How dreams smell on late afternoons
In through the open window, from under
The bed, by way of tree and moon and
Unsettled desire. How the afternoon fled
Its clothes and put a fork in numerical
Sequence, leaving us with what we know
Of odd and even. I think the stars are awful
And pretty, even awfully pretty, but seldom
Do they give chase to dreams.

~

A dream pivots on improperly assembled words,
And one could in effect
Produce a similar attuned sensory program
Say in a poem
Or standing in a field,
A leap from a rhetoric height will do,
Plainly sandwiched between the universe
And time itself, if time even exists at all.

Wind into fire, water into light, 
Breath into dust, words into dream.

Comets are not capable of love
Is shortsighted.  

Several times disassemble and put together again
Just to see how this goes.

New moon, dusk, railway lines, the wind
In all manner of mood.

In the fields on the other side of the city fence,
The elm leaves.

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.

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.

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.

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.