The world is brittle, and incapable of turning inside out.
 
The world is anxious, and who knows if the stars believe in ghosts?
 
The world is dusk, soiled collars, it is in the turn of a leaf.
 
I write about robots, and railroad tracks, flowers, a list of poems 
so scrambled and disjointed and unlikely to be anything 
but scrambled and disjointed.
 
I write that astronauts and apple blossoms have the same haircuts,
even as the little yellow bird in the evergreen sings like the 
diameter of the moon.
 
I write for habit’s sake, to fend off the April morning, to no avail
keeping a firm arm span from the late summer night. I tend to a 
fiery garden, and measure its wingspan.
 
I write the barriers are breached, the temples quacked, the first 
of the first snow breaks apart the air, and nibbles on bright darkness.
 
The world is strident, and misadventure. The approximation of untruth. 
 
And yet I write of poems, how they dig in the dirt and find
comets that have yet to hit the earth.
 
That God is a few lines of chalk on the cement, and everything else.  

The rain sounds out the road, into the windy streets,
The cosmos of walking.

In the end we hear the decibels
Of the sun, without the roots
Of dust.

Till then,
I write chance.
Life is the square of tree and moon.

Life is a squint, a DIY cassette,

A messy aim, a stupefied grin, and perfection.

That’s why there are stars,
Though always with us,
Over and over love is something else.

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.

I left immediately.
I didn’t dress.

I stepped out quietly,
A crayon like a violin,

An imposter of gravity.
The ghost

I left behind
I waited till now to name.

I painted lines in the street:

Love is
A bikini red sky in canvas
Shoes.

But the ghost,
The ghost is me

In the flip flops of the moon.

See to it your words are wingspan wrought.

And get us out of here.

The birds are
A bloody nose,

A bowl of
Crumpled paper
On fire,

Washed ashore
Having dreamed of whales.

A slight asteroid belt
For a fever
Will last a few days.

As the years go by
On some nights
You can see
A subtle scaffolding around the sun.

To catch a
Shadow,

You’ll need duct tape,
A tripwire, and
A mirror.

And like a dream, some of the words- I don’t know which ones.

I was buying three paintings a day

I was sponsoring chalk drawings

Walking alongside poems on junkyard walls of

Old school corrugated steel “Do you know

The album Zen Arcade, by Husker Du?”

“Out of Step, by Minor

Threat?”

I went to thrift stores to city fields church sales

Just to find paintings I ate blue collar pizza

As the crows argued about me wanted to know

My business but I didn’t have any

Just the playing cards

Of light of deity of logic of endless

Of dark of sun bursts of binary stars of crows

In the carless trees

Be certain

To appertain

The havoc and the intention

The intervention of fiction

As Steve Zissou said,

“Nobody knows what’s going to happen. And then we film it. That’s the whole concept.”

Sometimes it’s not worth
The tiny prose.

The VHS eyes
Struggling with angels.

Mixed up with
The sun and rain, the volume and the presence,
The pessimism of checker boards.

Don’t be
Terminally comfortable.

What does the sun
Behind power lines in the dusk
Do for a grip?

What else
Rejoice in the calamity
Face down in the cosmos.

Just as
Meaning
Really is less
Meaning,

The self
Is idea
As real
As self.