The foot is disheveled. The armpit is the moon. And what lessons have the rain To letter at night alone without Legs or thoughts? What does it mean to be human When the heart and lungs are a marathon Of leaves? You cannot cross out the distance. Cup sorrow in your hands But to be abbreviated in this light Is life. If death cannot cull these questions At least the ice cream truck tonight rings A symphony for a fake piano In pencil in the night in a sky that cannot be seen.
writing
The Cosmic Microwave Background Blues
The abyss is flat
And has no bottom.
It is a vagrant simile
Loitering on two
Legs carrying a bowl
Of wishes,
A grocery basket
At the elbow.
Isn’t that nice?
But don’t ask me to look back. There would be too many
Other of me in the way.
I’ve the multiverse blues too.
The Birds Make Up My Hands
The birds make up my hands.
You can’t see my hands.
My hands are invisible.
But not the birds.
They have kept their feathers.
They have kept their language.
But stopped using words.
Words are all I have.
Now that the birds are gone.
Escaped into the outlines of wings.
The bone structure of silence.
Rain Water
A reflection In the rain water. Is The banter of something. In the Sentiment of somewhere else. This is true. A reflection is the sentiment of somewhere else. Pretending to be something near. Gave me your hand. So I can trace the serial numbers of your favorite poems. The umbrella Is a reflection in the rain. Standing there with its hands on its head. Let swim the daft fractals. Tie tight the headbands of angels. A reflection is A four handed polonaise On a two-legged piano. The fire from a star in a spring tree. We Who importune With joy.
Always With Us
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, Life is the square of tree and moon, A squint, a DIY cassette, A messy aim, a stupefied grin, and perfection. That’s why there are stars, Over and over love is something else.
Ghost is Me
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.
Evolution Manages Imagination
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.
Snippets of Gas Giants on Their Sleeves
At first, it was not silence. Silence compared to what?
It was a string of stones. Older than the sun.
The antics of moving water. H₂O is susceptible to gravity. Aren’t we all?
At first, the eyes of god were darkness. Darkness compared to what?
Walk with me. The insects have snippets of gas giants on their sleeves.
A feral afternoon lost in the hills. Or across from you in the city lot. Looking back at you.
A feeling bereft of soles. And feet like antlers of light. As the angels neigh.
Sandwich Guy
A sandwich guy.
Tee shirt
And pants.
Library card,
Notebook poems.
I flunked calligraphy, and sometimes I think red means go.
They took away my license
To fish.
And if someone asks what poetry is
It’s in the wrist, and every dial in your brain
Is screaming.
Light Stands in the Dirt
Death is a shaking off of light, to rid itself of stars and mirrors, to rid itself of satiety.
Light stands in the dirt, and making circles with its hands.
Death is the number of circles in the apple blossom tree.
naïve haircuts 