release

"go live your life--"
and like a plate-glass shatter
let shards fall to nothingness,
new insignificance:
future's dust, from which
this current joy
escapes!



june 2013

channels

one wide street runs in a marble city
beneath some layers of crossing paths:
lofted boulevards, casting shadows
of a permanent demeanor on the road.
early morning is crisp and still.
this chiseled channel, cut into place
by urgent human rivers long since dry
speaks dark and lonesome things
to the dusty traveler crossing through.
now and then a glimpse, a brief mirage
of some slim motion, far and small--
menaces: a clinging relic
kept vital, here among such silent ruins
which busy Life abandoned long ago.
and abandons still. the dawning city
settles back into its shaded peace.




june 2013

rejoice!

when a thing is bitter

midst the swim-world hallucination

as dark times perceived descend: then

my skeptic's sword is raised in your defense--

doubt! ever doubt, and 

more so when the ground is hard!

cast your doubter's eye upon the darkness,

scoff the self-appointed sour side of things.

seize blind joy, relish in the strength of innocent 

oblivion!  for what can they do to such as we?

what can they do to us?

we need not acknowledge 

these unproven marks we see upon the wall.

omit this common wise dismay!  seize joy 

and foolish doubt: for cold and bitter ground

the skeptic's blade will ever turn.

January 2013

Peace, so

Tongue dammed
in a dark and silent place,
I speak voids in vacuum
languages discovered
between mildewed cellar walls
under feast halls on the deep
Fall-clouded noons
of my nervous youth.
Dust-quiet, I contend
with wide margins arrayed against
this volume bustle of spoken pain.
Peace, so
bitterly achieved,
burns in fast-held solitude. And
then is spent! Burst forth, my
timid thoughts! Margined as you are--
overwhelm the sour feast
with some new thing, some
silence splintered, tongue
released! And,
later, when Fall's curtain-clouds return,
reclaim the precious cellar-peace, so
lost. Such things will ever wait
and grow again.



December 2013

October

"On her deathbed"--
and I withdraw
to History's arrogant spire
indecently indifferent
reading these, my life's events
as in a dull book.
Judge not: withhold
your intent to condescend.
We all do this when seeing clearly
what and where we are;
I spread such pains
and subsequent joys throughout
these many memories loved and feared.

Well, that's all imaginary.
When Joe's mother nearly died
Brandon repeated his assessment--
that sounds "exhausting,"
to chorused low-note murmurs
from a surround of dramatic sympathetics.
"I had a friend in high school once
in great shape, got pneumonia
went to the hospital for a month,"
"Oh God, the fungal type will
Kill you,"--suppressed emotions
seeming reproduced from last week's
more exuberant review of sports,
they sound like they are trying to
sound somber, take this seriously.
I decline to comment, shy of my
black philosophy on life's ongoing death,
regarded as one more normal thing we do, like
sex, or birth, or eating, or the toilet.
Nothing Joe wants to hear
right now, nor should.

In the fall I often think of death:
my own, my lover's, my mother's,
my children's (although they are,
as yet unborn, so safe from death)--
to practice grief, which likely will be faked. 
I cannot separate the normal 
from itself! I expect us all to die
as a condition of our current life
and thus decline to be surprised at its result.

We are leaves upon the tree;
in the autumn
we colorfully descend.
Others shuffle past,
remark demurely on pastels
and forget. Seasons,
and trees, carry on.




october 2012