Sometimes the sad gallons of the moon
A tattoo of a trash heap
The sleeve of poesy rolled up like an ode
The sky
Was never where it was
The stillness you feel
Is the universe expanding
The measurements needed
For new windows in spring
How the mystery spends its gambols
Is ever after a just-so story
Abstract
Strange
The strumming reaches the ceiling and out
The open window,
Till far from its guitar, files in with the dusk,
Whose thoughts are gold-red and blue-gold
And gold-pink.
The UFO is a treasure map.
How an angel, in the city,
Sitting on a power line, marks the spot.
Till the cosmos tickles on the tongue
And expands between the ears.
Three Short Poems
SYNTAX
The velocity of connotation
Paraphrased
By time
Mirrors the exuberance
The commotion
Of finitude
Only the living
Possess slang
POEM
Because of waves
Coherence
Because of coherence
Complexity
Because of complexity
Mystery
A PHILOSOPHY
The stars have a
Bright finish
And a loose mayhem of birds
For a heartbeat
Veins and arteries are the riverbeds of consciousness
Rivulets and inlets are the infrastructure of metaphysics
A Poem For Lunch
This should be absurd and it’s not.
Take childhood, for instance.
It’s ramshackle centeredness,
And hostility to interpretation.
Or what of calamity, this simple game
Mastered by no one?
If this ditty sings, biographies of musical chairs.
Unguarded
The cosmos is an open clearing,
On no rampart, unguarded.
The cosmos is willing to be unsure,
Incalculable, even to the heavens.
Like a love note, unfolded, in the glow
Of the house burning.
And who rouses these symbols,
And the impetus to overcome themselves.
As the physicists would say,
Sometimes mass does funny things.
Fable
We lost the moon in the war. No one remembers the name of the war. Kids spray-paint the nicknames of the moon. Only they know its whereabouts. Rivers are an expression of gravity. Spines too.
The paperwork, we burned it. I thought we should save it. But you said we should write it down afterwards how we remember it.
There is so much strangeness to this day. Like asking clouds not to comb their hair into astronauts, it can’t be done. Butterflies drink the same wine as volcanoes.
We met again, years later. To sort out what we remember. It was mostly poetry.
Lines Dashed Before a Meeting at Work
When a dream breaks the fourth wall.
Like the footsteps of red autumn leaves
Determined by the wind’s simplicity. At night
So much of what we haven’t done
Lies awake. And wonders. The walker
Visits roam. A ghost spiritually can no longer tie its shoes.
All ghosts have untied shoes.
Which is a tripping hazard when going through walls.
Handwriting is a cosmology,
An archipelago of inklings
Like the orbits of our footprints
As we walk through puddles.
Because the calendar still has one foot in poetry,
Outcomes, whoever simple in the moment,
Over time gain in complexity. The horizon is always
Present-tense,
Yet the clouds like coins
In a time machine.
Here and There
I ranged
I mapped crescents
Abolished the number one
Ridiculous poetry
On imaginary stilts
In a suit of daffodils
Hurdles an inchworm
And chews on Saturn's rings
Suddenly here
Is everywhere
For all of us
I plant a tree
First its shadow
Then its velocity
See you there!
Wear and Tear
The cloud-work for a tune. Cloud-work as formal
Attire. In a way, autumn moves away from
One, notice the red shift in the leaves. We
Talk galaxies and the cosmos. Of the hourglass.
The dance of masks.
And how the dance strips away the mask.
Infinity is pretty. The sofa is
From a garage sale. A soul is a crew of words.
Poem
The area of a cold autumn
Wind in addition to
A crescent-colored inkling
Equals some kind of infinity.
It’s squares and circles minus
Any parachutes,
And flighty parallelograms,
The wealth of a clown, the diameter
Of a déjà vu,
A rain puddle of kisses
On the pavement’s cheeks and ears,
And between the stars
The gossamer of the cosmos.
naïve haircuts 