Two a.m.

I wake up early-
earlier than usual.
And I assume it must have been the moon
disturbing my sleep, with its intrusive and
garish moonlight on high
and the ghoulish nightmares
all rising to the surface.

When it finally rains, I am comforted
by the cloud cover,
which will luckily tuck me in tonight
and I should sleep tighter, making for more
muted sleeping conditions
with this welcome addition of white noise
atop clean white sheets.

It pours. It hails. It is dark.
And I wake-too early-
still-wondering
why this sinking icy feeling holds me here,
alert and anchored.
Awake. A constant pull, resistance and an
uprising washes over me, cold chains snap
forcing me violently to the surface,
gasping for air.

My two eyes try to adjust
to the bright white light,
where windows make mirrors
dark pupils shrink in the glare.
And I see, plainly,
it is too early to tell...



Painting by Johan Jongkind c. 1872 in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Treasures of a culture

Fire and glass reflected as smoke in mirrors.

A fork in the road, litter, like this wrapper, bottle, vessel, hand tools.

Artisan: colored ink, in part cursive curls, heartfelt loops, and snares,

we wrapped, and rapped, enrapt and bound ourselves.

Every opening begins with Roman squares, agoras, and edges

worn blurry and thin by so many eyes through ages, brittle

print-finger smudges to be dusted and all the while,

porous rocks erode into grainy pixel flashes, storage

boxes stack up, clouds let go, and by marrow

calcification holds together

bricks of pressed clay
                                     -for shelter is always a wall.

Supporting para-graphs, columns, and beams-by

lighted button codes:
green, go, yellow, slow, red, blood, blue screen of death,

only to touch here, like plucked strings
of stereocilia stimulating

goosebumps in sound waves that wash over us in wet streams.

Eye contact, nerve endings, radiant warmth from a mortal smile,
laser focus, photography un-posed, unprepared, ad-libbing and adding

depth of perception, this is us-

Totaled and broken down to the smallest things

in order to count the time more accurately

in minute fractions of eternity,

Well, this is why we bury things. 




Photo credit By Max Peronius (1907-1946), Tankavaara c. 1934 in[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Thor's day

Lightning likes it when we reach up to touch the sky.

And, grounded as we are

lucky in keeping our electricity contained 

and kept a safe distance from the epicenter or eye

It is miraculous we survive, sometimes, like a flash-

in the way that it is so unexpected, sudden

and unbelievable-until it occurs to you. 

Miraculum, as in the object of wonder.

It happened to me on a Thursday in February, 

just past the noon hour.

I was punched in the chest-

windswept out with words-choking on this

wonder-full revelation.

Desperately I tried to grasp my breath 

midair and stuff it back in where it stings 

and has been so hollow

and in wrestling with this 

it may have sounded like crying or rain.

But the dam lids overflowed 

and I struggled to compose a normal sound

while my son grabs a beverage from the fridge behind me, 

I exhale-steadily

as if blowing out a wish.

It was a video I was supposed to watch, assigned, as in destiny.

The woman spoke of her life, nothing like mine. 

Then she spoke of suicide and asked why, why, why-

she was not asking for forgiveness.

She traded her story with a Buddhist, 

the words he chose to frame her parable were:

"You chose Them", I coughed, she repeated, “you Chose them.”

The accusation blinding, hence the tears we blinked back.

It changes Here.

Where things are twisted 

around & 

you break the descending karmic chain
and begin Free fall.

This is when my heart plummeted like lead into my pelvis,

my rib cage closed, and I gasped one last deep breath

before being born once again

on a Thursday in February.

“This is the miracle that happens every tie to those who really love: the more they give, the more they possess.” 

-Rainer Maria Rilke

         “Everybody holds the possibility of a miracle.” 

-Elizabeth David 

 “I’ve never seen a greater monster or miracle than myself.” 

-Michel de Maontaigne

Painting by Mårten Eskil Winge (1825-1896), 'Thor's Battle' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Diurnal disbursements

Two night
terrors in a row
and one begins to feel the mixed reality
of day-dreams, what seems
light,
the photosphere,
assembles into bands of time
where body temperature correlates to color
and we are confined to a range,
endlessly scanning.

It seems the sensual burdens never cease,
perpetually sentenced to fixed perception
without the proper nouns, one feels
naked and utterly unequipped to resist
wishes and wherewithals,
comfort zones and one peace of mind.
In our comas, we can only succumb
to this and that-all
that we tell ourselves about infinities.

One often feels a strong momentum,
as if taken
on this ride around the clock, resigned to
eternally count our blessings.
All the nearby ember bodies are following us
and one feels curses, radiant heat, distinctly
a gravitation toward the bonfire sun
where horrors have no dark bodies
in which to hide.

Although, it is never the same as being awake.




Artwork (drawing and watercolor) by Odilon Redon, c. 1903 in[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Currency calculator

I worry when we need milk 

and wonder where the daily bread will come from.

Too many survive famine. 

Child support is over a week late. 
The Department holds the money it collects from others,
on behalf of others, extra days, 

in an interest-bearing account.
The Department makes more money
that way, it adds up in
arrears and years that cannot be spent
growing and splitting heirs.

The college decisions are coming in. 

We all wonder where this will take us. 

We need to pick a meal plan. She will not starve,
she hopes-
they better have good coffee. 

While driving to take the truck in for an unknown repair, 

the sky held up its coolest winter blue,
the air was crisp like minted dollars,

and I could not take my eyes off the sky
while riding home.

It said everything.

And utterly cloudless,
when I spy a shuttlecock of white, like a flash, in contrast to the blues,

I watched this meteoric figure against the broad daylight
falling, fading, falling, 
and finally, disappearing into the sky,
it all sunk in.

Like small talk, no granular attention is paid.
Burned up. I am broke anyway. 

Just like today. This week, I am weaker
than gravity.

Lighter with empty pockets and incinerating
into nothing,
but solid air pumping in and out of the chest

like fire and ice,
all the elements are there and it is enough 

for a poem. 

Photo credit By Clivelindsay at English Wikipedia, 'Comet McNaught with moon setting over the sea' [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Raking in the poetry

The record keepers and magnifiers
emphasized the purpose of poetry.
All of them, some that wear glasses,
some enshrined in plastic name clips.
All paper people
pretended
not just poets read poetry
as if listening was another way.

It was the concept, not the thing itself.
Grasping for a metaphor, clutching it like a baby spoon,
mush, mulch, nutrients, marrow, letting the heaviest bits
sink into oblivion as bullion or aether.
Comfort food. Settling.
Essences do not help with sleep and monotony,
pillows don't help with the blows of day
despite the changing positions or points of you
dealing with it and spitting feathers out.

The poet thinks his poems are the sharpest
because he has cleaved them out of his own
family tree and lay claim to uprooted and unfounded
murky concepts dim lit,
he has the callouses to prove it.

We have been warned about our
rites and rules of the word
which make or break a fine line between
make, made, pane and pain.
It always comes out as a color,
expression of tone that matches
the eye, radiant on the pyre
we warm up to the edges
with enough pacing.

Compliments come with a modest reading fee.
Only we poets read poetry, ideally free
from notoriety and ultimately forgotten.
We needed trees more than prose.
The leaf knows about leaves
from watching the Fall.

and greens in envy of the sun.

Poets lied

in the shadows thrown about, whistling

while they wait.


Painting By Ellen Robbins (1828–1905) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Double entendre: 4'33

Your Royal Madame,
Touche
I am a must be madman-I mean mad I am.
This incidence rather a coincidence,
                                           I think not.

It seems to me, it seems to be, and it just seems
an ironic twist of fate-wait-
                                     do I believe in that? Irony? Fate?

This is Shirley Sacrilegious? I’ve said that first name before-

No this is timing. Counting the time with you.
Not in a cage. Not a Cage. Nor Cagian but Timean era,
ergo, time and time again
-reduce-reuse-recycle-
wherein the cycle, rinse, sit and spin.

I met a girl, I met a poem, I meta read a poem
and know-know, know 'em-by heart, by shape,
by sound and better by sin tax, i-ambroken.

It was the eye. The i. Thy.
Universe. No place-like home. 

Always. Life imitates Art. Art imitates Life.
This goes there and that here and this fits and that works
and this is temporary.

And I culled, if that’s the word, took my due 

they said it was-but it sounds so sharp

and severe-the paper reaper is Here!

It is better when the cage is left open,
the books laid down comfortably,
the poems lined up and put to the side,
away, in the marginalia, as if part of the conversation
as if welcome in side,
where silverfish swim
and humans have traveled by sand
in glass hours of solitude.

Well, I just had to tell you-

I had to move the bookshelf in the bedroom.

Not the good one, the one opposite the bathroom.

To access the little door in the wall-not for me-

I think the wall was listening,
Modern Poetry, like water in the walls
falls through the pipes and vocal chords
like metronomes kept me calm.

Scaring sensitive books brittle by neglect,
oh I stirred it up all right! 

Two to six boxes stacked by the front door-

No need to be sad-it means room for more
not so delicious to corrosion.

No, I do not feel the need

to fingerprint them? Plate them. Serve or share them. 
Take something else, copied T's.  

The tribute Retallack retold, paginated for posterity.

The Others-Hah!
Obtuse out of context objects-

subjective-as though there was any other way

but to give those ones away.

The silence set in. Water absorbed. Cage closes in
the dust bunnies-butterflies-not yet-worms with wings.

Yeah, it is poetry answering life, the birds speak

the questions

that Timing is everything,
Those boxed up books are all Free!
Is this irony? Or just population control, Fate of the paper,
vaporous dates with destiny,
I see this not lasting, Dear John.

Art by Charles Emmanuel Biset, Still life with books, letter and tulip (1633–after 1693) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Net wait

A blessing comes with a curse,

wait and good things will appear,

like whale spouts and comet tails bursting forth,

you will see-eventually.

And chances are 

choices awaiting a verb,

like the other side of the coin

what is tossed in the air,

must plummet to its lowest nadir.

We have seen this played out. Likewise,

such sweeping statements, proverbs and prophecies,

do little for everything-in-all-times, 

yet consistently, this movement tends to

strew the smallest fragments more widely 

distributed across the floor and

atop all the lowest planes, building up-

just as the feather duster spreads its wings,

the timepiece propels one to practice 

gathering oneself more

and in doing so, magnetism must assert 

its basic properties are acuter 

than our elemental bodies

behaving and obeying the laws.

Well, we can only collect our thoughts 

and arrange them in an orderly fashion 

so that they may be 

overlooked,

making more room to move around and since 

wisdom was a woman, things, like elimination, 

we tend to find 

liberating in corners.

Everything here, in a sense shows, 

entropy was a mirror image of 

this empty room, piling up with dunes of dust.

While waiting for change,

chaos was creating 

lines in the sand and

when the wind broke in for one last sweep,

there was nothing to weigh any of us down.

The holes served their purpose. 

Image By A Stieglitz, c. 1899 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Scissor Sprinter

This poem is dedicated to Shaun White, who won his third Olympic gold medal in the Men's Half-pipe snowboarding competition February (12) 13, 2018.


While everyone watched frozen under flat light,
the announcers named the tricks as if they had
a secret menu with special combination numbers;
"Double McTwist twelve-sixty, front-side double cork
fourteen-forty, backside one-eighty" and on and off
from -helicopter height, the windows were rolling up,
and up and- they kept saying, it's like
"Running with Scissors",
"Running with Scissors"-

And on the rails,
the blades were dicing ice cubes into flakes
and carving deep lines no body falling
under Newton's law should follow.

As if the white backdrop was not ghastly enough,
the fretted intensity was only further
ratcheted around by the foot-pound, experience
is no receipt and injuries, grand slams, more curdling visions of
gore galore, with winces and
careening through the barrel came this dominant figure
with a thundering force of Nowness
and such intense Presence-
the crowd sensed this-
and like tea-kettles gathering steam the people
whined while he calmly rocks, they all speculate, he breathes
the wind screams, GO-
Now
outside of this high-pitched rapture-
white noise-froth and heartbeat-
he hurls himself aloft into the thin mountain air.
An Olympian finds himself folding and
forged with steel will, armed against all avalanches
gathering doubt,
gravity does not all ways
get her way.
Not today.

He insists his mortal self against the elements,
in hot white floods of force and musculature
tightened to the verge of splintering and fraying
at every fibrous ending,
without terminus, such as manifest dreams
repeat victories, underdogs and hometown hero's-
ending up, and up- upon frozen water afloat
and mindful of sharp edges,

-Suspended-
in the plane

gliding

victorious and humbled,
the competitor maintains his position
needing more blank space to trace his lines,
he finds reams of paper to shred,
and this Scissor Sprinter salivates
gathering the gauze of this paper plane pulp
to soak up the blood of mistake with stars and stripes.

So Sochi seems like destiny.
Challenge accepted.
Regret is erased with White.

Sweeter, this time, his sheer act of execution
in this balancing craft of the one versus self,
trenches a pipe-line between seeing
and being seen, striking gold
and going for gold,
performance and performance,
tomatoes being thrown at you
or being known
as the thrown one
at eighteen, twenty-two and thirty-one.

Overcome,
he has raised the gold bar.

[The Olympian brings waves of joy to quiet homes
on a Tuesday evening in the seaside town of Carlsbad.
The residents run to get the Wednesday paper
whereby, 
front and center, the Golden Boy
brings home the rarest thing of all-
(Real) Good News from Korea!]



Photograph By Sarkavagyan (Own work), 'Winter in Armenia' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

One and done

A singular point pierces the edifice of air,
a stone ruffles the feathered water in strands
where the wind was whispering aloud
and bodies bending above were
leeched into the one minuscule slit.
Pulses race under this repulsive pulling force,
heat escapes by each breath projecting into liquidity
and bulging beams charge forth in banded arrays
fractured from nothing, All
excited by this culmination
we found ourselves somewhere in there
catching glimpses with eyelids
necks lace this track, our spine compresses,
humidity falls, beads babble over boulders in
broken brooks under black light or water and space
pulled from the mountains sleeve
pinches time, a shroud of silken sky
glistens with age, a blink of life, a volume of light,
reaches its diurnal destination,
recycling motes in elliptical orbits.





Photo By Ingolfson (Self-photographed) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Minute Beans

Your time is money.
This account-Your Life, Net Worth
spent counting minutes

Until it never
earned any interest-ing
ways to get rich quick.

Capitalism
liquid mold, carbon copies
mint makers go broke

count on your changes
to add value. Return Re-
ceipt not required.

The storm has come to pass

We didn't have any pictures, she told me.
My mother said the only thing we had from him
was the toy chest he made that we kept inside my closet,
the one I used to climb in.

I'd hide in the darkness, inside the closet, inside the chest-
and I tried to believe, maybe it was all about him.

My mother has many pictures from when I was little
of my step-father's rock-and-roll band. He played guitar.
And in those old photos, there in the middle of the bass drum,
where the pillow for practice goes,
you see there is a little curled up body,

unmistakably my own.
Even long after I've long outgrown these small spaces,
I can remember feeling this heartbeat
like my own-

And I recognized, it was not about him either.
There were pictures.
She lied-plain and simply-I found-
I liked to hide
myself too.

And I can still distinctly recall feeling the floods
of darkness and thunder washing over me,
but there were no pictures of this I could find.

My mother would remind me,
not of myself.

Blonde and radiant, back then
she was more like the sun,
and likewise, one learns
too much exposure can lead to cancer.

It is the smell of rain that takes me back, the storm
that delivers these dank reminiscences,
dropping memory all over me
wet and vivid, here and now.

And under this heavily cloaked night, the sky hangs
starless and preoccupied with pushing clouds around,
building up pressure and waving flags,
whereby I cannot help but find that I share
a stark resemblance
to thin air.




Photo By Adolf Zika (Adolf Zika´s archive) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Sea minor

The day you were born
It would never be the same
as it ever was.

This day, at that time
started this life
                       from lives past-
Passed through you to you
creating something
from some things that were before
you arrived as you.

This time and time again

many things came first
many more things will come to pass
none have counted you
in years
             -as the last

-pushing through, pulling you-

The only time you
were you,
we met
            through others
matters were made

any day now we will change
-back-
into strangers, fate carried vessels
pulling our chords,
                              the other way.



Painting by Ivan Aivazovsky [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons. 

Puzzling poet

The last line was laid and this tied it all together,
Success!

Yet in the excitement of the assembled vivid scene,

the poet dropped his masterpiece onto the tile floor,

Whereby words shattered and scattered about

Everywhere.

Dejected and deterred, he could only kneel down

and try to pick up the pieces flung in far off places,

watchful for synonymous edges 

and similar shades

and of course, he paid particular attention
to the edges.

It had been done before, 

he told himself to start over,

it would be easier this time,

never imagining a different picture

put together,

he caught himself still glued to the finished image

of the new poem before him-
Stunning!

From out of Nowhere

its edges disappeared,

he saw it would never be finished,
so he took it apart and put it away.




Artwork by Harry Willson Watrous [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Terminal Velocity

My toes point to that familiar path
over which I tread the same very way
without thought, after days, after days
ground-soft
                               only it doesn't end.
The terminus dissipates before me
the exit escapes
itself

fracturing new matter,
atoms posing in new positions,
the frames along the long hall
                                        rattle and
all fall, shattering into
collage.

I have moved on and on
and recognize how the light changes
just enough to see
this
step
through and parallel time
at equal velocities and thus
all must be still-

transported. This is how
I can be carried along
in this metropolitan body,
incentivized, yet
                    infested with crime,
corrupt with ego, more so
hiding in skin
I was entrusted to always protect-
                                        but don't.

Animal eyes see me
burrow in my bi-pedestal body
and hear my heart beat itself and
echo through my unshod feet-
yet I do not run,
                                   I carry on,
erect, by these same narrow walls
plastered shells, caves or caverns
alternating distances passed
by vision and memory
                                        alone,
                                   barefoot,
weary but walking on and on
this way
toward the vanishing point.

Photograph By PCR Services Corporation, creator [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.