Tree of Knowledge

They bow and touch
lips to stone.
Salty soup leaking steam
like smoke from an altar
in the gold star driven nights
over the glowing flames
of an old Russian Monastery.
Backs bent from endless work
like plants toward life
giving light.

A cold wind
blows to prepare the soup
for the tongue. Rippled
monks bend in unison
under the breath of God.
Their lips are silent -
always in silence
because you cannot talk
with your lips against
the stone.
They give their voices to God.

During the day they prepare
the bread they eat at night.
A waterfall of falling grains
ground and broken for a reason.
Men in brown turning the wheel
while singing praise.
Drown the bread in cooling
soup and pop those rain soaked
clouds into mouths worn
from a day of singing and smiling.
They give their voices to God.

Days of singing and working
are useless at the altar
when they bend to meet the ground.
Silence is the only proper
response to awe.
Silence is the only thing
you can do
with lips pressed
against all of God’s creation.
They give their voices to God.

Press her against you,
so she can bend too.
There is a world that kisses
you back my monks.
He created her from the same
ground grains as you.
She bends in the breeze.
She blows on her soup
and on your ear.
She sings, and prays
all day long until night falls
so she can press her lips
against a stone
in silence.
It is not good,
it is not good,
for man to be alone.

So give to her,
give her your voice
and she’ll give it back.
From this dialogue of creation,
the harmony of silence,
comes true wisdom -
the only thing He wants for us,
the rest is violence.

Our voices come from God.

Catch A Fish, Throw It Back

A diploma and a ticket for the train
I’m buying new guitar strings with my change.
Washing conditioned nerves with bottled water
down a throat to live off of,
the hard work unseen like farmer hands
in the rearview mirror of a corn field.
Reader’s digest and a traveler’s meal
suppressing how I’ve been taught to feel
about leaving home to find myself.
The manifest destiny ride.
If it were up to me, I would try to fly.

An atlas balanced on converse all-stars
the ceaseless nausea of bucking train cars.
The Midwestern tundra has turned to rain
leaving blue skies behind me.
There are different invisible people here.
Different hands not seen. Yellow signs
for reconstruction sites abandoned
serve as arm rests for hard hat men
with steel toes planted on the edge
of someone else’s world -
The weight of which presses on their backs.

Neck tied commuters turning into pigs
clouded by thick smoke of passing big rigs.
The highway runs parallel
and almost touchable. There is grayness
to this age. Our freedom
makes it tolerable to be in this cage.
to place our hand on the window,
it can’t push through. Several hundred miles
until I get back to you.

The yawning lonely eye of the giant overpass
cuts the tranquility of the rolling grass
and our bullet travels against odds and gods
through the pupil. Don’t blink. I almost missed
what we are going through. A serpentine
woman, afraid of touch, but more afraid of dark
has grabbed my hand. Counting digits
in her head, her breathing is hectic. It’s all
I know of her until we emerge from the
ocean to the air. A deep breath to shake
the scare. A ’sorry’ and a ‘thank you’ are
all she can say. She slips a burned CD from her
bag. Its labeled: “just press play”. I pause to
look at the shining disc in my hand, looking back
to thank her, nobody is there.

Addictive hooks and lyrics draw me to her rock
and roll romantics. It is her voice, and it calls me to walk
after her retreat. I pull the earphones from the jack
but leave the CD to turn by itself. Home
isn’t far, I can’t give in now. Turn, turn, turn
the world, churn, churn, churn the sea. I stumble for
the notepad and fumble for the words. Outside
I miss the passing birds and sunset
migrating to forget.

A man old enough to have been from the grave and back
works on an endless newspaper stack
and chews a pen used to put words in their places
in every Sunday edition between New York
and Anchorage. He’s a man who seen so much past
that he knows the future. Keen and wise
he’ll be dead before he knows. I’ll make his funeral
if he is going where I am. We make idle chit-chat
so I can get his name, occupation, and hopefully
a destination. Reese, retired professor of literature,
and he simply rides the trains back and forth.
He’ll die in the dining car after getting all he could eat.
He said if I am searching for home I’ll never find it.
What does he know? He is old and senile.

Lonely and tired from the exchange
I’ve got you and your heartstrings on my brain.
Once I had thought you were out of reach
but now I’ve crossed this vast country
in belief that you would wait.
I met you in the dunes of a foreign beach
that day. My atrophied muscles struggling
with stable land. You had seashells in your hair
and naked for all I cared as if you had sprung
from the ocean itself. You found my travels cute,
but misplaced. Your love fell on another face
like the passing sun. “Sorry for collateral damage,”
you said, “but I was so far from home
and looking for something to make me feel good.
I never meant to hurt you.”
They never do I suppose.

I joined Reese on the next train out.
He asked what all the crying was about.
I told him that my lovers was gone
and yet how beautiful I had held her.
I told him I was homeless, like him,
and that he was right about never returning home.
“That is not what I said at all,” he laughed.
“I would never lie like that. It just isn’t
about searching lad. It’s about knowing
what you have.”

An Aubade – For Future Nights

There are words caught on my tongue
and my arms are getting weak.
My stomach is coming undone
and my brain has sprung a leak.
Fingers pluck a bass like jazz
improving notes like rain
on her ivory skin, and at last,
I can’t complain. I can’t complain.
Eight days a week, it’s all the same
until, with luck, you lose
yourself, your pride. You lose the game
of give to receive, sacrifice to chose,
leave to draw love, love to please.
In her skin she hides, waiting for me
to reveal myself. Surprise! I never was
before your eyes saw me. See?
There was no finding me, it was finding us.
Its time to heal, with every string
I pluck, and you sing Catullus,
With some luck and a thousand kisses
we’ll steal from fate this crazy thing
we thought we’d get alone.
We are going to find our way home.

The Last First Kiss

It was in her apartment,
that cradle of art
and of error
that a first kiss peeled
like wall paper
in hot wet summer.
We got to like that sticky
feeling
because it blurred where
we started and each other began.

The television was too evasive
so we turned to your phonograph.
The record skipped
so we turned on the radio.
The commercials advertised
nail painting and nihilism
so we turned to speak
to each other.

Stop smoking pot and kiss me.
You think you’re better than being stoned?
I just want to taste your lips.
You can in five minutes.
That illusive set of images….
that groove that keeps skipping….
those naked nails….
what followed was silence
and the sound of footsteps leaving.

Lost and Losing

The unlived life is not worth examining
and though it is better to have loved
it is better to have lived
than to never have felt pain
or the loneliness
that comes with having friends
and lovers like owls.
They leave when the sun is up
with work to be done
so that the sand and salt
of repetitive actions
grind through your turning cogs
of aching joints,
feverish skin,
and pounding headaches.
Plod along waiting for night,
the sun hardening your skin
to bronze. A trail,
your residue killing grass
and defining edges
of this winding path you made alone.
That is worth the living
if only for the night,
if only for the dreams,
if only for the blessed, blessed,
moment that the owl returns
shaking its own salt and dust
from its feathered back.

You were never alone child,
you just didn’t see everybody else.
So examine if you must,
love before you leave,
and cherish every broken piece
of life. I’ll help you put it back
together with some pieces
of me.

Do Unto Others

That is why books have covers
like old projectors on walls
with translucent sheets to hold
the shadows captive.
Like modern smoke detectors
to alert the students
with its siren call to meet
in ordered lines
of evacuation.

A mouth like a gavel
to call to order,
to end a trial,
to put a nail in place,
to smash a scarab,
or to rest on the Bible.
Do you tell a judge not to judge?
A carpenter not to build?
A teacher not to teach?

When I was young,
before your time,
as ancient as Egypt,
I would lie
about what I saw,
or touched,
or did,
and felt a terrible disarray -
a fun disarray.
Yet, contrary to my pounding heart,
that ever present justifier,
my parents would say
“You must do your part in this world,
you must work before you play.”

In the end, I have learned it to be true,
and love them for trying to tell me,
but more important still,
like breathing my child,
is what the journey has taught me to do.
My dear innocent,
my white winged angel,
my baptized babe,
you must do unto others,
no matter what they say,
as you would have them
do unto you.

All Around Is Turning

All around us,
all around us,
is turning
turning.
The world isn’t big enough,
the kids are too old,
and the coffee
is burning.

And in the hearts
of every man
is a yearning,
a churning,
for a change
he can’t make,
or can’t name.
So he drinks his bitter
coffee and chokes.

Everything around
keeps turning,
turning.
And because we don’t
feel eyes watching
we curse this
horrible mundanity
in the name of gods
and hearths
and nations.
We stab them back
with what
we have been learning,
learning.

Why I Laughed

Inside her
I see endless
space
frightening enough
to make me
laugh. A miracle
on fire.
And in her face
is a path,
an abyss between
lips that
cross my wires
stopping me
from delivering messages.
Thin red lace
hugging her hips
and the quivering
confessions of
my agoraphobic
finger tips
as if playing
a guitar for the first
time. Variations
in the key of woman.
A flame in a vacuum
everything is inside,
drawn to her
like creation’s bang
rewinding
around the ball
of nothing
that consumes
a new born reality.

Let It Be Now, Let It Be Now (For The Saint)

I stole something which I had plenty
and of much better quality.
Wickedness filled me.
I remember its feeling
being full
like a thanksgiving feast
of pear stuff birds
we made dance by
alternating their thigh bones
left and right.
I nevertheless felt forced to imagine
something physical occupying space
perhaps even growing
like aunt Sysaphus’ gut as she pushed
another meatball through infinite space
outside the world.
Perhaps today she will explode.
And the space remains evacuated
of anything physical.
The child of my self forms mashed
potato into his fancy in an enigma
as if in a mirror.
I thought of my sister’s dolls
the heads of which I removed
in an attempt to horrify.
It didn’t.
In surprising ways these thoughts
had a visceral effect

on me.

Now I am an adult
and my old loves, hold
me back. They tug my grament
of flesh. I still want
people to know I steal things,
things I don’t need,
but I steal to be social,
to claim purpose,
to snub even my inner voice
and in so doing
claim the freedom I am owed.

Yet still the voice continues:
Let it be now,
let it be now.

Pirate Music

He said your poetry gives you away.
He is more honest that me
That is why he says so. Sometimes
it tells me who I am today,
or was yesterday,
and sometimes I just sit in my room
and pirate music.