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.
poem
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.
Goofing Around
The night at the junkyard when all the headlights were kicked in, and a beautiful
Anarchy tasted like ice cream. And salad days, too!
We painted stars on the back of the cardboard factory,
And cut out rectangles of cardboard and wrote poems
On them. We posted and mailed them to addresses we
Randomly picked out of a 1993 phone book.
We endeavored for consciousness and more life. We took to the
Summer nights like an avalanche takes to interlopers.
Or a kid on a bicycle to a homemade ramp.
We seasoned the fields with our idealistic meanderings,
And filled the distances with our starry beards. Burned all
The self-help books.
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.
Three Poems
Ditty
Poetry unpauses
What can’t be paused.
If successful, implausibly.
For an Hour
Just wavelengths.
Just a covenant of daydreams.
No words.
Fingers pinching the wind.
Poem
A cratered pendant
The moon
Has a mass equivalent to all
The windows open
In the world.
Here and there
A forlorn afternoon
The heart
But it’s present nonetheless
The ache of genius
Autumn.
As Is Poem
Because it’s like a vintage
Washing machine, a poetic-o-matic.
A coin operated
Hieroglyphic.
A wandering in cahoots
With soil and sun.
A trouble that follows
Me, sewn right into the ambulation.
The running of the planets
Into fate and life and a cup of coffee.
Short Poems
1.
The syllogisms that hold up silence
Are understandably invisible and
Full of oranges and greens and yellows,
That aren’t colors at all, but the fullness
Of a late afternoon.
2.
The wind in the trees
Picks up the wishes that will one day become a new cosmos.
3.
A bit of blown leaves holler at the chimney.
Afterward, now below, the blown leaves caught in the chain link.
On the abandoned apartment building
Someone spray painted gothic arches.
4.
Forever is a verb
With clouds for hair
And coat buttons
Of highways
Germinating into the
Sky
An eclipse
Is the mailing address
Of dark matter
Forever is the typeface
Of letting go
5.
The rain sounds out the road, into the windy streets,
The cosmos of walking.
That’s why there are stars,
Over and over, love is something new.
It’s Different Than Prose
I don’t know how it ends. I imagine it will end with a hook and a hat and a sigh. Like at the end of the day.
Or a treatise will be inaugurated by the passing clouds.
Written on a wall of the bus station, where you wait for the interstate, “The baritones at the rodeo / Dance for the baronesses.” Accompanied by artwork. In black marker.
Everywhere complexity experiencing the waves and particles and chemical bonds, electricity and gravity.
The questions of infinity are no nearer completion. Thankful for that. Sitting on the bus seat, counting the landscapes. Dreaming or being dreamed. Probably both.
End of Summer Poem
The pigeons wing a faraway blue.
And the singsong crickets are the color of fields.
And so, by analogy, we are not robots.
And so, by the many horizons theory, the sky is forever.
With the shoreline on the tip of your tongue, the clouds head out to sea.
naïve haircuts 