Mantra(s)

(1)
Put this is your mouth
tasting this flavor of thought
smell the breath with in.

(2)
Lingering outside
you choose the notes to pick up
and savor the sounds.

(3)
Prove you can jump in
and out of the echoes left
in the chorus line(s).

(4)
Get inside between
and stretch as much as
you can momentarily.

Painting by Thomas Eakins [Public domain].

Another time

could you tell
the
pre-
occupation was else-
where
by, I mean, analogous to
investment, banking into
listening with the right ear-
I always knew
it was not wrong-
which explains why
I haven't given
much voice,
by choice
to what is left
over

this way
I can hear who said it best
and decide omissions,
sadly some adverbs snuck in
the cracks,

the poet recites
from fissures
showing the weak spots
matching voices,
what could have been
an echo
asked again,
could you repeat that?




Painting by Giovanni Segantini, 1892 in [Public domain].

Thought Angler

...sounds a little like
reminding, word choice and voice
in head unleashed runs back over
itself, like long winds of Jack Kerouac.

When some words settle
like boulders, impressioned and set on
making a safe crossing of white waters
for rock dwellers and ware sellers
of Cages. When Neruda was no longer
a border,
Lowell and beholden-There
I was only a Rae,
scaled into a small Armantrout
aiming upstream it seems
by heart.

Planning my path further,
the banks beckon me with moving silt lines
that shape earth
with a wand of whim. All eyes swim across all
those cummings and goings
making sparkles
above.

I take Paz at the reflection,
amassing stones
and skip the flattest ones
across the Eliotic surface,
Poundless and unpuddled,

noting ripples like run on sentences
that could race round forever,
yet are bound by body, only to be
settled on the shores
in the act of abating the volume
of poetry
with only the words of Emily,
finally.

I have caught a current in a collective
intention, wielding a hand
with a hook that looks
like a pen.
I wait, feeling for the wiggle,
a sign, message spoken
through fingertips-

this was when silence
was most sought
by the spear.






Painting by Martin Ryckaert (1587-1631), 'Fisherman in a wooded landscape' in [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.

Driving Ms. Crazy

Push-push-push

the words away-

Not Now, I'm driving-

Go Away, I say

to some voice who speaks 

whenever cotton choosing

time it strikes, 

fancy that

despite the 

distraction and cost,

I lose

my place

I will remember that 

later

I think

and try to trace

that thought I thought

I knew-flew

out the cracked window 

and is stuck back in traffic...

A bump in the grind

passed over like a pothole

or just a poorly patched-

over up poem. 

Image from 1902 publication, 'Motors and Motor-driving' by Alfred Charles William Harmsworth.