Park bench, the library, a light lunch, and coffee,
Of each lay step amounting
Somehow to the heart’s brimming light,
The blue sky, suddenly thinking, “equipped with in each of us that part of us
That turns with the universe,” the afternoon is warm for late
Summer, the library was empty, I may have even
Said this out loud, “on the way home, I walked
To the river, and I stood
There till I couldn’t tell either from another,”
The trees are beginning to lose their leaves,
It’s 225 million years to make it around the galaxy,
I wrote, “Dusk like shadows in magic clothes,”
At some point during my supper,
In a letter and put it in a tree for the birds to look at,
I laid down and waited to feel the continental drift,
To hear the crickets at night in the garden through the kitchen
Window, and as quietly as the ant
Walks, the moon crosses the sky.
walking
Short Poems
Dusk
The world is dusk and soiled collar, it is in the turn of a leaf.
The world is anxious, and who knows if the stars believe in ghosts?
I walk along the railroad tracks, the scrub, the flowers, across the scribbled trestles over city roads.
Astronauts and apple blossoms share the same haircut. Yellow birds sing.
The Graffiti at the Rail Yard
Arcade orange and gusto blue,
Even if the letters are indecipherable
Like a haiku in a smoke-filled room,
A cereal box of summer sky.
DIY
A simple record. Just guitar.
While standing in a pile of leaves.
Existential Crisis at Six Years Old
Like a box
All alone
Of crayons.
Reflection
The moon, white and moonlike, unearths a quiet evening.
A New Shadow on the Chess Board
The stars parody distance,
Says the universe.
Ice cream,
Says the philosopher.
The cat on the windowsill is aware of it too,
Says the author.
Note #2
How the poet, on a walk, leans into the rain, like a unicyclist in zero gravity.
Throughout The Day
A strange moon surfaces,
Braces itself on wooden beams, on trestles of late afternoon bird-song,
Nest of graffiti branches, twigs of quantum fluctuations.
Along the railroad tracks, the summer flowers in their uncountable realness, stemmed and leafed,
Stubborn as celestial bodies, all neck and eyelash.
The world is magnificent and real
In all its handsome revolution, allotted in its terrifying vastness,
Plucked by chance verse, the seasons wobble, the sunlight on garbage day is bright and clear.
A strange translation in the mirror, but I don’t mind, consistency leaves me uneasy.
Between your tattoos and your poems, rustle the late August leaves,
Chime the endless being and becoming,
The last train, the missed bus, the walk home in the rain, solitary, and yet as the rain lifts,
The strides lift, like bloomed flowers in broken pots.
The first note, the second note, the third note, I guess it will be a song, a scaling of fences,
A scribbling of verses, of feral melodies on forgotten walls,
Of throwing wild seeds in the unkempt lots.
You are up early, such light mingles with the skin, lifts the self into a sheer beautiful panic.
Such thoughts jingle at the periphery in lasting meandering akin to a cosmic drifting,
Swallowing mouthfuls of summer afternoons,
Tracing the edge of the moon with finger and one eye closed.
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.
Stroll
The silence, the cracks in the wall, airborne spring pollen,
The thoughts of black holes, the rugged joy of life that contagiously spins one’s head and heart,
The astronomical number of beetles on the earth, the fray on this shirt,
And collar windswept by early morning walks,
The sudden threat of solar flares, the beauty of fire escapes against red brick,
Blacktop, several pots of flowers,
And though the stars aren’t broken bottles, the graffiti beneath the fire escape
Is the Last Supper, but with UFOs and aliens,
A stitch of green stem and red flower climbing in and out of the chain link fence,
The turning earth, the creased corners of a used book,
And though the stars aren’t in any way lost, I wander aimlessly.
Mixed Up and Half Erased Yet
The tremors of silence like fingerprints
Drawn down the spine in goosebump riddles
Allocating leaves and stars and abstract poetry
Rattling the afternoons and calling out the night
Dusk is the space between my two front teeth
Death is a shadow of a shadow that has a life of its own
Molecular patterns, genomes, fractals, gravity
Tee shirts, concrete poetry, coffee stain, good shoes for walking
The tremors of silence like fingerprints
Drawing up the spine into an arabesque boom
Like fairy tales burnished with thorny truths
Unsquared by nebulous pivoting and terrifying beauty
Overwhelmed and brilliant in brevity
Yet on and on and on to visit the vast swelling of sensations
The dwindling down to the fine points of light and dark
Mixed up and half erased yet beaming with more awe
And guts and ambulatory genius and wrought
Along the rivers, through the alleys
Across the fields, let these strides wreath
The lonely, the lost, the joyful, the realized, the naïve
The untucked dusk
After a day of rain
Small Rhapsody
The weathered moon, the shoeless dream walks,
The cold damp of subway stations, the expanding universe,
A cat sleeps, a dog barks, the anxieties, the morning coffee,
The dull etcetera of a boring job, a walk in the morning rain,
What I thought was real, it all stirs and fathoms and flashes,
What is not beautiful and untrue, how to (cosmically)
Sleep by an open window, strained, uncertain, folly,
Joy, to walk alongside a passing train, eat an apple,
By chance fall home
Along the tabby road, up and over the feral pickets.
Short Poems
“Nothing is more glorious than the full moon to those who ride or walk under its beams. But whoso goes out of doors expressly to see it returns disappointed.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Journals 1820-1842
~
Uncertainty –
As a way of generating income for poets.
Daydream-
A species of butterfly which are also suitcases for angels.
Greetings-
We wave, like photons,
Particularly, an imaginary tree in a picture book.
A Metaphysics-
Without corners
Without terms
A harrowing rescue of afternoon sky
For ideology
Listen-
An elbow at dawn.
Half the pages missing.
The immediate
Vicinity.
The Bicycle of a Poet-
The moon of empty miles, parched as the street painted lines.
All they will find is dusk amongst the thickets and x-ray trees.
Spring Tramping
The cosmic roughhouse
Of yellow flowers
Purple fingerprints
On UFOs
Verse barreled
Over Niagara Falls
I don’t want anything
Just unkempt astonishment
~
The mote in the sunbeam is sovereign of the unknowable
Like probability
The number of insects in the field
A point has no circumference
A slim chance of dusk on the city roofs
The electrical towers sing your name
~
Afterward, it’s a bath then a long walk, I think of joints
Smoked in the parking lots of abandoned retail giants,
At dusk. The abstract laundry to hang,
Or how flowers touch the imperceptive steadiness of being
When the spring moon is null.
~
He knew the dead ends, where the chain link is pulled from its post,
How the moon transforms into feral words, across fields, a moon chased down
By sidewalk chalk verses. The ambler on the first day of spring
Must always in a few uncertain words puzzle us all.
These Walks
Beauty stuck in the throat, like a throttled moon
Vanguarding over the cut-out cityscape.
Summed in vastness, put to the feet, over and over
On pavement, down alleys, along railroad tracks,
Passing through railway yards, soliciting abandoned fields.
Ringing along the barbwire fences, and seeing graffiti hold its
Breath as the city curls up into dusk, into dark, blinks
Over the edge of stars.
A timelessness between time, a door where there is no proof.
Such beauty could pinch together an event horizon.
These solitary meanderings of star-stuffed pockets.
naïve haircuts 