A fire hydrant scrimmaged
With the play calling
Of street poets, a rummage
Of junkyard afternoons,
The distracted Milky Way,
Ripe autumn apples,
A spring rain and its naked toes,
And a comet, cheeks blushed
Like sunlight in June,
Is enough for me.
Hedged by unknowns
I burn my lawnmower in celebration.
Abstract
Puzzle Pieces
We will puzzle you.
By whatever pieces necessary.
Beauty is a ridiculous number.
It could take years of theorizing
And chalkboards to put a finger
On this.
I think I need an alphabet hat
To count the stars, and forgetfulness
To remember them all. A code name,
Because it would be cool. Just saying.
The universe is acuity, all the way down to and including unawareness.
A rolling pin made of daydreams. Unmade of mountain streams.
Most of it you can’t see. Most of it too small or too far away.
The universe is a merry-go-round in a metaphysical sense.
The universe is homespun, like plaster walls or quantum mechanics.
A Cadence
On the carousel of life’s travail
Sweetly in the circus of falling.
And the roads and all the indecipherable street signs
Bearing the logos of our dreams.
Suits me like the blue final pages
Ending in the night sky.
The Moon
Holds Mercury in its cheeks.
And the red leaves of autumn.
All the roads it has traveled
It has marked with the same
Dust and stone.
Holds Jupiter in the somersaults of daisies.
And almost disinterestedly the exuberant the light on its endless shores
When full.
Abstract Logic
Even in the shadows of
City buildings
Sits infinity.
It just adds up that way.
The universe is mostly
Unwalkable.
The apples are
Vagabond green,
This year
Freight train
Stems.
If we could give
The moon an ocean,
Or glue on it blue wings.
Autumn first appears
In the tuning
Of a stranger’s guitar.
In a galaxy of goldenrod
And a handful of comets.
Strange Little Poem
The color of a stolen coat.
The IQ of an origami
Tesseract.
Obscurity hung by a crag, by its metaphors.
And if the puddles ask, smile.
In this mystery, not even totality
Covers all the bases.
Paradoxes are natural.
Post Meridiem
The Nine-O-Clock Song like a spilled spool
Of tread along and over desperate for what’s
New of the city streets, along the river
Like a lucky railroad spike you found
As a kid then into the fields of pussy willow
And milkweed and goldenrod
The Song of the Moon Crater is a poem
Written by Walt Whitman the astronaut,
As is The Song of the Snowdrift written by David
“I like sneaking into the drive-in” Thoreau
Just as when we were kids hanging out
On the curb, or just running around, till the dusk up dark ladders
Into night when the streetlights came on
Journal Entry
How does one return. Ankles full of the sky. Throat
Clear of clarity.
To ply whatever theories one hopes to shape
And hang them up like coats and call this
Being or consciousness. The pinprick of dreams.
How does one get back to an open heart and
Feet on the ground full of thoughts and inklings.
The metaphysics of a canyon and anything that
Isn’t a canyon. Even the fire hydrant is a vase
Of ideas.
And furthermore, September is the last
Green house, soon enough, the dried-up roller skates
Of what’s left of the flowers.
Sometimes In My Dreams
Full of confusion, the chalk poems
Along the highway shoulder are mine.
In a state of superposition, said the would-be observer,
It’s possibility all the way down.
Have you thought about Jupiter as a tattoo idea?
Or how what is written below takes breath?
The gulping moon over the riverbed,
The tangled ribbon of self.
A Poetic Conscience
A chuckle of meandering
On one’s shoulder
Urging one on
Like a cricket
With a couplet
For wings
naïve haircuts 