Results for category "2018"

What if…

What if all of my bad choices
explode into dense night air
in a resonant plume of iridescent 
blue light—enough to lighten 
dark night—as transitory as a momentary
sun in brackish steep light, streaky
sweet light in a blue horizon?

That would be grand, wouldn’t it?

I can feel the tongue sizzle of cold
orange soda, from the vintage soda 
machine in our apartment’s laundry room,
just 25¢, so cold on a hot spring baseball
day, as sweet sweat covers me, happily
played, because we played all day as children
will, our furious, relentless homerun days 

If I see the ball, I can hit it

Coarsened in my own light cone
I can see just one piece of our past
and from this I’ll interpolate the whole
I know what kind of love you’re looking
for and when it’s yours you’ll treasure it
mostly, like an afterthought of what 
was done in this time, in this place 

Afterthoughts fleeting and ambiguous

They led the charge against us and 
we mowed them down—They were
downright arrogant, futile and mean—
Revenge, unless you’re mentally unhinged,
do the math for once and forget it,
it costs too much, you can’t have it,
it’s just some futile dream

Popular, vituperative fantasies of revenge

People live in their memories like 
herd animals as stupid as sheep
That old man said from behind his 
imposing cherry wood desk—“I don’t
know if I’ll hire you but I sense that
I can trust you with thousands of
dollars—you’ll never steal from me”

How could I turn her down?

I won’t give up on you 
Who you are determines how you’ll fly
Gravity is a foundational force—We’ll
all fall and we’ll fall at the same time—
our depths felt in every crevice and detail
Not perfection but a standard 
Perfection’s a dumb herd animal

That childlike, sweet green apple crunch 

“You think I’m a woman and
you can mess with me because I’m
weak—Try it bitch 
You’ll find I’m also a man 
and I will fuck you up”
In a dream from far away my
brother gives me his shoes

We each have our own smell

The depth of his love was 
felt in every crevice and detail,
utterly subconscious and strong 
Style expresses personality
Birds gliding in circles  
together is called “soaring” 
Is devotion and love the same?

We were gliding together that day

-December 29, 2018-

It’s a ruin

Hair and beard alluded to here
Look, how his finger points upwards
It’s all complete though not entirely
there—the thing that makes it great is
a ruin from the start like the walnut
wrinkled face of a grotesque man’s age
as jellied light streaks from behind him

I won’t cry about my real troubles
so I cry about unrelated sorrows hardly
mine—She’s a free Indian spirit
Money, to her, is meaningless, tedious
work is a no-life, she needs to feel
the brutal outside cold and seeks the spirit of
circular paths instead of our safe square lives

The rot she drinks may finally kill her
I judge, reason and live for comfort
in boxes—each day’s rage and
uncertainty are contradictory narratives
held in my mind at once—a world
of simultaneous narratives as
she grazes and graces my life

A resigned, insecure curiosity,
a coarse kind of humility
our long and venerable history—
that part of her that can so easily
get on without me as I pause,
judge and prescribe—as I
sit and cry about nothing

One raw evening without even
thinking, I moved to close her
jacket to cover her neck from
the cold and she remarked on it,
that it was just like me to do that
I think about her at least once
a day, sometimes more, no

specific time, time’s random
Her spirit is everywhere
It’s my vision and my power
How quick the days go
Don’t let the smooth taste fool you
Tiny deviations in density, little
fractures, a little pizazz

wasn’t too much to ask for
Pleasure and pain are twins
and can’t be conjured, or made
plain, the one without the other
We went to Italy, Jamaica,
Peru, lounged together in the
Dominican Republic…

Sometimes it looks like a duck
Sometimes it looks like a hare
It won’t appear as both at once
but both of them are there
She called it “The black pearl”
I called it “The Sphinx”
Everything we know is everywhere

-December 1, 2018-

The cool breeze

The cool breeze, the old trees,
the bright leaves—heaviness
decays into lightness
When you’re not with me,
your enemies say you’re
a person I wouldn’t know
Truth is what works and

love’s just a shadow—
I won’t give up on her and
she won’t give up on me
If love burns it’s never slightly
I walk quickly, goal or not
Judgment and knowledge
aren’t ever the same

We’re specks in the vastness—
This is serious, sensuous
The people here are known
to be crazier than coots
Meters, tempi, moods—
our simultaneous narratives
We make it strange but not

harsh, like a Nordic girl in
some tawny, jazzy, autumnal park
Happily we walked parallel
to the carousel, focused
on its ceramic shapes in the
fullness of revolving space, our
dark energy inside our dark matter

My certainties, uncertain
My deeper rules, all new
Joe DiMaggio, they say
would, in retirement, watch
a professional baseball game
and could usually predict, from
the body language of the players

which team would win even
when the team he chose seemed
sure to lose—he’d just know
The Pagans knew that if there are
gods they’ll take care of us when
we’re dead and if there are no
gods then everything just ends

We may feel a lasting burn
even after the event, after
the cause, is forgotten like some
shadowy torch wrought in
shadows—here then gone, the
inevitable impermanence—each
of our days together, so precious

-November 2, 2018-

I’m told

I’m told that 99.9% of earthly
species are now extinct and that
in 100 million years the sun
will implode with heat and wrath and
our earth will be, like the planets above
and the moon before us, uninhabitable
With 100 billion stars in our galaxy

and 100 million (and still counting)
galaxies, why are we so alone?
She keeps her money in her shoe
as fall leaves dry and decay into
wild wet colors like glistening
sea stones beneath us while the
the moon stabilizes the earth’s tilt

and time heals nothing but
conceals all, so deeply flawed, so
heavenly, as if freedom is the work
of anxiety, hesitation, errors and terror
Behold the robust water bears,
moss piglets, they can live anywhere,
reside in unconscious paradise

and have done so for at least
100 million years
We are lovers again because
our love becomes us and
here we are in all innocence
and this is how we partner
and we’re as miniscule as

the stars in a 100 million galaxies
Lively and robust, much is on
my mind as my earthly guides
falter in search of a resonant,
public reality of signs—so far
our advertisements are visually
more vibrant than what’s advertised

Like a tourist exposed to magnificent
sights but who doesn’t really see them,
these falsities of unity aren’t free
What you use to mediate vibrantly
determines what you see
Science is symbolic forms,
a system of signs, a pluralistic policy

of simultaneous narrations
in search of our perfect zone where
her inner light reflects upon my own
Jean Rhys wrote “I don’t write when
I’m happy but I’ve never had a
long period of happiness
Has anyone?”

Truth always illuminates—
It isn’t true just because it
seems so to you and your bilious
tribe of power-mad, privileged louts
Ask yourself now how many Romans felt
secretly gladdened by the bloody murder
of Caesar, that populous liar and tyrant

-October 7, 2018-

Frustration in

Frustration in wide hospital corridors resonates into
night like a slow taut walk past large exit signs that
show us the way to damp humid streets; like a sorrowful
pain electrically shot from our hearts to our knees;
like a tenderness and neuropathy in tired scorched
feet; like a love that fails because my lover is
sick again and I can’t really help her and she

would wordlessly leave me as I scurry
to catch up with her, find her a car and
send her off on her way home without me
to nag her about treatment as she’s
convinced that I’m judging her, don’t
really know her and won’t let her be
We don’t choose who to love except
that we kind of do—love echoes us

As we feel the ancient moonlight and
I do what I can to make it not hurt so
in this marred world of caustic polarities,
where our creative acts choose, make, discard
and keep and our being is the result of the
conditions under which we live because we aren’t
and there are no universal beings; and because
nature applies to us without regard to our welfare,

I would celebrate the authenticity of play
in this anguished churn of turmoil and possibility
however inadequate my wishes always play
I am sometimes so sure of my vision and then I
think—my passions are strong, my understanding
is feeble and pride’s my intoxication
The truth’s a whole with no parts and all of my
carefully wrought order will, of course, dissipate

She’s not beautiful because she pleases
She pleases because she’s beautiful
There are many who are smarter than me
but not in a way that matters to me
The suicidal Mr. Bourdain went one
time for that show of his to Mississippi
and saw one backwater city after another
where he sampled greasy gravy laden southern

food and said everywhere “This is so good,
so good” All I could see was each stink-hole city
with its fat laden southern food that looks like slop
Of the jury in Alabama that wrongly convicted
the Scottsboro boys in the thirties the defense
attorney wrote “If you ever saw those creatures,
those bigots whose mouths are slits
in their faces, whose eyes popped out

like frogs, whose chins dripped with
tobacco juice, bewhiskered and
filthy, you would not have to ask
how they could do it” That’s still an
embedded rot in this fucked-up
country that even today gives us
the current Republican party and
its disgusting stink of a president

Personal beauty is a trifle compared
to the essence; “gusto” requires good
taste and should imbue everything
we care for and everything we do
We begin as children by believing
everything grown-ups say; credulity
gives way to caution; “Are you
untrustworthy, unreliable and selfish?”

A friend of mine started a career (as it turned
out a short career) as a college philosophy professor
Unfortunately, he was tasked with teaching
a bunch of brute idiot jocks one of whom said angrily
(while pounding his fist in his hand) “You know
prof, I could really use a C in this course” which was
not my friend’s vision or hope for teaching as
he so struggled to master Kierkegaard and Nietzsche

Skepticism might be good or else
it may paralyze especially when we see
how wretchedly old age etches itself
upon our faces, undermines our gusto and
turns to havoc our grand, pristine essence
Long before life here something from space smashed
into and scathed our earth, cut into a big chunk of it,
hurtled it into space, and made of it the moon

You are my punishment, my devotion, my other
I’m now 26 years older than my father was
(he was a philosophy professor, by the way)
when leukemia killed him so I should think
of him now as the younger man—but I don’t
I continue to age as my gears still smoke
I can’t see them but I feel them—
my life’s gears still gyrate and smoke

-September 8, 2018-