Even if, and this is
Stretching it, besides,
Where are wild
Flowers, some as tall
As parking meters?
Sunlight, lost
In the blinds, even so,
Just as well,
The moon is famished,
Fathom-weary,
Just look, the moon says,
I am dust and stone.
You don’t say? As for me,
A quantum and wry sandwich,
A myopia prescribed in glasses.
Zany with the zeal
Of an amateur poet.
Asteroid haircut,
Thistle mustache,
Galactic sandwiches,
A lonesome twang
On the guitar.
A rooftop bird
Says nothing
But leaves us the wiser.
The space between stars.
The space between atoms.
No mow brainwaves,
Foraged verse.
Rain on imaginary roofs. A feral cat
Under the spell of the moon. Besides,
We have passed this way before. The best
Of the railroad dusk, the tee shirts
Sweaty with the miles spent.
What are these thoughts
Chords through the verse, not seen, faintly heard,
Like gravity. What we put together and what
Is pulled apart.
And what celestials did we tame, corral? None at all. What
Angsty dreams did we smother in interpretation and
Rationalizing? None at all. Do not dreams breathe with dream-lungs,
See with dream-eyes, fathom the earth on dream-wings?
Every butterfly is saddled with life and death, time and
Matter, having as means this curved space
To lift its skull and wing, and to scope out its dreams.
The spring rain is cousin to the moon, the moon
Is neighbor to the motes in the sunlit window,
And if these dreams are silly-serious (and they are) and are to be heckled
By the rings of Saturn (and they are), they are also as fabulous
As the lilac bush or the ponytail
Of a comet.
So let it stray, wobble, course a swerve-adhering
Meander in all its wonder and unknowing.
Regardless of words, poetry is forever
Without a portrait,
A steering column in the void, poetry
Cannot vanish into verse,
A terrible silence upends your sleep,
You are desperate to wake up poetry,
The periodic table of poetry, one element
Next to another element is metaphor,
Poetry is your lunch guest eating with
Its hands, you think to imitate this
But necessarily make a buffoon of yourself,
Poetry is under no obligation to value sense,
It is to image and rhythm it gives its blood,
Poetry tosses pennies into craters on the moon
But makes no wish, only the feathered fire of
Its reaching out to something other than itself.
A chickadee on the chain link fence.
A clarinet of pennies, like the reflection of stars
In the fountain.
Analytics for breakfast. Yet synthesis keeps one regular.
The murmurings at dawn spill out like headlights
On an inter-dimensional wanderlust.
It’s all the universe can do, lengthen its stay. That’s expansion.
If I was really a poet, I would walk to the next town
Wearing a blue scarf, teed in an ironic shirt,
With only what I’ve never known.
The moon is sibling to the Earth. Black coffee, spring porch.
Does one bother to tie it all together anymore?
Or does one tie it all up with one of those long walks
Trying to forget everything but the clouds.
A bluejay, quantum entanglement, another black coffee,
The porch at dusk.
The river, like an arpeggio,
Notes the difference in scale
Between the sea and the moon.
That we cannot stay, for not-staying’s sake.
Dietary advice, the roughage of poetic afternoons.
Typewriter perfume and a single bulb light. The proliferate
Seahorse. The robin’s return. These are the stems
And these the petals (flowers). These are the atoms
And these the velocities (physics). Light teaches
Like a bicycle (DIY). Regardless, a poem
Teaches it’s not so good to be flat footed,
To be askance to one’s heart.
In the attic-darkness of the cinema
The flickering lights on the screen.
I like going to the movies.
Hum along with strain and happenstance.
Dreams are tactile and stayed by contingency.
The dawn is cobweb-still,
And yet unafraid of ghosts. A charming
Dandelion at the curbside. The ritual of graffiti
Going back millennium, in such amateurish hands.
Just like these amateurish poems.
Welcomes even the most foolish of sunbeams.
Planets are information. Information spins.
The grain of these walks
Like cloud-work in the unfurling leaves.
There are no economic reductions.
The stars heed even the
Jellyfish in the sea.
Silence ends in the noise
Of nothing at all.
Again and again, the moon holds its weight
Above the city lights, a wanderer too.
The revolution cannot be solved for.
Dreams sweep away data.
Better Revolt
If birth has no ending
And death has no beginning,
Can we
The better revolt of joy and reverence
Between us?
Walk
Chewing the flame-leaps of sun in my chest
As I walk aware of the bustle
Of leaves, of sunlight, and
Clouds, the grow of trees, the lives of rocks.
Pyrrhic
Now to throw it on yesterday’s
Mound, raise a stone,
And be done with it.
Fragment
Enjambed on a railroad trestle,
Idle verse, spray-painted, like falling leaves
Forgotten by guitar.
Late Afternoon
The blue sky
And the moon
Are trees with roots.
And yet as it rains
The rubbish of sunset
Is met with the banter of stars.
The weather is unique
To each comet, would you like salad?
The distances between
Stars have deserted addition and fled
Into the open fields.
In the distortions of Mozart,
The poet sneezes.
Is your raincoat famous?
The cratered
Moon is capable of great intelligence.
Which you are aware of.
The poem reinhabits itself
Like spring, the poem casts off
Its own hemisphere
Like an egg hatching,
Fumbles for its voice, cedes
Its boundaries to the roofs of the sun.
Sees to and bundles up its
Colorful strings into verse.
Not for nothing have I
Summed up everything I can
Hinge on the turning of my head
On walks, the leaves chirping,
The birds rustling, native space
Tingling with countless particles.
naïve haircuts 