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.