we are better for it.
This sorrow is ample
And bright as it is blue,
This sorrow is simple,
Hardly here and hardly true.
And it matters now most of all.
Against this city smothered in machines
That pretends it’s not a ghost.
Oxidized City
A certain carelessness In a perfect circle It is too ripe and crude A coarse bird That fits in too well with the broken shore Unlike the polluting smoke of industry As it catches the closing beams of the sun A rosette triumph A too perfect charade
Frost on a Barbed Wire Fence
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
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
I have lost my piano hand. The banter on Saturn rings in my ears (that’s a terrible joke). A few of the handkerchiefs smell like operas. During the night, the ghosts arrive to try on my socks, and to read whatever book I am reading backwards to me. I have found a violin hand. Tonight I will camp out “under the stars” with Quixote and Pooh Bear. 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 electrical structures and the graffiti wire. There is dire in blue, directly in this wandering. I will work out the equations at a later date. At this rate, by the end of the year, the moon will have enough to buy a helicopter. And have that ankle looked at. Silence likes to doodle, intentional as clouds. In a sweater, the handlebars are autumn, even as it rains. While riding a bike. Part of it is the dust from stars. Some of it rolls in the ground, like a season. Take a bow, ripple with the sea. Each leaf before it catches hold of the earth Says hello.
The Dents of Highway Laughs
Begin in the knees of the earth. Walk the dizziness of A poem that breathes in space exhales into the void. Remember the Tomb tipping Guts of spring, The sea and the eyelashes Defying gravity, The ping pong playing peonies Of electric yesterdays. Remember how All at once The universe put on Its legs And walks like A fiasco of names On a checker board. Will you walk with me? In the opposite of acquisition? Who else can see these widowed months? Beckoning at the table Where is the pen and paper that ribs time and space with the dents of highway laughs? I walk and walk, In a coat, black, collared, the curve of which almost touches the ear. No hat. What is it in us that allows us past narrative ghosts? For this I penciled in the page and erased around the poem Like an astronaut fills the page With the memory of a jellyfish. I stayed up all night Playing solitaire On the PC With the radio on, Curating the ramblings. The soul is a runway for anything Willing to fly. What do we know? It is only afterward A sense of being.
Niagara River
Solitude forgot its wallet Not bothering with conversation, solitude sees if its diaries float Each letter of solitude was offered a role in a comic book movie Solitude of a few shirts, and feet covered in the leather of old shoes Solitude of waste basket prose… the emptiness of a flame The noise sweeps the heart November astronauts are solitude The universe is a tee shirt looking for a ride home, solitude of a bicycle And lonesome like a cartoon coyote But what of the falling leaves? It’s impossible to count them all. All the leaves. But what if counting had an out of body experience? Took LSD, and began licking its Zen palms? In conclusion Almost night now The hurry of pillows and the dot that is the moon The gulls are Mugs restaurant-white Dropped along the shores of one of the Great Lakes Across the river from Canada
Singularities
I Absorb Via neurons Approximations In favor of survival. But what of the poems that weigh Less than a few pebbles? I’d like to tell you more, that there is a counter weight to approximation: The square root of UFOs, The moon grew antlers and stopped wearing clothes. What’s left are the scribbles of dreams. A mouthful of dusk for eyes. Fingers like the appetite of the moon. Penciled whereabouts on the heart. You Pick up the few stones Of a short poem, Swim against the stars. The trees in October Are not the same as the trees in October. The cities of the Midwest Are wild with the loneliness of the cosmos.