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

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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.

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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.