Typewriter perfume and a single bulb light. The proliferate
Seahorse. The robin’s return. These are the stems
And these the petals (flowers). These are the atoms
And these the velocities (physics). Light teaches
Like a bicycle (DIY). Regardless, a poem
Teaches it’s not so good to be flat footed,
To be askance to one’s heart.
In the attic-darkness of the cinema
The flickering lights on the screen.
I like going to the movies.
Hum along with strain and happenstance.
Dreams are tactile and stayed by contingency.
The dawn is cobweb-still,
And yet unafraid of ghosts. A charming
Dandelion at the curbside. The ritual of graffiti
Going back millennium, in such amateurish hands.
Just like these amateurish poems.
poem
This Turning
Welcomes even the most foolish of sunbeams.
Planets are information. Information spins.
The grain of these walks
Like cloud-work in the unfurling leaves.
There are no economic reductions.
The stars heed even the
Jellyfish in the sea.
Silence ends in the noise
Of nothing at all.
Again and again, the moon holds its weight
Above the city lights, a wanderer too.
The revolution cannot be solved for.
Dreams sweep away data.
Short Poems
Better Revolt
If birth has no ending
And death has no beginning,
Can we
The better revolt of joy and reverence
Between us?
Walk
Chewing the flame-leaps of sun in my chest
As I walk aware of the bustle
Of leaves, of sunlight, and
Clouds, the grow of trees, the lives of rocks.
Pyrrhic
Now to throw it on yesterday’s
Mound, raise a stone,
And be done with it.
Fragment
Enjambed on a railroad trestle,
Idle verse, spray-painted, like falling leaves
Forgotten by guitar.
Late Afternoon
The blue sky
And the moon
Are trees with roots.
And yet as it rains
The rubbish of sunset
Is met with the banter of stars.
Spring Soon
The weather is unique
To each comet, would you like salad?
The distances between
Stars have deserted addition and fled
Into the open fields.
In the distortions of Mozart,
The poet sneezes.
Is your raincoat famous?
The cratered
Moon is capable of great intelligence.
Which you are aware of.
The poem reinhabits itself
Like spring, the poem casts off
Its own hemisphere
Like an egg hatching,
Fumbles for its voice, cedes
Its boundaries to the roofs of the sun.
Sees to and bundles up its
Colorful strings into verse.
Not for nothing have I
Summed up everything I can
Hinge on the turning of my head
On walks, the leaves chirping,
The birds rustling, native space
Tingling with countless particles.
A Couple of Theories on Dreams
How dreams smell on late afternoons
In through the open window, from under
The bed, by way of tree and moon and
Unsettled desire. How the afternoon fled
Its clothes and put a fork in numerical
Sequence, leaving us with what we know
Of odd and even. I think the stars are awful
And pretty, even awfully pretty, but seldom
Do they give chase to dreams.
~
A dream pivots on improperly assembled words,
And one could in effect
Produce a similar attuned sensory program
Say in a poem
Or standing in a field,
A leap from a rhetoric height will do,
Plainly sandwiched between the universe
And time itself, if time even exists at all.
Letter to a Poet Friend
Things I’d like to put into a poem: a walking stick, the mass of the moon,
Angular velocity, a robin’s footprints in the late winter mud,
An old-time intermission in a movie,
Leave room in the margins for
Spring, transistors for make believe beasts, and how your oatmeal
Cookies are the best,
I prefer your untied shoes
To the Big and Little Dipper, but not as much as the summer branches
Naming their own constellations,
How our research on summer sidewalks
Produced intriguing results, as does our paperwork on contemporary
Thrift store sonnets,
The moon would like you to know
It is neither new nor full and this phenomenon is only due to your perspective,
After all, even a ball of rock follows the tides with some
Enthusiasm.
Bird’s-eye View
A sudden precipitous drop
The yellow bee
Into the phantasmagoria
Of the flowering ditch.
The sun dreams.
The river offers us
A still heart.
Quiet as a winter
Branch
The moon
Just above the powerline.
Graffiti woodpeckers
On the abandoned building.
Streetlight warblers
Buttoned to the smokestack.
Who is this walking holding an imaginary kite?
Philosophy
Wind into fire, water into light,
Breath into dust, words into dream.
Comets are not capable of love
Is shortsighted.
Biography
Several times disassemble and put together again
Just to see how this goes.
New moon, dusk, railway lines, the wind
In all manner of mood.
In the fields on the other side of the city fence,
The elm leaves.
What We are Accustomed To
You are alone at night at the basketball
Court, that is disused and without netting, no one
Knows you are here, and you have chalk,
Sidewalk chalk, and draw pigeons and crows
And accompany these with sci-fi verses,
Avoiding the puddles or
Intersecting with the graffiti where someone
Spun the rustle of summer
Trees on the black top. You say something like,
The clouds reckon the stars
That reckon the earthworms that reckon
The tides that reckon the swaths of spinning mass
And gaseous twirls of the galaxies.
In accordance with the veers and volleys, splats and soars.
Before you leave,
In black marker, down the pole that supports
The backboard, you write,
The falling rain, like an untuned guitar,
Does not care what we are accustomed to.
naïve haircuts 