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.

Amateurs of the World Unite and Take Over

Briefly, and loosely, the butterfly mirrors the night. Like an angry river,

If patterns are a process, this visits language.

With painstaking naiveté, under a rotary dial dusk, this existential cowlick
Never burdens folly with precision.

I only write poems to defy paragraphs. Torn shorts and short poems,
An hour of television. In this cosmos inconsistencies are stars.

 

 

*From the archives

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.

everything.

puddles, bicycles, the cosmic microwave background, the holidays of stolen shoes barefoot in the spring, summer halos on poet vandals, of black marker epigrams on railroad trestles, of barbwire thistled with dandelions, the biceps of imaginary trees, the forehead of chicory dusk, the trance of knuckled stars, and sidewalks rapt with chalk operas,

the unavoidable cosmic, here in chance and outward in venture, the notes wrung of cascading rivers, the numbers in the pockets of ghosts, the turmoil of stars blistering with joy, the epiphanies that know the difference between one and one,

the waist of the moon summed in countless seconds standing with distant crows, to struggle these steps bright towards the arriving moments, the versified shoulders turning home at last, departing through stellar doors, and on these paths string the words for what the spring wind is good for,

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.

A Poet’s Style

Tattoos-

A lawn chair
On the forearm.

On the shoulder, the
Murmuring
Of birds.

Melody for a toy piano
On the dorsal of the hands.

Clothes-

No shoes
But the idea of shoes.

Appetite-

A table crowded with empty bowls.

Metaphysics-

The cosmos on the lips,
I breath it in through nostrils,
Pull its lint out of my belly button.

In Conclusion-

These poems that are intolerable
Improbable poems in yellow pants
At dusk in a ruined shirt staring at the future.

All That is Left

The rain. The dusk. The lone bassoonist. Sacked by a summer wind.

Brought home a sandwich of lost sidewalks. Out of a job, yet bookishly good looking.

If I was ever to the point, it was not in this poem.

If ever there was a point, it was not me that made it.

All that is left
Is chance,

Impossible
Solemn chance.

And love is

Your underwear on backwards. When it’s on at all.