Briefly, and loosely, the butterfly mirrors the night. Like an angry river,
If patterns are a process, this visits language.
With painstaking naiveté, under a rotary dial dusk, this existential cowlick
Never burdens folly with precision.
I only write poems to defy paragraphs. Torn shorts and short poems,
An hour of television. In this cosmos inconsistencies are stars.
I left immediately.
I didn’t dress.
I stepped out quietly,
A crayon like a violin,
An imposter of gravity.
The ghost
I left behind
I waited till now to name.
I painted lines in the street:
Love is
A bikini red sky in canvas
Shoes.
But the ghost,
The ghost is me
In the flip flops of the moon.
See to it your words are wingspan wrought.
And get us out of here.
The birds are
A bloody nose,
A bowl of
Crumpled paper
On fire,
Washed ashore
Having dreamed of whales.
A slight asteroid belt
For a fever
Will last a few days.
As the years go by
On some nights
You can see
A subtle scaffolding around the sun.
To catch a
Shadow,
You’ll need duct tape,
A tripwire, and
A mirror.
And like a dream, some of the words- I don’t know which ones.
I was buying three paintings a day
I was sponsoring chalk drawings
Walking alongside poems on junkyard walls of
Old school 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 paintings I ate blue collar pizza
As the crows argued about me wanted to know
My business but I didn’t have any
Just the playing cards
Of light of deity of logic of endless
Of dark of sun bursts of binary stars of crows
In the carless trees
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.”
Sometimes it’s not worth
The tiny prose.
The VHS eyes
Struggling with angels.
Mixed up with
The sun and rain, the volume and the presence,
The pessimism of checker boards.
Don’t be
Terminally comfortable.
What does the sun
Behind power lines in the dusk
Do for a grip?
What else
Rejoice in the calamity
Face down in the cosmos.
Just as
Meaning
Really is less
Meaning,
The self
Is idea
As real
As self.
At first, it was not silence. Silence compared to what?
It was a string of stones. Older than the sun.
The antics of moving water. H₂O is susceptible to gravity. Aren’t we all?
At first, the eyes of god were darkness. Darkness compared to what?
Walk with me. The insects have snippets of gas giants on their sleeves.
A feral afternoon lost in the hills. Or across from you in the city lot. Looking back at you.
A feeling bereft of soles. And feet like antlers of light. As the angels neigh.
A sandwich guy.
Tee shirt
And pants.
Library card,
Notebook poems.
I flunked calligraphy, and sometimes I think red means go.
They took away my license
To fish.
And if someone asks what poetry is
It’s in the wrist, and every dial in your brain
Is screaming.
Death is a shaking off of light, to rid itself of stars and mirrors, to rid itself of satiety.
Light stands in the dirt, and making circles with its hands.
Death is the number of circles in the apple blossom tree.
1.
The philosophy of horizons,
Specifically, the chapters on distance,
Is the zoology of time.
2.
The Minotaur
Are obstacles
In dreams. Like folded
Paper you have to unfolded.
Except that you are terrified.
And you haven’t learned
It’s pointless to retreat,
Even more so to be eaten.
4.
You can accompany
All the volume of spacetime
Always, where ever you go
Because it has stripes
Like a tiger.
5.
The shoes of the sea have stars up to their knees.
