The First Two Couplets of the Year-
Gather blankets and circuity
There is no way home.
A well shod vagabondism
Is unable to take your call.
~
Wardrobe-
Chaos socks.
Indefinite buttons.
Like some underlying
Notion of transcendence.
~
Always with Me-
A slight solitude.
An ephemeral knock knock joke.
Distance is simple.
It smells feral and wears the sky on its head.
The moon is a subsidiary
Of poetic cant.
Blank
Rounds out the void.
Radiation alibis
All margin and crater.
The sunlight baffles
In throwaway yellows.
Adding infinities and
Vanishing returns.
Spurious like symmetry
Under a full moon.
In a new light
Loitering in June.
Music box eyeliner
An old garage door for a tee shirt.
It is like the cosmos
At the end of a violin.
~
It’s funny this way, the allotted time
Surfaces, like a movie ticket, years later,
In someone else’s coat.
Simple duets of meaning and unmeaning. Buries us in stars.
The unnerving unbeginning of time. Only to tremble with belief in these lines.
To root for being… and always propelled by becoming.
In a city field, the summer all around me, I begin to recognize
Invisible minuets of insects, as I stand looking down the rail lines.
I send interstellar messages via the paper transistors of an origami radio.
Like the specter of tattoos
On the necks of ghosts,
Or the stars that blink telepathy along the curve
Of forever,
All is heeded on this walk,
Here and nowhere and everywhere,
The stars send out thoughts
Of blue birds on red branches or the first snow that
Kindles a city night,
In such poetic nonsense
Numbers give up their quantities,
This golden approach of mishaps.
The philosophy of horizons,
Specifically, the chapters on distance,
Is the zoology of time.
~
The degree of these walks
Like cloud-work in the falling leaves.
Along the seams of the city, taking to the edges,
In that loosely held tone
Of a meandered afternoon.
~
You can accompany
All the volume of space and time,
Always, wherever you go,
Because it has stripes
Like a tiger.
Most of the universe is invisible
And sufficiently implausible.
Which makes it all the more real.
A handprint in a cave,
A neutron star,
A scar from a fistfight
When you were a kid.
Even now, in November,
Half of the leaves are gone
And it is raining.
To each fathom of being migrates
A becoming, till readiness shores,
Structure bursts without burning,
Now wobbly and starry
With outstretched letting go
Into the evening trees, and of this dusk
Torches and butterflies.
~
Have you found
How it will be measured
By raindrops in spring trees?
That there is no volume
Other than space and time?
Do you ask what can be made of the heart
That is simple and brave?
The dimensions of the universe
That do not know fear or love?
Who drank the last
Of the halos? Deliberately made it rain?
Stole old purses from graffiti
Elbows?
Who lit fire to the last of the rocks?
Knowing very well that this storm
Is bare feet, verses, earth.
Like fireflies
Opening doors.
The spring wind
Counting knives.
I adhere to berry and branch,
Leaf, sunlight in the arteries,
Theater wire and the stars.
(old poem I thought I would give another chance)
Velocity is a color, said time. A bicycle like a deck of cards fallen into a car wash. The herds of disappearing cities.
A closing door, what color is that for time? I will remember nothing. I will remember everything. I will do both and neither. Just in case.
Forever, like lost love,
Is making ridiculous faces
On the radio.
Forever, said time, is perpendicular to fleeting, like the first snow surrounding the streetlights, how the sun steeped in yellow-burgundy presses in on time and space.
How is that for fleeting?
The moon is an attic
In a house of asteroids
As if the moon chased
Opening doors.
The crown for the dandelion is fields long
And bound to everything.
A poem that steadies on a yawning angel.
To the void, we are as empty as the void is to us.
A bird inside an angel.
A bird out of time and a dusk
Otherworldly.
The doodle: what is the significance
Of its clumsy lines, fettered by chance?
This is not jest
Scribbled the fool.
naïve haircuts 