heed not the troubled night

Ancestral pain reborn in every breath:
lungs expand, contract ... there it is again!
Like old friends who stay behind together--
here, too, an old response: Wisdom, Patience, 
a ragged Hope for better things ahead.
this, too, shall pass! Ah, sweet, thus shall you hope--
though simple guarantees belong to fools.
Wise men hunger too: cruel starvation, in-
discriminate foe of humanity!
These ancient pains carry no surrender.
One day old Sol shall not come mounting up
that dark, traditional Earth-edge sojourn,
yet shall breath-borne ancestral Ache remain.




june '06
feb '10

We slip to sleep, an audience of ice-melt veins
dripping roof tip rhythms in narrow alley-ways;
let slip our dark embrace to face the window-sill
and of the chill's retreat ear-drink our fill.

Stripped of harsh solidity by the noon-warm sun,

liquidity's your nature: everlasting run

from ancient times. You'll ice again, old molecules

as ice you knew before me; frosty tool

of Nature! I gladly pledge my vast descendants

to your care, and to your keen-eared audience
of life-bound mules.

feb '10

My face is a wall. My face is a piece of lead. My fingers fit this table in perfect crescent contradictions; I am History, spoken. The Sea has passed. The Sea has dried himself to salt and so much foreign land, all terrific motion laying still. We speak of Poetry, who is lost to us. Lost to me. For I am a stone. I am a crevice in your long-forgotten skyline.




feb '10

________

Grecian gods live in skies like these.

reflection

so you're twenty-five

thrice congratulated,

unemployed, wearing second-story apartment jeans

patiently. biding, 

doing things you've done

for thirteen years.

throwing dice, wasting afternoons

patiently. you'll find

some day--

nothing.

you will be full without ever eating

without ever raising your hands--

feb '10