Authentic:
A twangy guitar like volcano
Flowers.
A sparse harmonica
Like a ghost in the afternoon curtains.
Walking:
How a star
Invented a pulley system
In the arches between
Dreams
In addition to paradoxes
And doorknobs
The Moon:
Slapstick plate
Over the shed roof
And the reason your bicycle
Has a flat tire
Your Shoes:
UFOs in yachts
Even the sidewalks
Curve with spacetime
In Marker
I was buying three paintings a day
I was sponsoring chalk drawings
Anything with scribbles on it
I’d pick up off the street
Walking alongside junkyard walls I
Wrote on the corrugated steel “Do you know
The album, Zen Arcade, by Husker Du?
Out of Step, by Minor
Threat?"
I went to thrift stores, to city fields, church sales
Just to find the pictorial of light of deity of logic of everything that is endless
And terminal of dark of sun and the more popular binary stars
Be certain
To appertain
The havoc and the intention
The intervention of fiction
As Steve Zissou said,
"Nobody knows what's going to happen. And then we film it. That's the whole concept."
Michael (over at https://ravensweald.com/) and I were talking of old bands we listened to. And Hüsker Dü came up. I mentioned, not only did I like their music, but the title of the album, Zen Arcade and the cover art itself, has been influential to me. I brought up I had a poem were I mention the album title, but had taken it down. Deciding I didn’t like the poem. But I’ve given it another shot at editing. Still not sure it’s finished. But I thought I’d give it another try. I hope you enjoy. Thanks.
Poem
I plan on purchasing a crater from the moon when it becomes
Available for sale. I am a motivated buyer.
And I am as broke as an open field on the eve of
Dusk. My socks are garnishes from a leftover dream.
And I know the sea only by its many names.
I court a hectic thing I don’t have the words for.
A simple pretense as it always has been
Defying sameness and concord, edifying
Zigzag and along the lines of a hunch, this forest
In a dream is your soul’s cathedral,
The banister from heart to head.
Poem
Cosmic nose hair
And baffled tattoos
A tee shirt showing
Its afternoons
Loose of collar
But fixed of spirit
In this you take
Heed regardless
Of the gray hair.
Pothole Fishing
After the rain, I took my fishing pole over to the large pothole around the corner and stood in the street and sank my line. Someone yelled, they biting? The next person honked. It’s a sport of the mind, puddle fishing, somehow lends one to think cosmically. The puddle as space and the pole as time. Or maybe entropy, which could be time? The uneven sidewalk between my house and my neighbor’s, because of a large tree, pools rainwater, especially in spring. The birds, mostly robins, drop down to drink of it and the kids like to jump in it and dog walkers get annoyed with it, but it’s a token of wild. I plan on purchasing a quality umbrella. I’d like to get rid of my refrigerator too and do without one. I bought a notebook and pen, but I’m refusing to start a journal. What could I say about my days? They rattle, they think like dropped plates? Actually my days are all right, I read a lot, go on long walks on the weekends. And I should probably start a journal. And begin with an entry like: If the laws of physics are the same going in reverse in time as going forward in time, as the physicists say, and if there is a loving god, would god love us both going forward and backward in time? And would the leaves, tiring of green, after the yellow autumnal search, turn astronaut and climb up the cosmic tree?
Walking Poem
A walk is a glad
Unfencing of the
Present. The body
Finds it meditative.
Eventually, though, I stop for lunch.
A peanut butter and jelly
Sandwich and an apple.
I sit on some neglected ledge
Not far from the railroad tracks.
The posture of electric towers
Is impressive as I straighten
By back.
In the fields that run along the
Railroad tracks, that’s where
I often walk, I like the belated
Graffiti and all kinds of flowers
And insects, the corrugated metal
Fencing of the junkyard,
On which is spray painted:
"A spaceship
Like a hiccup
Lost of home"
&
"A passing moment
Not intended as far as I know of anything
At all. The rest I leave to the weather"
At the end of the path I am walking on is a
Clearing, where last year someone burned a car,
Leaving its charred remains.
From here I turn back and head home.
Anywhere
In a dream you are mumbled by a group of incongruous words. You find you have the silhouette of a jet pack for a tattoo. Between your shoulder blades. No memory of how it came about. The only way around this city is by bus. And this bus is possibly only a rumor, a wisp of shadow. The last few piano keys of a beautiful melody is the only currency for fare. You ride the bus for hours. You take it anywhere. Sometimes you close your eyes till you hear the last stop announcement. From there you try to find your way home. The only way home is by hunch. All in a hunch of wind and silence and by the look of deserted shoes dangling on power lines or following footsteps in a dream to disappear into. But all goes astray, and you find yourself at the end of an unfamiliar continent that ends at the sea, and how the waves reach the shore here is like the wishing of coins into a fountain. A strange accent of rain in the tread of your boots and the wind and spring you drag after you after hours along the railroad tracks and city streets. Who will pick this up, the images of birds? And will you find employment in the growing moon?
A Poem is Hardly a Poem
Distance is the moth wing
That smells like a lunar landing.
Our solar system began as a gaseous
Cloud.
The autumn leaves this year began
As blue typewriters.
A poem is hardly a poem, said
Vortex and valise. Said the sea,
What is the meaning of wind
In the trees?
Homesick for what is unfinished
Like leaving a dream to go to another dream.
Marginalia
The graffiti outside the concert hall
Is shabby, but beautiful, like the footwork of downspouts.
The grammatically correct lightbulbs, but for the fingerprints
Of new moons.
Like the notations in a dream, unevenly underlined, then
Soon forgotten.
The calligraphy of the video game Asteroids
Is a favorite study of Aristotle.
Aristotle loves marginalia.
What if you could add up all the circumferences in the galaxy?
As for that total, though I don’t know outright, I hum the tune.
We are all spacewalking.
Fragment
And if I have spent my certainties, I have
Also pooled my uncertainties, a body
Meandered into a wayward dignity.
All time is of a length, and all lengths are relative,
And lacking an absolute foothold, proclaims
Feet everywhere.
naïve haircuts 