What a mess Of books and solitude On the floor On the shelves The endless walks ~ Pockets of asteroids And feet like late afternoons Would I agree to draw Up a flight plan? ~ I buried my whiskers In the first light Of the universe Railroad lines for shoelaces ~ Ready to get a move on A smile no different from direction
What Next?
I clear my throat Of everything But chance ~ T-Shirt- I walk A pit stained poesy Wide-eyed Like a collapsing building ~ The Sky- Where oboes Go to die A dating game For unreal lips ~ The steps you take are both thunder And remembering Each gesture is beyond the mirror As for the present If you have not already Skip the words Wait and make shadows in the rain
Jukebox Cinema
Poem- A nifty sliver Breathless As a cocoon. Swift as a stalled Carousel Decades in the making. Folding and folding Uncreaseable wings. ~ In these wrists Ephemeral soles, Witches on broomsticks, And the plumbing I stole From the drowning poet. Poem- Numbers, undoffed Of cardinality, Yet stand attention, This is the road, ever forsaken Of sequence, forsaken and bright As the endless dark that never Begins. ~ Words Before the stars could speak. The shadows of lost diameters Measureless now Like childhood moons. And what space they dreamed, Commanded, played, In the ageless circumference, Amongst the sleepless paradoxes. ~ These are my last words. I want to end the sounds of words. Just for today. And walk With the tattoos of evolution.
All Sound Rests on No Sound
Fall fall fall fall fall, Like fathom feathers, Like Jupiter eyes, Till at the end of the self, The alphabet gives up the ghost, And in this dust New spectacles Breathe in the firsts Of perception Again. Again The doubling of cells, The doubling down of wiring, And at most The winning of confusion, From this Somehow Real steps. ~ Mischievous infinitesimals Chide the ego. All sound rests on no sound. What is the price of being particular That can but be halved? But go on. You must. Endorse your leg muscles. Your poetic anxiety. Chide back.
Messy Beginnings (old poems revisited)
The Blue Feet of the Sun-
The blue feet of the
Sun like
Ethereal wads of
Chewing gum
In this ninja sky
An insomnia of love
Is absolutely possible
~
A Feral Soup for Wandering-
Up from the ankles
Of messy beginnings
I promise
A feral soup
For wandering
The uncountable knees
Of each star
The troubled fire
That leaves no
Paw prints
Poems raised by roads
A pedigree of precipice
The hijacking of the pantaloons
Of our galaxy
Roads raised by poems
~
Used Car Lots in the Month of May-
Blue stars with yellow brains of dust of the green of dusk
Like used car lots in the month of May.
And what difference a few birds like a few words are all that’s left
Of blue stars whose laughter is scarlet chopsticks.
It is the brighter darkness that does not need the rhetoric of flames.
How do I Say it Plain, I am Accustomed to Saying it Otherwise?
The Score- A note in the third measure Begins to move backward in time. Would it have been better to begin with Illegible sonnets? The Tower- A subtle maybe Of dusk On the lips Has yet to land And never will. The self settles in like a pencil In a toaster, Tipping between worlds, Ideas and sounds, Wearing only the ideas of shoes Before breakfast. Blue- A ribbon Prized By ghosts, Like the taste of an apple Or the sound of a garbage truck, Possibly the memory of the sea. Salary- I make What a ghost Makes In an empty hallway. No Answers- Can laughter make the trees Turn white, said the moon? It can, questioned the sea, With a cadence only Moonlight could sustain While gurgling cannonballs. In a Time of Sad- The sea and the heart Share one memory, Clouds hardly notice The speed of light.
Poorly Written Novels
A dump truck in orbit. This Will need to be resolved. Uncertainty as a system allows Pockets of possibility. This Does not need to be resolved. This must Resemble a few lines Of verse. What else do we have? ~ Carrying my metaphysical Shoes, over my enigmatic Shoulders, happy as a guitar String. Everything matters: the trees, The sky, this jalopy of a Neighborhood. Walking, I chew up all my words. I am almost afraid How beautiful it is. ~ Going forward, There will be lines and metaphors (in these poems), But no words. Hence, To write a poem is to regret. If only I had the words to not have them. ~ The universe is being chased By distance
On the Strings of Gravity (More Short Poems)
The Blight of Poetry- Like a pulled tooth Chapped lips and a hole in The sole A tee shirt That reads Add Verse Double crossing hexameters (Whatever those are) And me Baffled hair Writing it all down For Walt- The sea Is all of our names Without being any of them. My Favorite Novel- On the chalk board Two dimensional windmills And Quixote With a barber’s bowl For wings Film Critic- Kung Fu Hustle Is the true spiritual Sequel of the Matrix Lollygagging- Electromagnetic fields To stand in. And then there’s mass. Not to be Confused with weight. What was said Spoke of beginnings, The cowlick birds Holler on the strings of gravity. A Stone on a Pillow- You establish it is Windy By opening a window By solving some math problems In a notebook Feeding the birds By the look of the city roofs And no matter how far you walk
Least Likely to Stick to a Plan (Short Poems)
Cleaning- The scrubbed stars Took all day Like a tub in an old room. Bodies- Now look, a shipwreck of lights Equal to the theater of the universe. Adjectives- Battered, folded Into paper planes Like the unlikely Waist of a green Apple. That’s When I Reach for my Revolver Record- I am looking for a verse. I am standing by the sea, whistling a Saturday morning cartoon theme. I gather a few juxtapositions. Wonder, awe, fear, dissolution, realignment. I am starting a blog of the photos I collect of sidewalk cracks. Don’t Forget- Along with immense size, How infinitesimal the universe is Would make a haiku blush.
But Not You
What ghosts of what stars did we know? If you could count all the acres and every plasma swirl of the sun, all the yellow gulls of its every beach, What then? Can we lose everything To the untenable slopes of love? ~ I haven’t the soonest blue Or the latest sonnet by Homer. Like a last place finish, the lone kite in the sky. As the moon opens its suitcases. ~ I’d like to see this through, outlandishly so. I study the effects of gravity on my houseplant. I ride my bicycle over to say hello. The rain clouds interrupt, though it never rains. ~ Latter at the drive-in neither of us Will recognize each other Or the lengths we sought to not Fall in love. ~ I specialize in putting words Just out of reach. But not you.
