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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?