You are alone at night at the basketball
Court, that is disused and without netting, no one
Knows you are here, and you have chalk,
Sidewalk chalk, and draw pigeons and crows
And accompany these with sci-fi verses,
Avoiding the puddles or
Intersecting with the graffiti where someone
Spun the rustle of summer
Trees on the black top. You say something like,
The clouds reckon the stars
That reckon the earthworms that reckon
The tides that reckon the swaths of spinning mass
And gaseous twirls of the galaxies.
In accordance with the veers and volleys, splats and soars.
Before you leave,
In black marker, down the pole that supports
The backboard, you write,
The falling rain, like an untuned guitar,
Does not care what we are accustomed to.
writing
Poem
It could be said, poetry
At first moves its toes, wiggles
Free of the past, the personal, the tidy,
The explanations that won‘t do.
At times, subsists on alliterative crumbs,
Cosmic airs, nuts and leaves, circular
Stars ringing in the heart.
The lofty ventures of time, verse, and graffiti.
And so very often, a dogged dream that sniffs out
The roads we oblige in our perambulations.
Notes During a Winter Rain
Beauty is
Not knowing
What the mystery
Bargains for.
One should consider the winter rain.
In all its timbre, its habit of doodling
On the windowpane,
The love of a stirred thing.
A spotted moon shakes off a plaited
Reflection,
Throws the sun and earth a headlong look,
And opens the veil.
Penniless
I found you standing on a chair. The following day, I found
You standing on a table. Your hair unbuttoned,
Except for a few clouds above the curlicues of your thoughts.
Delighted, you built imaginary cities on the horizon.
It was how you closed your eyes
That made the darkness so beautiful.
I found you on the roof branching like a profound fever
Into dreams, into the weather, arabesque in a thrift store cape.
Avidly, in a diving contest with the last of the afternoon.
And how the seasons translate the unsayable.
We go into business selling the open fields to the rain.
The Art at the End of the Season
And though you can’t see it,
It permeates the end of the year, it feels
In bright collapse, in the turning over
Of an old you, I walk up to the river
As what’s left of the rain foreshortens a reddening
Sky, and with a black marker write verses on a railroad trestle,
Put words to score these gut feelings,
Scrounge up the ghosts of a childhood
Sky, a string theory around your finger for luck,
It’s no small matter, this troubling
Entropy.
Outsider
A turning over of self,
By season and tract, it can’t be helped,
Like a whack of verse on the head seizing capillary
And shoe size.
And in the margins too, this is forever,
All of it, all of us, the dandelion, the tower,
Silence resting beneath a stone,
Along these roads, onto galaxies of
Coming home, the beautiful trouble of stars.
Of these afternoons, I am
Wildly in love with the wind
And alighted by its hurried
Poems.
What I’d Like to Know
The buzzing beliefs of cosmic
Ambling, the beautiful
Preludes of darkness and
Cataclysm, then suddenly
Of atom and charge, spin
And recognition, the endless
Paths and the streetlights
Ever so slightly leaning into
The rain, passingly framed by the sound
Of bicycle tires on the wet
Pavement, and if this concludes
In a diving board sky
Crowned by the harangues
Of cloud and dusk and
The wind in the leaves,
The backyard sermons
Of joint and lawn chair, the
Feral cat staring from what radius
It deems safe, or the smokestack
Of the old dairy now an eyrie
For pigeon and tonight’s moon.
Almost Winter Meditation
The cold swept the roads white.
The stars, strung out
On the hard sky like
Stones or shale or walnut casings.
The eddies of galaxies twined
In super structures of time
And gravity, that they are
Something, just something,
Bristling with difference,
And have stakes in life and death,
In bright clouds and fanning out
Vistas of turning horizons,
And blood in the veins, the sport
Of poetry and fielding
These spurred walks. That land
Me the miles of my untutored
Meanderings. And while some
Count the face of the dice, others
Its turns and hops.
The turns and hops of stars
And seasons, of fields swept
Brown and gray, the eddies of
Frustration, joy, love and the death
Of those lost from us, the mud
And frost, the swirling radiating
Surface of suns, or dark still rain puddles.
A journal of swirling words
On the surface of our diaries.
The difference how a road feels
At night or at dawn
As we foot its length.
A beautiful commotion of nonsense
And brevity. A madcap
Poetry perchance a narrow escape
From meaning.
Short Poems #6
Intoxicating
The wind
Fills the room with
The smell of rain.
The taxi cabs are now fairytales,
Washed ashore by UFOs.
The Music Hall
Everything is as it seems.
Flat tires, balloons, fireflies, gambling,
Fallen leaves. The horn section on LSD.
Philosophy
Every object is as unreal
As it is real.
Bon Voyage
Over large stretches my luggage
Is a sky-grin ascending.
Impounded is improbable.
Shadow Work
Your shadow has no interest in being your mirror.
Your shadow has poems to write
And tall afternoons to stand by.
Pages and pages of poems about afternoons.
Meandering all of them.
Railroad lines for shoelaces.
Song
Dithering moon
Chasing
Stones
Downhill
Along the road.
Such lonely
Hard to reach
Places, such
Rickety old poems
For
To get us home.
naïve haircuts 