The Blight of Poetry- Like a pulled tooth Chapped lips and a hole in The sole A tee shirt That reads Add Verse Double crossing hexameters (Whatever those are) And me Baffled hair Writing it all down For Walt- The sea Is all of our names Without being any of them. My Favorite Novel- On the chalk board Two dimensional windmills And Quixote With a barber’s bowl For wings Film Critic- Kung Fu Hustle Is the true spiritual Sequel of the Matrix Lollygagging- Electromagnetic fields To stand in. And then there’s mass. Not to be Confused with weight. What was said Spoke of beginnings, The cowlick birds Holler on the strings of gravity. A Stone on a Pillow- You establish it is Windy By opening a window By solving some math problems In a notebook Feeding the birds By the look of the city roofs And no matter how far you walk
poem
Least Likely to Stick to a Plan (Short Poems)
Cleaning- The scrubbed stars Took all day Like a tub in an old room. Bodies- Now look, a shipwreck of lights Equal to the theater of the universe. Adjectives- Battered, folded Into paper planes Like the unlikely Waist of a green Apple. That’s When I Reach for my Revolver Record- I am looking for a verse. I am standing by the sea, whistling a Saturday morning cartoon theme. I gather a few juxtapositions. Wonder, awe, fear, dissolution, realignment. I am starting a blog of the photos I collect of sidewalk cracks. Don’t Forget- Along with immense size, How infinitesimal the universe is Would make a haiku blush.
But Not You
What ghosts of what stars did we know? If you could count all the acres and every plasma swirl of the sun, all the yellow gulls of its every beach, What then? Can we lose everything To the untenable slopes of love? ~ I haven’t the soonest blue Or the latest sonnet by Homer. Like a last place finish, the lone kite in the sky. As the moon opens its suitcases. ~ I’d like to see this through, outlandishly so. I study the effects of gravity on my houseplant. I ride my bicycle over to say hello. The rain clouds interrupt, though it never rains. ~ Latter at the drive-in neither of us Will recognize each other Or the lengths we sought to not Fall in love. ~ I specialize in putting words Just out of reach. But not you.
Cubist Roller Skates/Soundless Space
1. The velocity of a poem-asteroid Is elliptical alliterations. 2. Locals call the moon, Charlie Knuckles, Who brought a fork and spoon into the desert. (Because of this I jumped into the ocean. And took my name from a turn in the road.) 3. The dismal diameter Bleak around No matter how many megaphones Without an atmosphere The moon can't hear what it cannot say 4. Data is finite. 5. And yet, We crossed The sea And found the inaudible Screams of the moon, Buds on spring trees. 6. You were silent all though the movie. Only once, I heard you say, "The crimson sky over the city dump, the cosmonauts are a tree line." You see the wire that holds the celestials, The magnetic ghosts in cubist roller skates.
This is What I Know
Unknowing can be navigated. Ventured. Crossed. Consulted with. I start writing poems. Not knowing what they will be. The rubble of stars In my boots. ~ How savage is the immediate. You stand up to it. You hold your breath. You even tuck in your shirt. But this too weird Varied Almost infinite If you had the guts to ask. The rubble of stars Retina holding. ~ This is the bumble In the be all of our magnificent lives, The sorrow and the silence of our Hearts when they are lightest. The worst and everything more. The crumpled sunlight Passing for debris. The rubble of stars Ankle deep, spring aspiring.
Writer’s Block
If at first, you draft A poem, To start, you say: A yellow couch Listens to John Cage. Next, leave it With the paint cans In the cellar. In a year, or two, Go looking for it. Without reading it, Turn it over, Start something new, Like: You found me In the birdbath, The rainwater Is shirtless. That will never do. It’s best to be desperate: The universe Was swallowed By a few words. Long shadows Go to great lengths In doorways. For the better part of a decade Put it with the dry Beans in the back of The cupboard: The night arrives first A pink ribbon Of steel, A headache of honey and blood. Just abruptly end and hope no one Notices: Writing a poem Is like finishing a knot, Or cutting a hole in a net Before collecting butterflies.
A Knack for Lost Places
A bowl filled with letters or a bowl filled with numbers, which is less Organized? ~ Frayed stars Are in style The universe for pockets. ~ I was looking forward to the time off. I wasn't going to write. Or read. I would smoke a joint and watch Buckaroo Bonzai. ~ The light reflected by the earth is less organized. Then when it left The sun. Same for the moon. The boiling pot is order. ~ Bureaucracy Paperwork We Stole- The paperwork we found, we burned it, it was mostly poetry. You said we should write down afterwards how we remember it. And the ghosts, they too had names. Remember them. ~ Send a SASE. Do not include an address. Put it into a bottle. Fold it into a plane. I know where to look for it. I have a knack For lost places.
Portrait
You sit Here and invest in the part of you That has no beginning. Eyes fixed on the wooden Fireflies. A deserted city for a headband. Shoulders like Heisenberg's uncertainty Principle. The to-do list of dusk in the air. Which you have always taken seriously. And a tattoo Of wings put on the bottom of the feet. The Void for what it is, the thread count of Existence. You think, Did the universe inflate, superfluous Of compass, all in one go of it? Behind you the sky, Not knowing how many Keys make an accordion, Shoulders the long way Home. This is clear. As it is uneven, and croaked like meaning. Like a portrait. What the words have to do with this, Is an emergency.
Unknowing Poem
This I will say plain,
I will not
Sabotage distance with
Preoccupation, I will not
Dirty the socks of the moon
With pleading.
Let them be.
That’s why shadows are important,
They tend to adhere to you,
So you are what you are not,
Jumping atop lost pianos
In factory made shoes, singing
The birds are the perfect cents.
Originality is propaganda,
Certain exaggerations
Must precipitate into fairy tales.
Like November helicopters
Gathering up the body slams of dusk.
Pillows that are fire
For this garden head.
The Books on the Fridge
A well-kept bike, a stack of poems in disarray. The books on the fridge. I'll get to them soon. After a walk and a few More months of procrastinating. I’ll write poems too. Small ones, by An open window. The moon like a dog licking a plate. Mirrors Don’t know left from right. A group of dusk is called a vanish. The arteries of stars Do they feel it too, The quiet celebrity of being alone?
naïve haircuts 