In a dream you are mumbled by a group of incongruous words. You find you have the silhouette of a jet pack for a tattoo. Between your shoulder blades. No memory of how it came about. The only way around this city is by bus. And this bus is possibly only a rumor, a wisp of shadow. The last few piano keys of a beautiful melody is the only currency for fare. You ride the bus for hours. You take it anywhere. Sometimes you close your eyes till you hear the last stop announcement. From there you try to find your way home. The only way home is by hunch. All in a hunch of wind and silence and by the look of deserted shoes dangling on power lines or following footsteps in a dream to disappear into. But all goes astray, and you find yourself at the end of an unfamiliar continent that ends at the sea, and how the waves reach the shore here is like the wishing of coins into a fountain. A strange accent of rain in the tread of your boots and the wind and spring you drag after you after hours along the railroad tracks and city streets. Who will pick this up, the images of birds? And will you find employment in the growing moon?
prose-poem
Walking Thoughts
Afternoons kneading walking-thoughts, reeling daydreams and the blue of mid-August skies, stopping for garden-tomato sandwiches, these knapsack wanderings,
And if Saturn is a seaside holiday, and Neptune perplexed of axis, here the geese in the shade of the oak tree, and here and everywhere, time has a nervous system, and space the gravity of cause,
Life threaded with time and place, raveled and unraveled, swept up in cloud bursts of the sun peering through, squeezed at its side till it balloons and grins, and these walks as the Earth spins, and sometimes end like a felled season, and begins with feet in the green grass,
As if I hadn’t charged my blood stream with sunlight and chance, fate and opportunity, housed this expanse in the meanderings of love and dreams, wrapped up in the onset of the present,
The afternoons on bench with book, or just sitting there looking out into the mesa clouds, and for this hour, vast as the summer fields,
And the trunk and branches are what’s left of a sudden explosion (time is relative) from the seedling hatched, as the mountains are quick to ascend and descend, and puddles are forever (somehow), and the kids in the neighborhood are not quite Picasso with graffiti and first ask of their spray cans the permission of the grasshoppers in my untamed lawn, and not be outdone by the quick gallop of the yellow of the dandelion in spring, the orange-yellow-gold of the black-eyed Susans in August, the rain as if falls from the gutter-less roofs.
Correspondence
It all boils down to how the universe stores information. For example: the surface area of a poem, like the chewing gum that comes with trading cards, it is a half-moon. The potholes meditate. Pink dusk.
The Earth is somewhat squished, pinched in orbit by our star. I walk to the window. Suddenly, rain. I read the letter. It said: The barometer of missing socks. Always where we haven’t been, and where we will never be again.
I walk to the door. It thunders. Just afterwards, listen closely. To the reverberations. The rain on the pane.
My reply.
On the Arm
The tattoo of the church bell and the passing train. I hear both, in the fields, just before the rain. The moon has polka dot breath, but I imagine the city lights under my fingernails.
There is a feather on the ground. A lampshade in the sky. I walk up to a lamppost, it is night. I write on the lamppost. In marker: Where are you?
The elopement of city features. The facades of houses, the stature of downtown buildings. The silence of fountains that don’t work. The few pennies for the graffiti flowers, and the inter-dimensional coordinates for solitary meandering.
naïve haircuts 