A summer
Song sans sense, in electric red,
On air guitar.
And the blue afternoon
For pocket change, a terse notebook
Jotted down in a shirt pocket
To keep poems.
But whatever it is, even the typography
Of space travel,
And if you can, do not
Hold it at arm’s length.
poem
June is Decidedly a Cosmonaut
June is airy and incomplete and true and I
Will be getting up before dawn to walk
Along the railroad lines and find any hidden
Imaginary doors or graffiti haiku or a summiting cloud formation
Like a labyrinth of words in the sky.
The Malady of Wing and Antenna
You took to the railroad lines like a fiddler to a roof.
And the hours out walking, an aficionado of being
For the wind and for the horizon and for the fields.
You took home the sweat of summer,
And into the night, the dimpled ribbon of the moon
Unravels along an airy topography. You are enlivened
By the malady of wing and antenna as the butterfly
Tops the ironweed. Like the evening dusk piled on the blue sky,
And above that, the night without any currency
Of its own giving away everything.
A Feral Letter to a Stray Friend
We should begin with
The moon, have your cat draw
The circle and its glow and its marred
Demeanor. Why don’t we stop
For some tea and enrich ourselves
On the rain-smell of the coming storm?
When the cat has finished,
And the moon is just right, and over the rooftops,
We will draw up evacuation plans
But they will all be forgeries
Splendidly like puddles or these
Journal entries. Truth be told,
The cosmos is a drum roll not unlike the smell
Of lilac,
The cosmos is also a strummed guitar the color
Of a lonesome whistle.
We should finish our evening by returning to
The moon, where we left it, have your car draw
It being swallowed by our sun
Now a red giant.
A Quantum and Wry Sandwich
Even if, and this is
Stretching it, besides,
Where are wild
Flowers, some as tall
As parking meters?
Sunlight, lost
In the blinds, even so,
Just as well,
The moon is famished,
Fathom-weary,
Just look, the moon says,
I am dust and stone.
You don’t say? As for me,
A quantum and wry sandwich,
A myopia prescribed in glasses.
Zany with the zeal
Of an amateur poet.
No Mow Brainwaves
Asteroid haircut,
Thistle mustache,
Galactic sandwiches,
A lonesome twang
On the guitar.
A rooftop bird
Says nothing
But leaves us the wiser.
The space between stars.
The space between atoms.
No mow brainwaves,
Foraged verse.
Waking Dream
Rain on imaginary roofs. A feral cat
Under the spell of the moon. Besides,
We have passed this way before. The best
Of the railroad dusk, the tee shirts
Sweaty with the miles spent.
What are these thoughts
Chords through the verse, not seen, faintly heard,
Like gravity. What we put together and what
Is pulled apart.
Let It Stray
And what celestials did we tame, corral? None at all. What
Angsty dreams did we smother in interpretation and
Rationalizing? None at all. Do not dreams breathe with dream-lungs,
See with dream-eyes, fathom the earth on dream-wings?
Every butterfly is saddled with life and death, time and
Matter, having as means this curved space
To lift its skull and wing, and to scope out its dreams.
The spring rain is cousin to the moon, the moon
Is neighbor to the motes in the sunlit window,
And if these dreams are silly-serious (and they are) and are to be heckled
By the rings of Saturn (and they are), they are also as fabulous
As the lilac bush or the ponytail
Of a comet.
So let it stray, wobble, course a swerve-adhering
Meander in all its wonder and unknowing.
Lunch Guest
Regardless of words, poetry is forever
Without a portrait,
A steering column in the void, poetry
Cannot vanish into verse,
A terrible silence upends your sleep,
You are desperate to wake up poetry,
The periodic table of poetry, one element
Next to another element is metaphor,
Poetry is your lunch guest eating with
Its hands, you think to imitate this
But necessarily make a buffoon of yourself,
Poetry is under no obligation to value sense,
It is to image and rhythm it gives its blood,
Poetry tosses pennies into craters on the moon
But makes no wish, only the feathered fire of
Its reaching out to something other than itself.
Untied
A chickadee on the chain link fence.
A clarinet of pennies, like the reflection of stars
In the fountain.
Analytics for breakfast. Yet synthesis keeps one regular.
The murmurings at dawn spill out like headlights
On an inter-dimensional wanderlust.
It’s all the universe can do, lengthen its stay. That’s expansion.
If I was really a poet, I would walk to the next town
Wearing a blue scarf, teed in an ironic shirt,
With only what I’ve never known.
The moon is sibling to the Earth. Black coffee, spring porch.
Does one bother to tie it all together anymore?
Or does one tie it all up with one of those long walks
Trying to forget everything but the clouds.
A bluejay, quantum entanglement, another black coffee,
The porch at dusk.
The river, like an arpeggio,
Notes the difference in scale
Between the sea and the moon.
That we cannot stay, for not-staying’s sake.
Dietary advice, the roughage of poetic afternoons.
naïve haircuts 