The sun is a wooden
Sea overrun by
The shadows of birds.
Nevertheless, who will
Find for us
The primitive words
For arriving stars?
~
Just as you are ready
To settle in,
Take away
The floor.
The words you don’t know anymore
Are poetry.
(Another old poem revised.)
I walked to the city limit
And played volleyball
With some seagulls.
It was a no-nonsense game
Without intermissions.
I headed west
To the river.
In my coat
I stood at the water.
The posture of dusk
Ransacked of belongings
Looking over its shoulder.
And though the stars
Come looking for alms I have only the sense
Of infinity.
If I knew how to spell lasso
Or pumpernickel. But I don’t.
It is a reluctant light,
The hardware of the self.
This is an old poem I hopefully cleaned up a bit, and decided to give another try.
I would have to add a few lines. And dedicate years to being aimless. But over time
I would become familiar with the ill-fitted dusk on the city. My heart fills with the misplaced.
It does seem unlikely
I will put a handle on this.
Indefinite wonderful.
A crescent coat.
An endless road
That grips you
Like a wrestling hold.
Arms tattooed
With famous operas.
And only these daring doodles
To save our noodles.
I didn’t know all along how it would end.
As such. The trees in late February are skinnier than wind chimes.
The graffiti on the building on a diet of streetlight. Disheveled like a poorly thrown frisbee.
As such. The poem is rigged. Like a large body of water at night with a single light shone on it.
Looking for what it lost.
I learned
At a young age how to stand in the rain and snow properly.
And because this poem
Needed you. The ephemeral enterprise of being.
Implementing secret
Information into
The poem.
~
A pulpit moon
In love
Hanging by a thread.
~
The problem laid out.
Though you hired
A chorus.
Such tragedy.
The late afternoon faints
With the metaphysical.
Reflections in puddles.
Even the universe is a hologram.
~
The wind
Has mass
Of dusk
On road,
Alive
Like a mountain,
A glacier
Pre-industrial.
The night is
The dusk
Out-pooled.
~
The self is a card trick
In the dark
Without hands,
Sweeping sidewalks for
Enlightenment.
Speaking drastically,
The oomph that is not the self.
I made a diorama
Of the Triple Lindy
And left it on a diving
Board.
It all boils down to how the universe stores information. For example: the surface area of a poem, like the chewing gum that comes with trading cards, it is a half-moon. The potholes meditate. Pink dusk.
The Earth is somewhat squished, pinched in orbit by our star. I walk to the window. Suddenly, rain. I read the letter. It said: The barometer of missing socks. Always where we haven’t been, and where we will never be again.
I walk to the door. It thunders. Just afterwards, listen closely. To the reverberations. The rain on the pane.
My reply.
The tattoo of the church bell and the passing train. I hear both, in the fields, just before the rain. The moon has polka dot breath, but I imagine the city lights under my fingernails.
There is a feather on the ground. A lampshade in the sky. I walk up to a lamppost, it is night. I write on the lamppost. In marker: Where are you?
The elopement of city features. The facades of houses, the stature of downtown buildings. The silence of fountains that don’t work. The few pennies for the graffiti flowers, and the inter-dimensional coordinates for solitary meandering.
Light steadies the ankles. Darkness readies the knees.
Darkness is a box of pins. Light the ghosts of future stars.
Light sounds out words, creates space. Darkness kneads.
Darkness is the immanence of distance and the ongoing retrieval of it.
Light stitches bones into the soul. Light is the darkness when you blink.
The wind is cheap poems through barbwire parasols.
But what are the footfalls of electromagnetic touchdowns?
naïve haircuts 