Abstactius Deo Magis Vivere

The sky could be filled
with mind's endless chaos
or with the blue of spirit

there is a choice

to see inside without the words
or form by touch the equations of the blind

to gaze from behind the eternal face
or resist the inner tyrant

there is a choice
and there are consequences
but there are no costs
on either side

they grow unrecognized
as life grows
from its seed

never seeing all that's around
is only itself

Red

Her own spinning top -
there's a beauty to those storms in the sky,
the current shooting like trees,
the thunder of complaint
interrogates my turbid surface,
shaping me to some valence,
a responsive froth
that won't stay put,
that only honors
tidal promptings.

But there's another lady
inside the lake
who moves within the waves,
her eyes as large
as her heart is wide,
she whispers "always
I feel everything as you do."

The Day in Stages

Morning Solitude...
No skunk grass, no blades of sun
just February's caves and the cavepeople of New England
who boil up the slugs inside their skulls' cauldron
never to be other than a smile or word, impermeable
yet making of all dropped around them a world, to be shared:
the jerky, the gumdrops, the paraffin...
"Tell me who you are
so I may know
myself.
"Tell me who I am
so I may think of you
- what you do."
Birds and squirrels plunge their noses to the snow,
there's something unseen that nourishes
some scavenging needs to be done.
...How quickly the flesh turns to spirit,
one touch and it's gone.

Afternoon Conversations...
The pigeons on the snow,
unknowable pigeons, unknowable snow,
still hypnotize with gentle coos
of nonsense soon transformed
to consolation from the One,
for even the forms are sensing organs,
the containers are alive,
the 1's dance with zeros,
the cells birth the truth of the whole
by staying in borders
and letting the beautiful illusion flow -
everyone I know
is disidentifying,
letting go of the wheel
what they know of control -
for we have to learn the lines
and there's no script.

Evening Entertainment...
Love is too pure, too much the essence of who we are
we must, down here, turn it into a contract
with iron-bound laws
that break at the slightest of whimpers,
for when two become one, there's always another one
waiting to be torn from the wholeness,
to be taught about the body, how it must be fucked and fed
regularly (something that is not true, apparently),
and be sent, because the love of a couple is too urgent,
to the wilderness of does who go looking for the one
who will pay them enough attention, and the bucks
who pursue those easiest to lure.
Nature abhors this vacuum it created,
the desperate hunger for love,
the odds are greater when two anyone's can hook up
at random, any connection is perfection
when all can find the one,
but the secrets that are shared
in secret sacred places
have a way of staying secret
and the words turned by loving into poems
turn to grocery lists and therapist notes,
and the search for the beloved never ends
but in the meantime you can love,
you can live your vast desire into truth
and learn the limits of what is allowed,
for love's gifts are not contractual,
there is nothing there specified for you,
and when the ink you signed in turns to blood
your needs become a weight you must shake off
like water droplets sloughing from a dog,
a purifying turn
as the veil slips off from
your true, eternal lover.

The Virtuous Circle

Where "Jesus is Lord"
street crime can't be far away
Hell created when the natural is forbidden

The Universe City

It gives
and then it yields
a kind of breathing

that becomes
in our magnified glass
like birth and dying

unfathomable gratuity
these bones are so
unworthy of

then cruel withholding
of what the soul
deserves, an answer

the joyous letter from
a long-lost friend,
the call that's not

returned -
to learn to lean
into the lesson

to not expect
one's Lego village
in the flesh

instead, a road
without directions
without an ending

one can see
only surprises
that roll like dice

reflections
trembling
of mere survival.

A Poem Beginning with a Line by Robert Duncan

"Great Death gives way         and unprepares us."*

When things fill up, they break.
Ice breaks. Why is it tragic
for masks to slip away?
All we can grasp are containers
that serve for a time
emptying their echo
- just as death gives way
to meaning, meaning
gives way to death;
it's all a matter of sizing
the tailor measuring out time and space
as if what is surrounding us could ever fit
as if there were bolts enough of light
to cover a human soul -
we grow like nine-years-old -
into what we already are.

* from "A Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar - IV"

Wondering Whether I've Helped a Friend

A touch of light in a coal-black world
has it arrived or is it going? Who's to say
what's absorbed and what's absorbing
- they say the ones can only equal out
still, shadow size seems         insurmountable
and blinding glare seems mirrored back.
A face upon the window in electric light
just sees itself, not what's beyond it.

At a Threshold

I run my eyes over details
Letting them pass
Adjusting to sun and shadow
It all will be there tomorrow
But this morning will never return

The Museum

Dozens of seagulls crisscross the sky…
One image yields many impressions:
A circling for meat.
An energy field.
A point on the grid where I join in the dance.
An intelligent line,
Or maybe the painter is capricious,
Another Picasso brushstroke on white sky.

It came without plan. It leaves without warning.
The mind only widens.
The tracks on the ground are inside the eyes
Connecting the snow and the skies.
The chaos and structures are there to resolve,
To completed thoughts,
Encircling the whole,
Yet nothing
Is ever
Missing.

In the Space between Things

I.
Steam rises like steeples
Above the white marble,
The surfaces where once they played golf.
It’s hard to believe a place so shiny and cold,
That shows less of its life than a swaying sajuaro
Can turn to a jungle in time
Can blast sewer caps
Off ancient fissures.

The perfection of a scene that can’t move,
Of things that burn with ice when touched
That cannot change into one’s own mind
Thinking – the spinning balls of dreams
Won’t lift, they resist being
Pretended into patterning
As joyful solutions, forms of truth.

II.
How can the angels speak
and no one hear?
How come the chiseled air
becomes so sheer?
As everything I touch
breathes from my lungs
Some silent breath
with vast mother tongues
In exponentials from my arms
to harmonize
In endless loving space
to colonize
With wings the structures
of the hive
Mathematics
make it alive
With humming likeness
newly recognized
To spin the not
to vagaries of size
Expressing all the silence
in geometries
Hurtling through the cold
so fires know freeze.

An Opera of Soap

I pine for the days of blue shampoo
and mouthwash lip-gloss red,
When one could actually pour
“Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific”
on your head,
Those brave days of Binaca Blast,
Hai Karate and McLeans
Of Phisohex and Burma-Shave,
Wella-Balsam and Brylcreem,
When soap came on a rope
and Calgon could take me away
From Mr. Bubble smiling
on the back side of the box and, say
The heartbreak of psoriasis,
static cling and spotted dishes
And ring around the collar,
that once and constant crisis,
With lemon-freshened borax,
scrubbing bubbles, Ammonia D,
Like a fragrant foamy friend
who only lived to make me happy.
I pine for the days
when Pine-Sol smelled like pine
and the Breck girls were on the bottle
and only your hairdresser knew for sure,
and no one thought Noxzema
was Neutrogena, not even your sister.

The days of Prince Matchabelli
(not the Prince by Machiavelli)
flavored lipstick,
When there actually was a King Gillette,
Lord Wilkinson, Sir Schick,
When Clorox actually was made out of the sea
And Maybelline was coal tar
mixed with Vaseline,
And Pantene came from the same lab
that synthesized LSD,
And Crest, if you ingested it,
required you to call poison control
immediately (strangely not the case, though,
if you swallowed Listerine).

Who knew that using sugar cane
for war wounds ‘stead of cotton
Would lead nurses to try it
as a sanitary napkin?
And for soldiers to blow with it
their noses, birthing Kotex and then Kleenex
And, Yankee see and Yankee do,
Band-Aids, Q-Tips and Tampax,
Til Pampers begat Kimbies
begat Luvs begat Huggies begat Depends.
The first roll-on deodorant
was modeled on a ball-point pen.
Petroleum replaced palm oil
replaced whale tallow, lard and hickory
As Tone came down from Dove came from Camay
came from Cashmere Bouquet,
As Comet came from Connecticut quartz-encrustred
little Dutch girl Bon Ami;
The synthetics that came like marching bands
with names like Tide and Cheer
made her a casualty.

But now they’ve sold Niagara, RIT, Twinkle
Octagon and Oxydol,
Brillo and Fels Naptha,
Purex and Parson’s Ammonia,
The names live on forever
in a warehouse in New Jersey
But they’ve gone on to the swiffers
and gender-specific diapers
And toothbrushes that use sound waves
to kill bacteria.
There aren’t even any phosphates,
all cleaning must be green,
Even Unilever bought the farm
to save the Amazon palm tree.

A younger generation cannot comprehend
the endless human mind
That creates, creates, creates, creates
and leaves so much behind:
The hole-in-the-walls for old razor blades,
the laundry pins and strings
That glow in gilded darkness as
the fat immortal sings.

The Snow. The Train. The Door.

For someone who has really been "on the beam" lately...

Your face, that cannot keep
its secrets, that ever must
stay secret, a blue boy's
black and white -
an ageless child
without a line you are
despite the wrinkles folding down
your verse as for the winter,
as for the last time.

Your poet's eyes, refracting light
and emptied out of all but poet
pain - that shock at seeing,
that curse at being
free and beautiful
beyond.

Your poet's voice
reciting legal briefs, betrayed by
just a quaver
in the reed from being
wholly
disembodied.
There's barely a mask - there -
emotion has all turned
to vapor, which no one dares
to prove is there.

You've found that place
where the glued unspools,
the fixed unsticks, the world
of you and me collapses
at your eyebrows, and you
must pick - the rhythm - up
with words imprisoned
in their heartache,
the only things still free
beyond the skull,
those last tobacco plugs
not price-tagged by the white man,
those last unnoticed flights
across the Fairborn plains
before the world believed
that it could fly.

There's too much distance - none.
You speak for me - succinctly.
I turn my ears for you - hear words
you cannot use.

Official Use Only

A man named Mohammad wears an American flag
"freedom is not free" t-shirt, and nowhere
is that sentiment more true than at the DMV,
the closest thing to prison most people ever see,
and if they don't navigate successfully its convoluted queues
some may stay inside forever, clutching at the paper
proof of their existence, praying for that magic combo-
nation of lines between proof, test, payment and photo.
The rest just conclude if they stay in one place long enough
an angel will take pity on them and open the gate,
so they wait, with the patiences of saints, the same people who,
when they are in vehicles, honk at cars that stop for pedestrians,
accelerate to reach red lights, pass slower cars with fingers.
Here, young and old, rich and poor stand together
spinning their invisible yo-yo's, staring at the yellowed travel posters
that aren't there, and wandering with eyes all a-glaze through
the vast honeycombs of things they should and shouldn't have done
today, this week, this year, their entire lives. Some break out
in half-hearted conversations, in Urdu or Farsi or Cantonese,
like a black market where access to bureaucrats is traded.
New pilgrims come in, continuously, alive with impossible optimism
while newly-minted citizens drag their wretchedly bitter
carcasses outside, to be washed clean of time once again.
They look so ordinary, these people behind the counters,
wearing glasses and happy new year antlers, with barely a hint
they're our Gods for the day, stamping our visas of infinite possibility.

Reboot

The white mortar in the city's cracks,
the snow-covered graves and factories,
the necklaces of ice hung from wires,
the re-shaping of the fields into corners:
they've waited as long as they could stand it,
their axes are sharpened and raised;
the woods in the way must be cleared.

Old Year Evening

A Carry on Tuesday prompt based on Helen Hunt Jackson’s "New Year’s Morning"

On the fourth day of Christmas the old year made a plea:
"If your love is true, you must forget me,
I’m only a night from old to new, a ring on your jeweled tree,
I must be released, to the woods, to grieve, to say to the past 'you're free.'"
"Only a night from old to new!" That’s how it must be,
The new comes in darkness, undressed of memory,
The new ones are ancient, like a grizzled baby,
The old ones’ reborn, the mulch our confetti!
We’ve charged up the cork, fermented like tea
The singular vintage, as sweet bubbles flee
And for a fleeting instant, as the circles pop, one seems to see
A glimpse of future goals and finished victory,
So much this old familiar road is cast with mystery—
The thought that sows the seed, the lock that carves the key.

The Homemade Wine of the Picaro

For Tom

Sestinas make the finest stories, so says the dramaturge
who may as well be Wordsworth
or Scheherazade for all it matters
when we hear that blizzard burying our houses.
He swears we'll wake one morning
to our knitting clubs dissolved
subsumed by a new Prometheus
with a voice like the South Wales coast
who'll speak of our predicament
to make it matter to anyone but poets.

Outside, the blizzard of scriveners
buries all our verses
but we can almost hear that voice above it
the howl of time's inferno
seething the immortal
but the cry is too familiar
that seems come from the center,
this raging out of nowhere,
it's for attention, nothing more
and would take your voice if you let it.

The quest for immortality never ends
and there's no black swan in the white snowfall
this morning, just gusts of snowdrift grit
to powder windows over
like furnace ash from hellfire smoke
on whorls of desert dunes
and statuary statuesque with boughs of hanging marble.
There's no great voice inside these swirls
just nature's inescapable poem
that makes where I sit the center of its roiling.

Closer to a Colder Point

White pigeons in December aviaries
Coo as the city grinds
Echoing sweetly from their looming perch,
The courthouse roof.
Their sound is like the love of children
Who wish to touch you
In a way no one ever can,
A sound that reminds you of how
Life gets swallowed up in joy,
How internal warmth lights the outside
And the heat prods you harder and faster and closer,
Working to the center of their eyes
By pulling at your own core,
Your only native, understanding.

Alarm Set at 2:22 AM

red moon
apocalyptic wind
another bout of significance
to contend with

in what may all be still a dream
a conspiracy of senses
acting out some blueprint
only the sleeping comprehend

sometimes I feel I can grip the wheel
only to find its purpose is in turning
what it would do anyway—
the only real thing is this song

Torque

This peculiar mutation, consciousness—
in a field where energy stills—it pulls apart
to make believe the one thing differentiates—
a splay of splinters broken off like ice

While any shadow of the whole—is only darkness,
a resting spot where thoughts can re-create.
What flares—disappears in sunlight,
the curve within a perfect bending course.

When Morning Goes Clairovoyant

The sky is coming
prisoners of sound
the slate is on its way

Freedom abounds
nothing you cannot say
all will be wiped clean away

That is the gift
no consequence given
forgiveness as wide as the sky

Prepare now your tones
the music is endless
illusions to hold and let go

Dead Man Poem

Thanks to Victoria I’ve discovered Marvin Bell's Dead Man poems and a prompt at Big Tent Poetry to create my own poem in that style.

1. About How the Dead Man Helps Out Around the House

The dead man can’t handle kitchen appliances.
He'd fast-forward to the days when butter is churned by hand.
There’s no room for the dead man with that infernal whirring motor.
Eight-track tapes on the other hand are his friend.
He unspools their gray-brown ribbons like Christo across the sky.
Billions of old teenagers dreaming, still damp with lust, turn their eyes on
the dead man.

2. More About How the Dead Man Helps Out Around the House

The dead man has no time to clean the cat box.
No flossing or scrubbing sinks for he.
He cannot bear to follow any regular routine.
He’s just no good at that sort of thing.
He’d rather wait around all day until someone remembers him.
He’ll come out then and be the jester for the night.
There’s no wisdom he hasn’t filed away for just this occasion.
He loves to poke at the wounds that kill us, laughing all the way.

Paradise

I.
On one side of the island
The people borrow books and leave them in the rain after reading
them.
There is always a shortage of cigarettes, wine and heroin.
Everyone goes unattended, like unwanted prostitutes,
Their canvasses continually erased and redone,
Reams of writing blotted by furious ink,
Discordant sounds annulled by clashing tones,
Clay obsessively reformed...
Every resident looks with all of his hope at each passerby
As an angel who will finally retrieve him,
Then looks a moment later with all his hatred
At a world full of cruel neglect.
Meanwhile, the resident looked upon goes through the same paroxysms
of reaction
As the miracle becomes a curse again and again and again...
Yet, each may see in the gleam on the tar the luminescence of his own
unique dream,
Jottings on discarded paper may end up the words to a forgotten song
That may entrance a dancer whose angular moves may become a
preliminary sketch
For a cartoon burned for warmth.
Their impoverished cries and wails of rapture fade into the sky
And, although they pray to it, they know the statue on the mountaintop,
Its back turned to them, is not their God
And will never decide among them.

II.
On the other side of the island
Strange lustrous fruits are never picked,
Sapphirine lagoons are never found,
And blinds keep away the glare of great red skies.
Everyone strives in vain to have the same plain face,
The clothes range in color from pumice to slate,
And even the poems seem exactly the same
(Although each volume is wrapped lovingly in gold-leaf binding).
Everything spoken is understood, as if borne from heaven,
But stray thoughts are considered an indulgence and immediately
forgotten
And they go back to building their tabulations and collections
And boiling down fat ideas into delineations as fine as the sand.
They are sublimely successful, yet unhappy,
Feathery beings weighed down by obligations,
The never-ending sum of parents, peers, children, the harsh, invisible
God,
Not to be swift or be strong, but be friendly and patient,
And this is never rewarded, never successful, never enough;
But as long as they sit at the table and smile
They are always welcome to eat
The tasteless food served on small beige plates.
Even if they were not told not to look at the face on the mountain
They would not want to.

Musings on the First Snow

The Inca Empire relied on mummies to make their wars,
The strength of spirit preserved in bodies proved invincible.
Opposing tribes who placed their bones on sacred mountains
Awoke to find the Incan mummies in their place, and gave their ghosts.
The Inca kings would never leave their legacies for sons,
They held on, & made them earn new lands of their own within the one.
And when the droughts came they would entomb their finest children
Alive within the mountains, fed herbs that would preserve them.

So it is, today, with those we call celebrities,
The chosen from among us are entombed for us to worship.
In every field of human skill we laurel our immortals
To sing or sling a ball for all our garlands and our cheers
As we sit like tone-deaf cripples on our couches dreaming we
Could somehow be like them if only the breaks had come our way.
The pantheon of kings and queens looks on from mausoleums
That each of us keeps lit in a corner of our living rooms.

Meanwhile, a billion sacred shapes have fallen from the sky,
Each one a seed to plant unique geometries of healing,
Who've come at night to change the way the face of Earth appears
And, as boots merge with crystal, the way it sounds, the way it feels.
Everything familiar's now touched with a holy white robe
That overhangs with silence all the things we used to know.
Let's stop before this beauty, for it's all we'll see of us
Transforming and invisible, the blessings of the endless.

Tom Brady's Hair

No one saw this coming
the dominance this year
how effortless it moved the ball
through beasts and schemes and snow,
so strong and multi-layered
so perfect like Apollo,
with nods to every football decade
of hair: the shag, the crew, the mullet,
from Bobby Layne to Willie Joe
to something once barbaric,
like the first white guy to wear a pink tuxedo
no quarterback dared pull this off before,
and it's well-thought-out, superb in all its details
it's not a tawdry gimmick or a trick,
no pseudo-Rastafari braids or Polynesian fro
it's a coif of the messiah
that jostles in the wind
like Jehovah's very breath.

No one saw this coming
this Samson per Giselle,
no one imagined Belichick
would have his finest hour
in the autumn of his career
by whispering, from his concrete-colored hoodie
in his impressionable prodigy's ear
"this off-season I need you to concentrate,
put the work into your hair."

A Hello to Cid Corman Across Time and Space

Nothing silent
is independent

Nothing sacred
kneels and prays

Nothing mortal
stops its growing

Nothing changeless
ever stays


Nothing dreamed of
needs believing

Nothing speaking
knows what's heard

Nothing missing
lacks in feeling

Nothing whole
is ever filled

Everybody Needs a Hobby

The greased-dish spiral wave transmitter
He uses to talk with the aliens
Caused static while "Family Ties" was on TV,
So his wife, who'd defended him
Unflinching against an army of non-believers
Ordered him to stop all communications.
Funny, he thought, the adjective used to describe the great,
"Uncompromising." Had he not engineered
This frail rig through compromise alone?
First he had to delete all his delicious references
To politics and sex and religion and race, for these things
Annoyed the visitors. Then he had to retranslate his own voice
To an inexact symbolic rendering that took all gestures from his words,
And he had to pay off the neighbors
With tales of his own insanity, the evil twin voices in him.
For every minute of contact, he would spend
Hours dredging through the wiring, hours
Giving the world back to his loved ones,
For fear that this new one would crush it, and him
Not a part now of either, but a medium between the two.
The happiness of one is so desperately sad for the other
The walls of sacrifice must be built,
And once he had done that, he could settle in with his web
Of recursive-spin generators and barite transmitters
And start to destroy himself,
All for the chance to touch,
To give himself up to it completely,
A force that asks only the ultimate compromise,
That he keep it to himself,
For silent accord is glory,
The secrets of the future are revealed
Because they will stay secret,
Because he knows they can't keep.

Other humans see only pretensions of glory in his silence;
They don't want it revealed so much as they want to know why
He won't tell,
What would shrivel in the light,
Where the aliens are either child's toys to be discarded
Or they are all that he has.

Aha, he thought, the compromises of one man
Within the world, not even,
Except in his own mind, opposed.
Imagine what it would be to fight,
To no longer look at it as a hobby,
To dare to spread his shit in sacred corners,
His perverse act mocking our vocabularies, killing our priorities
With its dauntless proposal that this way, his only way, exists.
Somehow, if he denies defiantly enough
He removes the choice
But to conduct air raids on his occupied villages,
To nail him for drinking, tax evasion, for the crimes of his
And everyone's past, not to show him, but to keep him
From the rest.
It rarely works. There are always the aliens
To rescue him from man
As they rescue themselves
From him.

Meanwhile the police would warn that capitulation
Would be to treat him as beyond human,
And that violates general policies,
And we can't make too many exceptions
Or the world becomes a jungle,
And there would be no more doubt about angels.

Seasonal Clang

A sheet of ice banks all the rivertowns
Apartment windows strange in early glaze
As crisp as deserts and as hard the ground
Rocks soften from their falling glaciate

You'd never know that life became more hopeless
As everyone pretends they've urgent chores
Just sniffles and catarrhs and vents pervasive hiss
Betray the bitter white the morning bore

The sign says "alto" but your words are frozen
A mirror flaring back my cruel play
To warmer dens you're off in crazy motion
And now you've moved impossibly away

Pieces of Jade

Riding one more time with Scott LaFaro

Fir hints its depths in such
Rebel chimes
Inlaid pieces move in flux
Harmonize
Clasping nuance
Countering too much sense

Take the coals back to port
Throw more echoes on the floor
Tend the flow
As the spheres drop
To tears
Awkward fretboard
Clear urgencies of keys
Scored on the dissolute seas

For the note that won't squeeze
From arpeggios
As the sails turn to roses
And no one supposes
This voyage will last
For the clouds always steam
Through the mast
And the mists only dream you
Underway
Over waves

Into jade
Visions
Of shores
Where your people
Adoring
Hold your glyphs inside

The rising of the toll
Something similar
To the swells inside your soul
Following crystal
That rings incessantly
Below the ocean's lapidary
Blue

That endless bending note
That grounds us into dissonance
And beats us with its resonance
Its rhythm violation
That calls immortal birds
From unimagined nests

The Scarab, or Complicity in Fort Wayne, Indiana

In memory of my Great-Great-Great Grandfather Hugh McCulloch, born on this day, my birthday, in 1808.

“What is threatening to collapse the dollar today is not that it is not backed by gold. It is that 99 percent of the U.S. money supply is owed back to private lenders with interest, and the money to cover the interest does not exist until new loans are taken out to cover it. Money created privately as multiple “loans” against a single “reserve” is fraudulent on its face, whether the “reserve” is a government bond or gold bullion. The private banks are not really creating credit and advancing it to us, counting on our future productivity to pay it off, the way they once did under the functional facade of fractional reserve lending. Instead, they are vacuuming up our money and lending it back to us at higher rates. In the shadow banking system, they are sucking up our real estate and lending it back to our pension funds and mutual funds at compound interest. The result is a mathematically impossible pyramid scheme, which is inherently prone to systemic failure.” – Ellen Brown

You were sick the night the greenbacks died
In that brain-splat show of force in old Ford’s Theater,
And as they buried any thought we could be free
You pinned the cockroach to your suit in fine obeisance
And let them mint the credits from thin air,
So Gould who stole the nation’s gold
And Morgan who had armed the South
And the House-picked team of psychopaths
Could be owed at last the lives of all your blood.

I for one was collateralized at birth
For the debts owed before more credit could be secured,
But now it’s gotten to the point that you can’t
Even see “It’s a Wonderful Life” any more
—It’s not in any store or TV station—
More mortgages have been re-sold
Than there were deeds to write the debts to begin with,
And all the bets that they would fall have been cashed in
And all the gold to help the banks survive procured
By throwing people on the street without legality.

That’s just the way the system has to work;
One has no right to life save banker’s blessings,
No right to think that counters their control.
They own one’s house, one’s car, the air one borrows.
One pays in exponentials for the right.
Education only matters ‘cos expensive
Just as warfare only matters ‘cos it’s debt.
The scarab only cares that it is owed more
But there is no more debt the world can hold.

Even my grandma’s bank stocks now are worthless,
What you bequeathed to us as your last wisdom.
And I, who write poems from the scarab’s droppings
See them fly away as something worthless, what everything
But money somehow is, that once was not a thing at all
But a relation, like I to you, a long-lost son
Who learned the way to speak the propaganda
That cannot touch the horns of this dilemma:

The question “are we able to wake up?”
“Can we raise the dead – investments – from their sleep?”
“If we threw on shadows light would they be gone?”

Matins of the Change

Gray breath, gray trees, gray sky
and then a blue, blue river.

How strange that the small now insists
on being part of something larger.

Taking a Stab at the Shifting Paradigm

“Every question you ask presupposes an alternative universe” –Tom Raworth

I can't shake the image, as I read David Yezzi's analysis on the decline of poet-critics, of an epaulet-shaking British general striding sword and steed out of the Afghan mountains and verily brimming with the vim and vigor of genuine belief that superior killing abilities equals moral superiority.

What to make of an essay that boldly proclaims “essays and reviews no longer figure as part of a poet's project” in the face of enough ink on “the post-ironic stare” or “the hipster in contemporary American poetry” to choke Donnelly & Co in the heyday of the Yellow Pages? Yezzi appears to long for the resurrection of some sort of dead poet-critics society of the likes of Eliot, Auden, Bogan, Winters, Jarrell and Moore, hard-nosed and discriminating on the verse of their times. However, it doesn't take a familiarity with the work of William Logan to realize how quickly such a world would get very ugly, if only for the alarming speed with which Mssrs. Eliot, Auden et. al. would be dispatched to sweep floors and clean toilets if they didn't modify the rancor of their opinions to fit the current poetry business model. The “po-biz” Ponzi scheme needs continuous infusions of new poets called to greatness from sirens wails to financially support the unremunerative older poets. The bottom line of the enterprise is not served by having any kinds of actual critical standards, lest they scare off any marks. Cutthroat competition and sensitive compassion, after all, make somewhat uncomfortable bedfellows, best not to let discouraging words be heard about other poets in public, right?

That such an obvious conclusion would be lost on Yezzi, a lifetime academic, is damaging enough. He compounds his folly by flapping a stiff-upper-we-have-a-duty-to-be-superior-lip with one sophomoric Victorian truism after another, like “the question, then, is how to shift posthumous conferral of recognition to the living, even a little,” or “to sift with a fine sieve aesthetic material and discard the chaff—is to be conscious as an artist. But, as Eliot notes, this has long been an unpopular stance.” Is there any critical intelligence in this at all? If he can't see that there is just as much purpose on God's green earth for chaff as for wheat, can't he at least see that wheat is treated exactly the same way as chaff in the contemporary poetry world? He seems obsessed with the idea that there are levels of greatness in poets, and that proper recognition is the only thing that is needed to create harmony. It's like Newtonian physics used to explain a Quantum physics universe. Beyond his apparent unfamiliarity with the 40-year work of deconstructionist critics who have shot to holes ideas about recognition, status and objectivity in judgment, has this gentleman ever heard of the internet? Has he spent any actual time comparing the work of the most acclaimed “po-biz” (or as I call it, “pizz”) poets with the work of 20-something students who write blogs? Does he even care that virtually anyone who follows such things knows that what he says is nonsense, that critical decisions to publish, recognize and evangelicize are routinely made without any regard for the standards and discernment he claims are somehow important in the propagation of poetry? I'm not trying to shoot fish in a barrel here, just pointing out that step one to constructing new strategies is admitting that the old paradigm has a problem.

A good entry point into Yezzi's deluded thinking comes when he finally offers up a decent metaphor. “Few lay people,” he writes, “engage with poetry deeply enough—say, in the way an auto mechanic engages with a Straight 6.” Assuming that he really means by the strange term “lay people” non-poet readers of poetry and not non-professional poets who read poetry, readers don't look at writing like auto mechanics look at cars, but like drivers look at cars. They drive for pleasure and a purpose, not to see what kind of bolts keep the manifold intact. If it's broke, they want it fixed, and are prepared to pay a lot of money to not have it explained to them. What's the point of a troubleshooting manual when the mechanics risk their careers to read one?

Yezzi, being a respected gentleman of the university poets club, with taxidermied pelts to show for it, talks a good critical romp, but for my money, I find these words of GK Asante, one of thousands of virtually anonymous poetry bloggers, to say more about the direction of contemporary poetry than his whole essay:

“What day will arrive
when from our selfish orbits
we make a new planet,
a landscape molten
on the backs of every hand?”

Here we find stated with astonishing starkness the new paradigm, the God in the machine mind that works at a deeper and more collective level than lit-crit or po-biz or the whole moldy cult of the individual can conceive. This way of thinking about poetry and art and life can breezily dismiss hierarchies such as Yezzi proposes, where his examples of proper critical practice (William Logan, Adam Kirsch, David Barber and Eric Ormsby) all conveniently work for the magazine he edits and are, like Yezzi himself, very bad poets (unlike, say, Auden, Eliot, Bogan, Moore and Winters, who were very good poets).

In this new paradigm, communication is beyond the level of the conscious mind, with memes that spread like lightning across vast distances of geography, language and social programming, seeming to converge as if from a galactic center. We've gone from the system of a speaker and a listener (or writer/reader) into one where everyone is a speaker, and there is a new set of ears growing from nowhere. It's our own answering spirit come to life at last, Rumi's reed flute asking and answering at the same time. It's as if we have gone back to the ancient cave of the poets, where everyone is called in service to the invisible, answering to our own powers, which are far greater than we know.

In such a world, poets do bond (what else have we got?), they do gush to each other, but it's only a kiss that heaven is listening, for there is way too much work on the path ahead, in order to get to those places that the poets of old only imagined, in order to ramp up the discernment concerning the nature of reality, the power of images, the connective alchemy of symbols. We can no longer seriously consider the poet's egoic skill in capturing something of a flat surface reality. We are freer than ever to chase down ultimate meaning, but the responsibility to get it right is also much greater, for there's a new reality on the other side that is crying to be born with our words, with our patient work at understanding, in atoms of thought.

So much prose has been poisoned by man's believing he is fallen and in that heartbreak of a lack of self-forgiveness spins the mental cages of examination and explanation, which never care that the vindications change with every season, unlike the ever-turbid feelings that keep the mind working to protect them. Poetry – in all its forms – offers a way outside of the mind trapped by self-loathing. It disrupts the patterns of meaning into stones of authenticity, which in time crystallize together in new structures, of fresh seeing, as the indirect scan of heavenly light becomes the full-on star itself.

If you don't know what I am talking about, just peruse Poet’s United, any poem at random, to see the way the whole is being recovered cell by cell. And this is just one example. We are no longer our father's keepers.

Fresh White

That cool December light
as soft as it is clear
bathes with tender white
the homes of families here

who struggle as they love,
who give as they retreat,
the gentle light forgives the air
of continuous defeat,

the feeling that all one has left
are the ones you've hurt so much,
the ones who take the time away,
the ones who let you touch,

the ones you always do things for
who never understand
except when winter, watching,
casts a blessing on the land.

Curse of the Lobster Woman

a new wind film noir

Nude modeling will only get you so far
when you're on the lam from an architect and the funny farm
and the Cadillac the British bastard let you drive
has now been repossessed a final time:
a nasty heart attack at 35
and the gallery is up for grabs
and all that fell into your blood-washed hands
was a legacy lobster license: Maine 1A
they wait like German Shepherds
with guns to peel away.
What's a femme fatale to do
when it's colder than an anaconda's smile?
You haul the traps, they dredge the bay
for a forensic match of you.
When they ask about your whereabouts,
your sister hands them a blank page.
But now they're closing in like Fundy caves
across the Grand Manaan,
the fire dogs to the hell cat you used to be
have set up shop along the coast
to raise their spawn and hang their laundry
and gaze out longingly through the vapors to Monhegan.
Even your sister has been asking about me
to warn me off your scent, presumably,
but I saw the secret code upon the buoy
came from your hand,
a woodworking front
they call the Cove's End
where all the gremlins from the ancient lairs
still laugh and draw cartoons
of all the precious salvage crews
who never were amused,
but something else is going on
in that red barn when the black smoke rises.
What thought had you of chickens & the bribes that made them squawk?
What plots for your betrayers who spun red hair into gold?
What photos of Charybdis do you possess?
The scavengers with claws may know, the holy bottom-feeders.
The tide comes up like a toilet bowl
and the dredgers, foiled, all rust.
A horn sounds in the harbor, a warning in the dusk
to beware the secret laughter of red brushes in the dust.

20 Things We Learned Over Thanksgiving Vacation

Re-posted from last year as a video

In the Time of Cocoa and Frost

Wheeee - running down the escalators at the end of the day
it's fun to chase down a train
so I can see that moment of light
across the white triple-deck tenements,
as close to God as we can get.

A Party without Flowers

“Thank you disillusionment” – Alanis Morissette

You're not supposed to fall in love
With your date at your high school reunion,
You're supposed to be in shock
And wallow in the pity that life was and must become.
The first classmate you see is not supposed to be your old enemy
Asking “is she with you?” and your reply is “no”, but at that moment
You know she is, and you two face down in a long, homoerotic stare
(After which the class archivist with Asperger Syndrome, who remembers
The names of your children and who's been married how many times,
Says to you, perspiring, from behind his twitching beard
“The record shows you did not back down, right there, in surrender,
You only pretended. Why? Why?” to which you answered (in your head)
That you wanted the girl, the cool, that something illusive from before
You became enlightened, when you still were authentic,
Not weighing every move).
You expected the outbreak of blond among the water-drinking divorcées,
The fat girl is supposed to now be beautiful, the black sheep boy
Is supposed to have three businesses and four homes,
The prom queen should emerge as if she'd been encased in ice,
The prom king should be a psychopathic arsonist now serving life,
The boy who won all the prizes should be teaching high school English,
The girl who held the whole class together should be a grandmother now,
The free radicals should have learned the hard way
How happiness is to master the art of daily living,
And those with shoulder chips should lord all their subsequent success
Over a room of vacant stares.
It's a mechanical equation, a final rite of passage,
A last chance filling station for the shame and secret crying,
The pulling out of mothballs of your mask and poker face.
It's not supposed to end with a tap upon your shoulders,
A loving voice who says that now it's time for you to go
Before the longing pleas of eyes have finally drained away,
To fall into the company of an angel, who somehow
Soothes the terror real to something peaceful,
Who balances right and wrong on clicking heels
Like God and Satan guiding you to your car,
To ache upon that moment in the cold and certain evening,
How what you feel is all there ever was.

The High School Class Portrait as One Face

For Brenda

Rain weighs on windows like a needle over scratches
on the shacks of Children's Island
where wild dogs once were free,
what later was a colony for lepers and for smallpox
and then a place to keep the ill mentally
before it was a place to hold the orphans
or a camp for sailing, archery and macrame
where totem poles greeted you at the pier,
their faces were all the parents that you had,
the ones that taught you how to handle rope
like holy braids and lean into a hartelee
and the ones that threw you off the rocks
to learn to float, the ones that made you take
the ferry boat to this outcast island
and the ones you swam here to escape from.
For none of them could you see beyond
what they said to what they really meant,
for none of them could you do more than automatically react.
One night each summer you'd stay overnight,
fall in love in front of campfires
enraptured with your own stories
and climb in other people's beds
- for once you felt alive
to be so distinct,
for once the shame was worth not knowing how you hurt
others as the awkward burned on awkward
and the fire felt so damn good.

So much they seemed to be at one time real:
the mirror of yourself was once clear glass
that showed the molting worms as angry butterflies
before the madness really was a choice.
Before there was the board, there were the pieces,
and you moved upon the squares as in a court
to play the damsel, jack or knight or squire or jester
in what was just your family written wide.
Some knew, some didn't know, some couldn't tell,
but as a group together all was seen:
the crashing of the boundaries, the suicidal tendencies,
the gatherings at three in smoke and beer
where all that never could be was what is:
the mastery, the wisdom, the compassion,
the icy breeze inside the swollen summer
that let you give away every gift that was ever taken
and showed you how to hold on to the one thing
that was real - how you felt - the great invisible
that landed on the dance floors, the gridirons and auditoriums,
the vice-principal's offices and the smoker's corridors
with a colossal splat and an unfathomable bounce.

You drew the outlines from cartoons, made words escape their tunes,
walked movies through the streets until the trees no longer
haunted you. You tried to kill the passion they call youth
by throwing all your clothes into the fire
and seeing in the flames - the never-ending flames
the shapings of some dream
not handed down with sunscreen and the life vests;
the molting had become you, desires would never rest,
you could go forth and dance upon the clearing
as if that tiny separate thing could ever matter,
as if through it all we weren't together, in the fire,
the perfect abnegation, the zeroed-out equation,
the freedom-seeking, heat-collective missile
orphaned for one glorious moment, on the beach
in bodies doused in the ever-swirling black,
wet in tuxes and prom dresses, huddled in circles
like chandeliers of driftwood bonfires
that melted in the sky
before the beach stone morning light hit shore
to lull us all to sleep.

The Sky as Abstract Painting

a tear of violet
where all that is inside us leaks away -
a vapor rising
light in stripes
from underneath the weaves of swollen gray
well hidden in its nest
with all its echoes of eclipse
released as final statement:
balance before transformation
then balance once more
if only we could let it just occur
what happens anyway
instead of tracing out the frequencies
in boundaries
attaching
to separation
as the slow unveil of blurring
turns the one

The Hills Above New Haven

A smoky veiled moon
plays mousehide and catseek
through the naked tangled trees
as I lurch upward
along the moraine
through the edges of November
when the jaws are opened wide.
All creation comes from silence
and the wonder at abundance
like sparks across the sky.

One-Note Tango

That dull burn
spans the most composed souls,
that ache of something unknown
searches for the solace of itself
at the point of sight
scanning all it is not
for what it is.

Another Metaphor Turns Ornery

There's razor wire around the dirt mound
- no fences by the graves.

I tell myself this means something,
like the nonsense pleas of children and the updates for the day,

But it's only eyes upon my loneliness,
that one thing that I can't perceive exists.

The city turns too easily into toothpicks;
the people in the buildings, I make up.

Late Afternoons in Summer

Prompted from “The Pupil” by Donald Justice (hat tip Patrick)

That diminished ninth, like Mulgrew Miller,
That rainbow of suspended chords,
How a third could link Los Angeles to New York
And a tonic could go anywhere with different roots.
My fingers curled for all the sly inversions,
My yearning for a chord that rang all notes.
My right hand like a sparrow landed on the plangencies,
Worked Phrygian arpeggios just as Chick Corea danced them
And somber Lydian modes as voiced by the real McCoy.
I sprang a shocking modulation: Bb major to F# diminished,
Then rode the devil's interval ‘cos Monk pretended it was cool
Until it was.

“Will you cut that racket out?” my father said,
“It's too depressing for the afternoon.”
“Depressing,” I sighed, while dampening the pedal,
Now there's a word I hadn't considered, as I poked to see
How close two notes could be to echo cleanly.
The smell of chicken stock came from the kitchen.
Another sunny day gave way its diminuendo cue,
Another night ahead with jazz on the radio 'til three –
The pipes and boards were already drumming and creaking –
Tonight could be the night that Rocket Bob will play some Cecil Taylor.

I gathered up my books and closed the fall board
And put the lingering melancholy to bed
And bravely faced my family once again,
To sit mute through their talk of friends and checklists and success
Before the low hum of synthesizers
And Clint Eastwood droning his rage between the ads.
Another remote evening I waited out to end
And the night to begin, a saxophone at my fingertips
As the tree limb taps the window.

Transparence

Green veins hold golden leaves
as iridescent fingers
in suspended incandescence,

frequencies of decay
in layered variegation
tipped with touches of blood.

The trees sway,
boughs lean like jet wings in the wind
as shivering timbers send sailors diving to the sea

to land so softly,
to be cupped in a hand
full of surrendering pages

curled and batter-fried,
frothed with burlap tatters
over moss that reads like a map.

All collapses to the soil
or drips into the stream
to decompose to oneness,

pulled under the fern-patterned surface
that gives all the rust colors back;
Speaking through, not to, each other.

Narrowing as the Water Widens

Reality brooks no description
still we persist
chasing rivers under bridges
with our sticks
we throw like stones to make the stream hold on -

but they are swallowed up by the water
as it leads us forward
to new impasses, different silences,
smaller things to learn.

Reflections on My 500th Post

This two-eyed, uncountable number makes me think of formula one racecars making concrete rafters shake or skyscrapers with their lights on all night. It makes me turn my fancies temporarily away from the arcana and tollkeeping of verse and onto the larger blogospheric world, i.e. actual human society. The virtual world is populated by real people, but so often they’re disguised behind obsessions with, say, hot peppers, Mauritius, or the Truman Show-like videos of their babies daily growing up, to name three among the millions floating in the soup like some vast fantasy machine of gentle service to people’s addictions, as if the internet was a vast Vegas roulette wheel, where what happens there stays there.

What is the place of poetry, the oldest of arts, within this church of the endless mind? I’m only a grain of salt even on the poetic landscape here, but I have a larger readership than did such luminaries as Greville, Blake, Keats, Rimbaud or of course Emily Dickinson (none of whom had readers in Dubai or Ulan Bator as far as I can tell). Yet I see blogs in my chosen field of finance that have 60,000 hits a day, while I’m lucky to get 60. What conjuration ability can poems have in a world that wants results that can be monetized, like earth, water and air? In the realm of verbal expression we call that tradable quality communication, and poetry fits into that goal the way autism or people who speak through a blowhole in their throats do (these are just harmless metaphors, no disrespect intended for autistics or people who speak through a blowhole in their throats).

I suppose it’s like William Carlos Williams said "It is difficult to get the news from poems, yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there." I want so much to believe that, because that’s what it means to me, but I know poets do tend to see death in every leaf that’s out of place, even doctors who deliver babies assume their own loneliness is the general human condition. Maybe it is. Maybe poetry really is practical as a salve for the tangles and frays of today’s hyper-charged lives. But then there’s the matter of having given up convincing even those closest to me that writing poetry is not some strange mental illness, an affliction deserving of pity and the widest of berths. John Ashbery thinks his poems simple and practical, and I think my poems are simple and practical, but they are still poems – wild things beyond the fence, so pure as to be perverse. Plus I assume that all the thoughts and feeling that descend into my every word or phrase, all the imbedded references, the personal resonances, the way the sound of syllables hits me, will just pop back up in the reader’s mind like multi-colored plastic boots do in the streets on a rainy day in Manhattan—meanwhile I’m just now getting, four months after the fact, a reference from my friend Hannah in her poetry blog when it turned two that she wouldn’t throw any tantrums. Ha, that’s funny!

This is a fancy way of saying I have nothing to say about why there’s so little me in all these words that come out of me—the dog I walked today must be a wolf of divine vengeance. I don’t think I could be confessional if I wanted to be, and that’s the last thing I want to be. Poems that don’t at least attempt to achieve a disembodied state are not worth writing, much less reading. But the problem is that the higher spheres, for all their mathematical harmonics, like it incoherent, or at least beyond coherence as we mere mortals practice it. Their rationale is simple: words create things, why re-create like some police pathologist when you can re-organize chaos and make it a comfortable fit? Such standards terrify me, quite frankly, because poems to me should have the same illusions as life, that of having a beginning, middle and end. They should only be as large as the mind’s ability to understand them, they should resemble durable objects like pearls. They should be plastic and dumb like humans, should they not?

This, in other words, seems a worse balancing act than the one handed to President Obama. I guess, at the most basic level, people want to know “why the hell is he doing this?” My answer is the same as it would be if the question was “what have I learned?” “how was I influenced?” or “how do I get published?”: I don’t know. All I know for sure is that this is a wonderful respite from the joy of giving to others all day long—it’s a giving back to myself. ‘Cos I deserve it.

With that in mind, here are my own personal favorites of the poems I’ve posted here since Memorial Day, 2007.

Twilight Gift--One of my favorite short poems

Return to the Superstitions--Comes closest to what I really meant to say

The Woman from Michigan--Captured as it happened at 4 o’clock in the morning

Looking Out Car Window, Thinking Larry Eigner--Guys from Swampscott and Marblehead checking out Highway 8

Three Perspectives on the War--Not for the squeamish

The Children of Baltimore--This one always makes me cry

Four Corners Postcard: Colorado--For the photos alone

Tribute to the Red Shield and its Five Arrows--A different kind of political poem

The Forties People--Like the Philadelphia Experiment, this one is real

Avebury--My all-time most visited post

My humble thanks to anyone reading who takes pleasure in what I write.

Ghost Towns

The Old West Union Hall has red flags and manifestos behind glass.
The proletariat roller coaster hangs decrepit in the sky.
The gallery of rogues, once robots with red eyes, is stilled in mid-gesture,
Like the Karl Marx jack-in-the-box at the haunted house
And the Mao Tse Tung doll with ironic smile and bloody frozen chainsaw.

They say this all was real once, but the information booth
Claims that it was built by a Wisconsin entrepreneur
As a way to lure tourists to the county after the railroad track ran dry.

Everybody knows this, secretly, but it's better to pretend
That this was the way it all went down, better that
Than to see the real ghost town down the road
With its skeletons ground into the soil,
Its mine shafts filled with garbage,
Its phantoms of vodka and violence.

The gold inside
Made some rich folks happy, for a spell
But it too was replaceable, by paper—
The pretense of worth no longer was needed
But the wound in the earth lingers on.

Hopper-esque

The darkest place is a white wall
on a bright-lit winter morning,
the shadow combing the brownstone,
the slats of a fire escape.
The loudest voice is the one not there.

A Song by .38 Special

For more on this topic, see The Immortal Coffee Urn

The ghosts, today, have taken hold,
the chains of what I've created rankle,
that sound, through the treacherous wind,
that song that won't let go

can't live without you...

It gnaws like tendons on my bones,
it haunts me wherever I go: as I reach
for the garbanzo beans, as I string out the pumpkins
for Halloween, that insidious whistle as I rake the hissing leaves

I never want to set myself free...

Finally a respite in the Walmart parking lot
as I pray that I'm finally free:
"get on the world, everybody, join hands, c'mon
on a love train, love train" and everybody dances,
the sky and earth connect for a still and shining moment...

but the helium soon enough resumes,
the invulnerable 80's riveting gun,
the fangs, the fur, the talons, the scales:

You're the one that's got me down on my knees...

And now, as the afternoon shadows
blur into a dream world, and the raptors
that are flying through the air, not even there
shriek like static their supremacy, it speaks again:

So caught up in you, little girl...

The bells and flutes wail in the distance
awaiting the children of the witching hour,
who know nothing of my tell-tale undead beat,
who will sing as if no songs were ever sung

Baby it's true, you're the one...

The trees have all turned to skeletons
but still this romance lingers on,
some feeling stays alive through me
in the ashes of a song

So caught up in you...

What we stumble on may grow into a flu,
the smallest things can turn immortal,
can become the voices of the hierarchy,
our sadness locked like spheres inside the azure.

A Bout of Indigestion

Inspired by Hannah's Underworld

In time I find some comfort in
this tortoise shell of lesson
how walls are never really walls
and doors yield other doors,
And love is always partial love
and light is never total.

A sample of the actual
infects me like a virus
and every detail turns from brown to red:
a centipede is the godhead,
the sky is empty space.

I hear my voice behind a curtain
dismissing all my fears
with that laugh of recognition:
how I'm greater here than there.

A Poem by Fr. Jan Twardowski

Man

Kneels at night and tries to find God
with eyes of fear, wear and tear-
the distant someone, from whom he'd been parted,
errant and crying, somewhere.

The smell throngs like blooming jasmine
in the golden wheat field of a dream-
who woke who you are, where you swim
through the nights and days unending.

No one says if you are right or wrong,
no one says you are not gorgeous,
only the land of the ancient tombs
hears and knows about your silence.

Translated from the Polish