When she asked me, I thought of English Class

The poet used to have to be sad
because tragedy was harder to write in those days
the days of dusty old history books.
Life, at that point, was just as hard but still whimsical
to look upon something with despair took talent
because even amidst sickness, death, and plague
there was an air of mysticism.
The poet always liked a challenge.
Hence my daughter asks:
“why are poets always sad?”
It is not for any reason other than ease today
In the gray wrinkled newspaper world.
It is foolish to write about happiness, of love, of hope
for we are the children of despair
and the poet is our mouth.
The poet abhores others, for he sees only half-people,
He writes only about himself, for himself.
But still I answer her:
“They must be seeing something you and I don’t”.

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Reflections on a Silverback Guerrilla

He says humanity but means apes
lucky enough to understand their misery.
Resolve to evolve
Find the courage to leave the cave
and become the servant to your liberty.
Why did you ever leave?

Our neediness checked our ambition
but now we have more than we need.
A revolution against evolution.
Power inherited through our tradition
has turned survival into greed.
Is that so hard to believe?

He says that love is a chemical illusion
from the barrel of a gun.
Evolve her revolver
She prefers romance to evolution;
the moon over the sun.
Do you think she’s deceived?

Heaven, for him, is a benevolent lie
Well-meaning but ultimately wrong
Resolve to be solved
All to see is nothing, when you die
all but darkness is gone.
Am I supposed to be relieved?

He likes his technology, not realizing it makes him weak.
They demand his constant attention.
Evolve and dissolve
Plug yourself in, and see what you seek
the newest level of ascension.
Do you like what you’ve received?

Meanwhile his cousin waits in the zoo
passing messages with the sings they learn
An institution of revolution
They wait for the fall of man to be through
They’ve got a civilization to burn.
Our destruction will not be grieved.

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While Driving Home I Whitnessed a Crash.

Snow is pure but it is cold
and it falls.
Its not like us, its new and its old,
Its not like us at all.
It doesn’t mind being in a whole
it gives it power
to stop being a flake and assume control
with an avalanche.
No single one can take credit for the squall
so they are innocent.
Snow isn’t like us at all
it isn’t cognoscente
it doesn’t know the difference
between chosen and natural.
When it falls it doesn’t feel the wind
it doesn’t think freedom is vital
nor being questionable,
nor time passable,
nor nature unknowable,
It doesn’t wonder about the immortality of the soul
it doesn’t despair over its fall
it is pure white but very cold
No, snow isn’t like us at all.

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An Observation, an Objection, and a Story (2008)

No one wants to listen anymore
the ear is the symbol of servitude.
Speech is freedom,
The mouth is the pinnacle of power.

Silence is humility, a rejection of information
but still listening is irrelevant
for he who wishes to eat the fresh fruit of knowledge
will not be sated by the weeds of opinion.

In the garden of tar and steel
there is a race of people
who live in a mile tall mirror
over grown with the sweetest smelling
Anagallis arvensis.

The two inside, the final pair in all the world
Have safe sex all day and smell the flowers
(they think they are roses).
Neither recall what civilization is,
and wear only history as virtue.

Then as smoldering dusk o’retakes the sky
They watch the sun in the mirrored sides
of the mile-tall uncoiled snake
Which had long devoured them.

Such a place the devil wouldn’t even call hell
if such a man, or such a place could exist,
His forked tongue would rather curse its human name
A curse which echoes from the heavens the same:
“Damn the son of Eve, who in his haste to disbelieve,
has sentenced himself twice, to an earthly paradise.”

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That Without Which the Cause Could Not Be the Cause

When 2 words kiss

They lose themselves

So we can imagine this

Third thing

Rising like a phoenix

Or a sapling

Only to be dethroned
By a third word and a new thing

This is our grace
To make silence speak

Echoing over the surface

To create something that

Isn’t there

In union they destroy time and space

To hold eternal bliss

Is to read between the lies

And bathe in the light that refines

How much we are like this

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A World Covered in Fall (1969)

Sky, a soft and gentle knight
With flaming sword and lunar shield
whose unfurled banner hides from sight
the heavens and it’s gold.

Man has pawned his dreams
for steel. Emissaries in bishop hats
with fire so bright it seems
to be from the myths of old.

Earth, our verdent queen
has dawned a Virgin blue
to watch her child become unseen
In the dark and endless fold.

Woe, a realization made too late,
that our dream, but not our destiny, is great.

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What surprises morning brings

A man with nothing to wear but belief
Crawls, his belly toward hell, over
A street with cobblestone teeth.
Roadside vendors sell their vices
and prayers with stoney answers.
Above them the giant clock tower eye’s
hands are tied with tears
From the ashen faced sky.

Two lovers are the masons of a desire
Killing time, in self defense.
A cold beach and a cricket choir
Call the hourglass sands to dance.
Two opalescent squids trying to make sense
of each other and the dark.

The once proud city built with words by drones
is now nothing but loud concrete and silent windows
peddlers and thier prey, hungry men getting stoned
with happy widows, and the color grey.
Stories are passed like disease and wine
About the day David slew Goliath.

In the library their is a poet with a historian’s delay
with his good, but broken, arm in a sling
and his pen ready like a trebuchet.
He has spent his life waiting, waiting, waiting
for today. He watches the street and
does nothing, nothing, nothing.

He watches the naked man make progress
his open stomach feeding on stone.
The man must be insane, or even hopeless,
drunk, or maybe just alone.
The poet considers weeping for the happy man
Being stripped to his bones,
but such is the sorrow of fairy tales
Not the reality of his home.

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The Alcoholic’s Wife

Last night I kissed his mistress
Once, on the lips, in silence.
I thought I might’ved missed his distress
as he’d feel her hips, in violence.
She took me for a spin
To feel warmth, to forget
The look of him or from within
When his hand was around our necks.

She wasn’t there for the intervention
Intoxication drips, he’s sober now.
Friends, created by my own imagination,
show off my bruised body, his brow
Arching at how he had fell.
I bottled my fear and my anger, into one,
this thing I call myself.
The person she made me become.

Last night I kissed her again
Two long sips, a numb alliance
drowning in Manhattan,
For only a moment, I forgive his reliance.
Together we spin, spin, spin,
and feel warmth, and forget
the look of him, red with sin
with our hands around his neck.

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Einstein’s Light

Her metronome eyes
are always moving
keeping time
tightly wrapped
like the clothes she wears,
stretching the fabric of seconds
into minutes,
into hours,
into days.

Her shadow sees
each day
Waste away
the echoes that compose
them like dry sand in the wind
Washing back and forth
over her,
over her,
over her.

The sour note of eternity lost
when time crashes around.
Her lips shake like Atlas’ arms
the weight of a world
isn’t light, it doesn’t belong to her,
she was told to hold it
Until a savior comes
Until a savior comes
Until a savior comes.

The yawning of the red sea,
with teeth,
Can only be passed by me,
leading a host of Hebrew slaves,
a destiny or a history
to unfold
over time…
over time….
over time….

And the miracle of self knowledge
Is the knowing of a man
You are not, but you will be,
the man that you were, but you are not,
and the awareness that
eternity is just a woman’s eyes
keeping time,
keeping time,
keeping time.

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The Winter Wedding

The earth was dressed in snow
To honor the pure unity
Of the blessed virgin.

The tolling bell called the fall to slow
So the air could arrest the lunacy
of the solemn surgeons;

Images forged in defiance of the cold
and tested by madness with no immunity
or conversion.

A tear falls, becoming a snowflake as it goes
down a cheek, over a breast, across infinity
until the night’s conclusion.

Love calls the blessed ones to show
a symbol of their impunity,
An embrace of seclusion

wraps their origins in the throws
of wild ambiguity.
Afterward both will mourn the temporality of the fusion,

The frosty winter blows
icy singularity
A reminder of their flawed condition.

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