Orcadian Hymn

“The closer I come to knowledge of myself, the more certain I feel I am immortal, and conversely, the more certain I am of my immortality, the more intimately I come to know myself.” – Edwin Muir

The recently discovered ruins in Brodgar, Orkney, thought older and more complex than Stonehenge, remind us of Orkney's mythic status as a lost paradise, one elucidated by its two greatest poets, Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown.

From Scara Brae to the Ness o' Brogdar
Fairies play and mermaids appear
With the kelpies and the ghillie dhu,
The finfolk of eynhallow and the seal people
While creels are woven, trawlers battened,
Cold winds hold us to the stone
That holds it all, but never mocks
Our unknowing. The holms all come and go, so too
The smoke from which comes forth the scrying face,
Our own, on the other side, smiling through the salt
And icicles on our nostrils. We are free as gulls
But tethered to the buoys, repairing traps and scaling mackerel,
Trying not to let our pity show, as we haul indifferent eyes in sacks
To kitchens eyed by cats, but everybody else with jaws as final
As the rocks before the sea.

The skerries can’t be seen without the white gull screak,
The tides cannot come in without the creak of wheels on docks.
In the caves sentinel witches converse with spirits drowned,
By the churches clean as drums, with gravestones like teeth broken,
Fallen down, laundry roars in the wind, immortality in every edge.

Endure things long enough you learn to see,
There always is an opening for waves,
So it is with our souls, sustained by
Endless drownings, constant hunger, bone-chilled cold
--And the warmth we find from the other side
Joining us for all we have to give:
Undiminished love, an endless stock of faith,
Gratitude that ferments into grace.

Changing Cast of Morning Clouds

The clouds have been woven to herringbone wool
and all I do is paint them;
The band plays it funky to rev up the morning
and I fit my soul in the bass line;
I react, like the well-oiled machine I am
to the news and gossip of the day, the terms used
convey me to a place not quite there, not quite here.

Illumination comes as the white sun through clouds.

I was responsible for my own unfoldment once
—I left the scene of the crimes,
demanded my own holy vista,
drove off the clothes and the ideas I wore,
stood alone at a rippling, glistening pond,
but the people I had hurt came back in time
to show me the damage I had done,
responsibility created fault
because I let the childish looking go
to move toward something larger.
My love was not quite strong enough
to overcome condemnation.

So here I am, on rails at fixed times,
providing the insights expected to those
who'd cry every night to be heard—
an intricate fabric, a singular thread
moves to disappear—knowing the sun
rewards failure, and there's always a hope
I can lose everything
again, and the next time
the ruins will be pure
beauty.

Glimpses of Ubiquity

The sun through the trees transmits sacred geometries
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint.

The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the one entire.

When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.

Behind Door Number Three

Children must leave childish things behind,
they must grow up to find their mothers.
Every human can be free, the key is to surrender,
ask help to be autonomous, to wake up to the dream
by learning the truth from its teacher, the lies that built our world.

The sun through the trees transmits sacred geometries
turning this place of flesh, in its flash, back to blueprint
and we remember how the stories and songs needed a home,
how movement needed a form to measure itself around
like the earth could seem so still hurtling in exponentials.

The only part of us not at one with the universe
is our consciousness, yet consciousness is the whole she-bang.
How can we think of our lives being different from our ideas,
or our planet being different from a black hole or quasar,
or of horses, say, distinct from rocks?

When the ancients painted eyes on stones
it was not so much to help them see
as to remember that they could.

Turn Black the Mirrors

Turn black the mirrors
to look at myself,
Peeling back layers
of miserable doubt
Before I see how I am held
in the warmest embrace,
From the vantage point of a God
it seems, is what it takes
What would be, if not for the mind,
an instantaneous realization.

Blue Sparks at Dragon Night

Everything can be reconciled from a place of self-loathing;
if one looks enough at the broken hall of mirrors one becomes
what one fears, and says "I told you so."
Ah, the payoff,
the short-circuit vision into heartlessness, so one doesn't
have to think but one's a fool to show respect because
one isn't treated with the respect that one deserves
as one was taught to treat every other
(with verbal and physical scars to prove it).
And so there's the slow burn of frustrated expectations,
the fire that says "it's mine" in a wind that scatters coals,
expecting others to be other than what they are
(and helping them see just how far they fall short),
it's this game of fair play, once given as a promise
in lieu of another hug, it becomes an addiction
with its thumb to the world, where everything's a gift
and justice is not of this realm.

Humans are the creatures incensed they can't get what they want
and the ones who keep forgetting they are royalty

And then the anger comes, and it burns inside the viscera,
the dull aches of another's pain inside
as he feels the whole thing slip away from his grip,
he should get what he gets without pitching a fit,
he knows this, he knows what he meant
was not close to what was expressed, whatever truth
was there is forgotten in his shame. He feels estranged
and paralyzed once again.

Humans are the beasts who maximize their advantage because they can,
and the ones who surrender with the compassion of the Gods

Meanwhile, on the other end of his wrath,
they wonder how far it can go,
how softly they must walk on the eggshells,
how quickly they can mend what's torn,
they dare not say that conversation is inaccessible,
dare not express the confusion of their pain,
time is too short to utter any words, words that can
cut unexpectedly like glass.

They feel like victims, powerless, mute,
as if it's all their fault, misunderstood,
just like that ogre in the other corner,
the one now crying too softly to hear, for love.

Humans are the animals who kill to prove a principle
but mourn a passing they never stopped to know

Redemption Train

For Jesse

The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to take that walk through the rain
There's so many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray you will find the way

The redemption train is forever boarding
With sinners forgiven who wash themselves clean
They fall down to their knees for the power and glory
They’re worthy enough for the grace they have seen

The redemption train has one destination
The place we are waiting with love in our eyes
To share all your tears and sing your salvation
The love of the Lord is just you in disguise

The redemption train is already waiting
Waiting for you to walk through the rain
So many roads but there’s only one station
Where all of us pray that you’ll find your way

Replacement Parts

Our human stars
that light the night
below the absent sky
give up their secrets easily,
some love they wish you'd buy

displayed behind
the lamps of chrome
that flood the darkness gray
so you can find your way around
the frameworks of the day.

The Pleiades
are liquor stores
to help you stagger home,
Orion leaves its office on
so you can eye its tomes,

and street lamps
are the zodiac
connecting Gods and men
and bedroom lamps the planets glow
as days begin and end.

We bring our essence
closer in
and dance in spacious rooms,
the universes we once rhymed
can safely now resume.

Two People Talking

The affairs of state are such intimate kisses,
the ravenousness inside only hinted at in the pictures.
We can hear the malnourished mistress but we never see her face;
the concessions that they press are someone else’s pillow talk.
Their wars disturb my sleep but they are merely lover’s quarrels
where neighbors can make out a phrase or two,
and the unreciprocation, their contempt for our distress
is but a whispering note in a high-end dinner date
to complement the wine.

I look into your eyes and tell the history of all that is,
and the total past is prologue for our talking,
and we solve whatever problems there are festering
because we care to understand each other's viewpoint.
As we talk, people watch us eagerly from the aethers
and we smell the scents of heaven that imbue their evening rooms.
What we do seems to matter more to them than public speeches
for the real is the only thing, the only thing that matters,
and no one can forget that they are real.

Crazy

I walk through the mist
in awe of the glistening snow at night
as the dharma of rain soaks my skin.

While the others are driving, splashing my shoes
I walk the two miles to my home
in my own cold baptism.

There is nothing in these homes for me
with their warm TVs,
there is only this chance

that another word waits around the corner,
a new rhythm to capture from the pleadings of rain,
a different sensation to coax from the winter dark.

Grey Day

I. Observations
The blank sheet of snow
Is already turning grey
As the portentous sky
And rooftops of slate,
The now-trodden paths
And the grid of the highway,
The branches of trees
Where the junco birds play,
The fog from the breath
As it billows away,
The smoke on the river,
The stacks and the chimneys,
The switches and platforms
And sides of the train,
The tall office towers
And the window frames,
The fences and pipes
And satellite plates,
The bridges and schools
And commercial displays,
The stacked blocks and wet stone
And graffiti base paint,
The clock hands and tire rims
And locked storefront grates,
Garage doors and steeple tops,
Antennas and fire escapes,
Concertina and chain link,
Derricks and cranes,
Swingsets and air vents
And factory gates,
The water in cylinders
Seen through the rain.

II. Meaning
Grey is the stigma you must overcome,
The mud in the search for the truth,
What are the ashes but what has been?
The elegance of loss, the gunmetal wisdom,
The vicissitudes of sophistication,
A mind too heartless, a spirit confused,
Polarities neutralized, purities soiled,
Sharpnesses scraped away,
To accept without discernment,
The shine that is unyielding, that pulls all inside,
What can, in a moment of sun, be undone.

A Sunday in Greenwich

Behind the red barn with its rooftop of snow
in the white home older than the revolution
a book of Aeschylus is pulled off the library shelves
to peruse perhaps while the owner is waiting
for an answer to his latest email.
Greece has only so many islands to give
they must offer him something more tangible
if they expect his small claim on their distressed debt
to not be litigated in a favorable court;
without rights at par and a generous recovery waterfall
he can paralyze the global bond market and they know it
or will learn it by afternoon's end.
As he waits, he takes breaks from his monitors
to cheer for his teams, who both make the super bowl
through the most fortunate bounces of the football.
He must make a call, the game will be fun to attend this year,
he resolves as he reads the happy report
how Newt won by running against the elites.
He takes his Xanax and Crestor
And reads briefs before his usual blissful sleep,
unaware that the Black Water Dragon
now emerges in the darkest of skies.

Snowblind

lilac snow
violet sky
white
can't yet
be seen

for the light
inside of us
has not yet risen

we're not clarified enough
to see it
purely
just its fractures
seen uncertainly
as if they were the vapor
of our dreams
stories in the static noise
that make us feel our lives
are not our own

when white
is certainty
the law that is alignment
the pull that keeps us
tethered
to the stars

Black Angel Suite

First a translation of Eugenio Montale’s “L’angelo nero” (Go here for the original Italian plus an alternative translation by the great William Arrowsmith), then an original poem on the same subject…

I.
Angel of black
restore me in soot
under your wings,
I can scrape past the combs
of thorns, the illuminations of the ovens
and kneel down
on the extinguished embers
if ever there remains some fringe
of your feathers

small angel so dark,
not heavenly or human
angel who is visible
changing different colors
and different forms, the same
then not the same, in the rapid flashing
tale-spinning your incomprehensible

black angel unveil
but do not kill me with your radiance,
do not clear the halo of fog
imprinted in my mind
because there is no eye that can withstand the headlights,
angel of coal that will shelter
inside the chestnut seller’s shawl

great ebony angel
dark angel
or white, if I, tired of wandering
took your wing and felt it
creak
I could not recognize you as I do
in sleep, waking in the morning
because it’s easier for a biped or a camel
to fit a needle's eye
than distinguish the false from the true,
and the burnt part that’s left, the lump
on your fingertips
is less than the dust
on your last feather, great angel
of furnace and ash, miniature angel
chimney sweep.

II.
Angel of black
with invisible wings
fill up my lungs with your flickering
grime, angel hobbling
in vagabond clothes
chanting toothless hymns,
cover the pipe steam too bright as it ascends
mirror my prayers too black
to comprehend, so the thought of death
is overwhelming, the sense of loss almost real,
let the burn of injustice turn the sky to ash
before it reduces
to blue and confusion,
let me know my sins and see in you
their retribution
and mercy in your hideous cloak.

O angel walk past me in fur
skirting the unknown with vampiric gait
and disappear, when your eyes
have laid their eggs in me
to purple smoke, the blackened
acid sweet leaves
of what's no longer
in form
and there's no life at all in the gargoyles
just the thought of you
as if you exist.

Don't desert me, black angel,
I wish to forget
that the world is service and thought
is endless,
let me grovel with turbid fanatics
who all harbor secret doubts
and a thirst for vengeance.
The sulfurous burn
of the paper and names
as the borders get blurred,
encendered,
how you endure the fire’s play, resolute
pit, cast-iron charm.

Why I Don't Mourn the Loss of History

"There are children playing in the street who could solve some of my top problems in physics, because they have modes of sensory perception that I lost long ago." - J. Robert Oppenheimer

Euripides is speaking in this brook
As is Joy Formidable;
Both are preferable to the no voice that we hear
Contradicting all our yes’s.

Cultura, the tiny leaf off the tree that we saved
Is all we have left of our vanity
In the raw perception of the moment,

Where the rise and fall of countless lifetimes
is now transformed into our soil, our water, what we are,
a mulch where anything can grow
but seeds so precious they must drop from unseen birds.

Counting Flags

In solidarity with Wikipedia

Stars, watching over the worried homes,
A line of long red bloodstripes from an old war
Before the Rothschilds took control.
The people here take pride in the care and folding,
The angle of ascent, the length of the pole,
Ironing it out like something they would wear
While dreaming of grandmothers new to these shores
And the blessings of this vast last chance Texaco
Large enough to take the most insignificant in,
Where there wasn’t something in the way of being human.
The government can now kill every one of us as it pleases
That’s the law, but mostly reserved for those
Who refuse to be implicated in the slaughter of children
For no other reason than it makes some feel stronger.
The flag thumbs its generous nose at such opposition,
That great symbol of dissent now warns against opinion,
Reminds us we have no freedom because we are not responsible.
The few who remember the way things were are sent overseas
To start their own countries (if they’re lucky) somewhere else,
And the brand is refreshed with each gusting of wind
As the buildings around them keep on crumbling.
The morning sun makes these rippling stripes
A memorial to something more than
The people who gave their lives
So that debt would grow,
It’s an undefiled dream
Waving over the projects,
The shuttered factories,
The foreclosed homes,
And everyone in terror

That they might wake up.

A Winter Day

Snow dust at sunrise,
Geese honking, the screeching of crows,
slush cracks, shoes muffle, tires shush, drains splatter

The woods have held on to their browns
and the grasses didn't yield without a fight

The afternoon forgets the thought
that breathed down on the real
as our minds are asked to let our knowledge go

White forms will always dissolve into black pools

Wet night
with its luminous coal and clean concrete,
limbs in tubes of light and diamond straw

Remembering ML King Boulevard

It was so beautiful in Tinytown

When the sunrise hit the formstone, or the

Moonlight caught the scrapyard storage tanks.

We were proud to drink at Butts ‘n’ Betties

Where you fought or lost your girlfriend every time,

Proud to walk the projects every day

And navigate police tape and well-tossed bricks,

Proud of that fat guy at the liquor store

Who sold us our Chesterfields and Smirnoff

When he shot a robber dead from his perch,

Proud we had no furniture and Goodwill clothes,

Proud we smelled the sulfur and epoxy,

Proud we were insane not mediocre,

With our gizzard and horseradish banquets

And violence on the grass each Saturday…

But thoughts become like a virus

And memory a terminal disease

And I wonder why, as I let this go,

I found such solace in their acceptance,

In the magic of a dying old world town

Where there wasn’t ever any room to build

But plenty of incentive to destroy,

Where pain was a badge best left in the attic

And drinking games the only freedom from shame,

The shame of feeling pain

                                            in a harbor

Of tears,

where the priests lacked all compassion,

Where they let you see with a kind of glee

What will become of those souls abandoned

But only if you do not bat an eye;

This town that drinks alone but lets you buy.

Ghosts and homeless people were my only friends

Because they said what others merely know:

How every mental fabricating smelter

Goes belly up in the end, and every grace

Must always be contingent, for no one

Deserves a thing, that is the curse of knowing

That before the Marxist hip-hop poseurs

Stapled their flyers to the plywood walls

That once these storefronts held a golden age.

Escaping from such a place with my life

Was nothing, for it was a place to die,

Tho I cry to have pulled two new foals from its clay.

Brittle Words

Sunday morning
laying in bed
letting all the monumental somethings
float by

Once in a while
when it's perfectly still
the occasional all-encompassing nothing comes
what we, with brittle words, call love

A Fairy Tale for Grimm Times

Once upon a time in a land far away there lived a queen.  

While sewing, she pricks her finger and three drops of blood fall on the snow that swirls continuously around her. As she looks at the blood on the snow, she says to herself, "Oh, how I wish that I had a daughter that had skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony."

A few years later, the queen gives birth to a baby girl who has skin white as snow, lips red as blood, and hair black as ebony. They name her Princess Snow White. As soon as the child is born, the queen dies.

In the meantime the king has taken on a new wife, who is beautiful but very vain. The new queen possesses a magical mirror, which answers any question it is polled. The only question that the queen ever wanted to ask, however, was "Mirror, mirror on the wall / Who is the fairest of them all?" to which the mirror always replies "You, my queen, are fairest of all."

But one day Snow White became more beautiful, and the mirror told the queen when she asked: "Queen, you are full fair, 'tis true, but Snow White is fairer than you."

The queen becomes jealous, and orders a huntsman to take Snow White into the woods to be killed.

She demanded that the huntsman, as proof of killing Snow White, return with her lungs and her liver. The huntsman takes Snow White into the forest, but after raising his knife to stab her, he finds himself unable to kill her as he has fallen deeply in love with her. Instead, he lets her go, telling her to flee and hide from the Queen. He then brings the queen the lungs and the liver of a fairy, which is prepared by the cook and eaten by the queen.

In the forest, Snow White discovers a tiny cottage belonging to a group of seven dwarfs, where she rests. There, the dwarfs take pity on her, saying "If you will keep house for us, and cook, make beds, wash, sew, and knit, and keep everything clean and orderly, then you can stay with us, and you shall have everything that you want."

Each of the dwarfs had a name:

Dopey, the youngest, most lovable and most mischievous of the seven…

Grumpy, who found nothing to like in the forest or in the dwarf family…

Doc, the only one of the dwarfs to wear glasses, so presumably an intellectual and in charge…

Happy, the most rotund of the dwarfs, who laughs off all the troubles around him and makes fun of the other dwarfs…

Bashful, who hides his innocent nature behind a classic pose of shyness…

Sneezy, whose words are often hard to distinguish because of his propensity for sneezing all the time…

And Sleepy, who apparently cannot get much work done because of a problem with narcolepsy.

While Snow White travels around with the Seven Dwarfs putting on shows for the forest animals, the Queen asks her mirror once again "Who's the fairest of them all?", and is horrified to learn that Snow White is not only alive and well and living with the dwarves, but is still the fairest of them all.

Outraged, she makes a poisoned apple to kill Snow White, and in the disguise of a farmer’s wife…

offers it to Snow White. When she is hesitant to accept it, the Queen cuts the apple in half, eats the white part and gives the poisoned red part to Snow White, who eats the apple eagerly and immediately falls into a deep stupor. When the dwarfs find her, they cannot revive her, and they place her in a glass vault, assuming that she is dead.

Time passes, and a prince traveling through the land sees Snow White.  

He strides to her vault. The prince is enchanted by her beauty and instantly falls in love with her. He begs the dwarves to let him have the vault. The prince's servants carry the vault away, and the movement causes the piece of poisoned apple to dislodge from Snow White's throat, awakening her. The prince then declares his love for her and soon a wedding is planned.

The vain Queen, still believing that Snow White is dead, once again asks her mirror who is the fairest in the land, and yet again the mirror disappoints her by responding that "You, my queen, are fair; it is true. But the young queen is a thousand times fairer than you."

Not knowing that this new queen was indeed her stepdaughter, she arrives at the wedding, and her heart fills with the deepest of dread when she realizes the truth. As punishment for her wicked ways, a pair of heated iron shoes are brought forth with tongs and placed before the Queen, but before she steps into them, Dopey, who has mistakenly eaten a small bite of the poisoned apple, asks the Queen to marry him. She quickly accepts, and the party continues as before, with everyone living happily ever after.

The Breaking of the Sun

It's the redness of the fallen leaves
the calico blue of the waterway
the pom pom shaking of the winter trees
the revelation of beige in ragged quills

That makes the homes so far away
and the people on the train no more than scenery
and I wonder whether we are seen at all
or whether we are watched like morning birds

As they harmonize their moves from branch to branch
experiencing up and down, together and alone,
one going to the wires, and one into the woods
in some unknown and vast choreography

And I see the people take the form of beasts
outlined out of star shapes and the visions inside dreams
alighting at the terminal, their creatures hid within,
to disperse in complex patterns only galaxies portend.

Poète Maudit

Thinking of Ernest Dowson

Beauty rules her haunted souls,
Her gold transmuting lead,
Her scepter takes allotted tolls
In flames that must be fed

With lives you lived so long ago
Still roasting on her spit,
That feeling you cannot let go,
Like wardrobes that won't fit.

Her perfume phial is empty,
The lipstick faded grey,
The world will never hear your cries
Now that they’ve burned away,

The perfect turns of phrase will bend,
The music will undo;
The kisses will survive them,
The roses will stay true,

The wine will last forever
‘Tho drunkards drain like drops
In death the quenchless river
Where every carriage stops;

The dull words of the girl long gone
Will echo in the caves,
The sound in vain you waited on
Will whisper through the waves

But the sweet silk that you made of it
Has long since now dissolved,
And the dawn you mourned as dimly lit
Will never quite resolve.

The fountain now no longer sings
Its unheard melodies,
But lovers still arrive in spring
With fires to appease,

And only you are absent,
You poet of the clouds,
Who held what was too vibrant,
Too lucent for our shrouds.

The Golden Years

The age that we live in is the past.
There's no need for librarians, everyone's a wiki on something.

The question of the age is: what age do you wish to live in?
Perhaps the absinthe 90's, the 50's baby boom,
Rome when it fiddled, Paris when it sizzled, Britain when heads rolled.

The hotels are roaring twenties affairs, the pharmacies strictly post-war,
The trains were made in 1970, and the stations a hundred years before.
When the buildings aren't greco-roman, they're soviet modern or deco
with arches from Byzantium and frills from gothic France.

Even the factory ruins are preserved as shopping arcades
where orange-yellow miniskirts and bouffants are all the rage
and no one pretends to make jewelry anymore, or watches or gloves
or drapery or shoes or scarves or cedar chests.

One expects wedding dresses and baby clothes to stay the same
but Harleys and Fenders and Airstreams?
There hasn't been a new kind of lamp in 30 years!

Instead there are fractals and video games,
the cartoons that you think are real,
and gadgets that bring the past that much closer to life

so we can chat about Lucy and the Seventies Bands,
relive Antietam, check the Magna Carta's fine print,
draft fantasy players for the USFL, watch handfishing passed down for
centuries,
reminisce about sit-com families before they all become dysfunctional,
see the guitar in Picasso's studio, and the glory of Monty Python's tomb.

Even the currency slowly turns back to gold
along with old books and gas station ornaments.

It's all we can do to hold on to what we are
like a chrysalis flailing through dust
squirming for the light in a cavernous glue
for some long-dreamt beauty of birth.

Evening at the Cyber Café

Chinese warrior monks eat Marco Polo pizza in dishwasher aprons
debating mastadons from Mars to all-night Babylonian oompah music

while off-duty patrolmen nonchalantly play mafia shrooms and shoot-em-up
video games waiting for a slice

and Hieronymous Fresh works on his translation of the lemon jelly donut
into linear b like every archivist from the Pleiades to Alpha Centauri

and a junkyard dog named Iron Fist drinks Mint Romneys with velvet gloves
and a dry cravat remembering how despite it all the Monte Cristos were good.

It was enough to wax nostalgic for getting bushwacked by a tire iron
in the back of a Parisian chop suey joint by men with too much Frenchness.

The clown-nanny wonders why the children are all frightened
and why he can't get service in his hairshirt and order mock turtleneck soup to go,

while the golden thumb piano of justice plays for quarterback Tim Tebow's
elk antlers glimpsed before they retract into His Magnificent Skull.

The organ donor monkey dressed like a Peter Lorre cancer survivor on trial
wants spellcheck now too but not on spellcakes, for his memoirs, that he calls

"Pimping God, the Spanish Johnny Story, or How I Learned the Long Con”
while his pasta grows cold like unrequited love or certain hands in poker.

Tebow Time

"Tebow threw for exactly 316 yards in the 29-23 upset win, presenting an eerie allusion to the Bible’s John 3: 16 passage — whose number Tebow famously wore in the black under his eyes when he led the Florida Gators to victory in the 2009 collegiate national championship game. What’s more, that event took place exactly three years ago on the same day as his latest miracle comeback. And that wasn’t it for the coincidences: Tebow set an NFL playoff record with, you guessed it, 31.6 yards per completion and the TV rating on CBS peaked between 8.00-8.15pm ET with a rating of, say it ain’t so, 31.6." - Glen Levy, Time Magazine online, January 9, 2011

Tim Tebow as John Henry
come to Occupy the Playoffs
sayin' 'tis no game for courtiers and kings
'tis a game for holy children,
no matter all the layers
of anger from abandonment
the giants are as pure
as naked babies underneath.
And while the greatest minds
scheme deep into the night
on how to spring their team
on a blackboard from its prison
he waited late at night
deep inside the locker room
to run to rookie Miller
and tell him of the good news
how Jesus needs this team to win.

He never was supposed to have been born
so physical restrictions don't mean much to him.
He never went to school except to play football
so the thought of himself as an individual makes him grin,
and the game plan always was a form of scripture
with time enough for prayers and gratitude,
the will to win the same as the thirst for heaven.

And when the opening kickoff
bounced right off the goalpost
and landed perfectly still
smack dab on the 20-yard line,
one knew that Jesus was in the building,
that another miracle was needed
in these hard and desperate times,
a miracle that would only happen
when the other team had reached the point
that they could put away the game,
when the last of the non-believers
had given up all hope.

Truth: Pro & Con

One can either move with the stars or against them.
The correctness of the journey is not what is important.

149 Degrees

A Tesla infrared machine
like the desert in a box
releasing copper from my blood
in sadness droplets
pen starts crying
black like the foot bath
my fingerprints toxic
my sadness so small
in the face of the endless
quiet at the bottom of my heart -
no one else is waiting there
just my invincible twin

Epiphany and the Ace of Spades

They talked, at work, of gold this morning,
the difference between base and precious metals,
the former was a bubble, financially speaking,
the latter the last thing of value on earth,
increasing based on its cost in extraction,
the modern variant of the myth in every ancient culture
how the serpents came to our planet for gold
and created us to mine it, and take dominion.
Thank you, Melchior of Babylon
for the gift of empire, in changeless gold,
for the philosopher's stone,
the earth of kings turned virtuous,
the queen that recognizes the divine so gives it birth,
the women of Parthia in the West, in angelic descent
yield their perception to earth, producing form as beauty
the loveliness of all that is endlessly created,
the sculptures, the colors, the bodies
as, from the East, the shamans and brahmins
with sage and papyrus, priests of their captor's religion,
Chaldean necromancers, Egyptian exorcists,
who hold the secrets to conquering earth with their minds
for the betterment of humanity, yield their wisdom
to the earth, producing laws of wisdom
transmitted secretly from races unknown to history,
the 144 magi, 12 messiahs, seven ages.

This afternoon, a different scent in the underground tunnels,
frankincense, strange and familiar, with its opening fragrance
that widens the heart and softens the mind,
the white stone that burns and turns the self violet,
the smoke that is spirit cleansing the air
and calling us inward to God.
Thank you Balthazar of Arabia
for the gift of priesthood, sweet frankincense,
for the fire that burns knowledge into the divine,
that illumines a vision of God the Son,
that we may see through the crystallized sand columns
built from music and plied with cosmic light,
to wear the robes of hierophant as he awaits the Christ
until revealed like an eclipse, out of the infinity of faith,
earth becomes a two-fold star lit by two perfect rays,
the bride and the groom waiting,
the binah and chokmah, the yin and yang
dancing through the skeleton frame
where the constellations, the mighty bull, lion and scorpion
marked in light within the head, high heart and loins
as one aligns with the flowing, the conclusion to the word,
the slow syrup drip of the universe.

This evening, when I came home
my wife put in the diffuser a new essential oil, myrrh,
the most powerful tool of healers, a resin that bleeds red
from the tree, embalmer of mummies
strong enough to resurrect one for the next world,
to if not cure all disease, purify the suffering
in the space between living and immortality.
Thank you Jaspar of Persia
for the gift of prophecy, bitter myrrh,
the divine feminine manifests the divine
virgin Mary in the grotto as the Christ light is born
from the bride and groom of heaven,
the mathematics of love calls down angels
from thrones from dominions from archangels
to densest earth, for heaven to beat in hearts
and vibrate inside skin;
throw the fruitcakes, hunt the wren,
set the Christmas trees on fire, dive into the water
for the cross, let Carnival begin
to celebrate the unification
of what never was divided,
spirit and flesh, earth and heaven.

Father and Daughter Chat

For Veronica

Confusing to know what is right and what's wrong
And everything, all the time, is perfect

The bullies are weak and retreaters are strong
And everything, all the time, is perfect

It's holy to think that the others have won
And everything, all the time, is perfect

It's sacred to feel that that your work is undone
And everything, all the time, is perfect

A comfort to know you have wasted your time
And everything, all the time, is perfect

Losing the time you don't have is no crime
And everything, all the time, is perfect

The greatest of gifts is what hurts you the most
And everything, all the time, is perfect

That thing you're ashamed of is your proudest boast
And everything, all the time, is perfect

The future and past's in this breath that you take
And everything, all the time, is perfect

All that you gather becomes what you make
And everything, all the time, is perfect

You ask how we thrive without a hive mind
And everything, all the time, is perfect

Our strength is in what we can seek and not find
And everything, all the time, is perfect

Outside the Net

When the world was real, I had Biddle Street,
its smell of grime and gravy, its ghosts dressed
like cathedrals, its beggars dressed like ghosts,

the concrete hill that was my life
with the monument on top done up in purple
when the ravens came to town and I had left

to drink lemonade with Sufis and eat oranges with virgins
who wrote ancient Chinese channelings in sand
in yellow houses in the deep evangelical South;

I was simply chasing purple, the shade I finally found
when I saw Jesus tip his titty dancer Mary
in an all-you-can-eat casino in North Las Vegas.

How much easier it was, then, to know what was actual,
for it glinted like a crystal in my hand, reunited with my cells
and now it swims before my eyes whenever I close them.

It's a cry that can't be heard inside this box
that's now the world, that collects all the facts
but not that purple, the bird itself, its arc of flight.

After Falling Off the Wagon to Read a Newspaper

Hobos are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,
Hippies of the drum circle its armies of the night,
the Unemployed turned anarchist the new-school bourgeoisie,
the throng of rude unimpressed Youth the new blue light.

More drop into this sewage from the ordinary every day
as jobs, homes, health care lapses
learning, as they fall, how to live with so much less,
less stuff, fewer lies, not as much irradiated food,
to fill the abyss of self-esteem with something else,
to look with different eyes at the world, to observe
how close the stars are, and how no corner's disconnected
from another, how strong one is for walking on two feet.

Nearby, more people wait to fall off, afraid
of what they'll become when their vestiges of order
crumble, afraid of the smile the free wear,
their shabby clothes. The clock is like a timebomb,
so they hold on to the moments:
the posing models, the decadent gadgets,
the knowing that their paradise must end.

When you've been branded by the hot coals held by Satan
you tend to trust him, you take solace in your pitiful share
of corruption, and overlook the sacrificed souls of children
as it's all a game, until the reaper comes
and reminds you this was your choice all along.

Poet's Block

thermal lint
rusted bulb...

wherever you are
you are inside the poem

it lets you in
its sacred space

to show there is no other you
in all that is

and then it pulls away
like the sun revealing glass

all walls and windows
through which the veils of smoke are clear as crystals

New Year's Day Football

The shock of the clock
turning as I turn
covering as I leap
for what may be my last
hail mary
to haul in the thing
reality contests
its minutes of bliss
too small
for my chasm of heart
beating

My Year in Review

I wash the scent off of 2011,
an Oscar Wilde saint with a past,
the lines, by El Greco, all black.

It's time, to leave behind
some hostages of the mind:
bowling in Manhattan, swimming in the Yucatan,
visiting psych wards and tooth removers,
humid graduations and ice-cold reunions,
afternoon mescal in the West, St. Germaine back East,
the cheers for the Bruins and for De Vere on the silver screen,
the elegies for capitalism and democracy,
well-made socks and the NC double A,
caught in the job creators pepper spray,
praising Aaron Rodgers and Scott Walker,
Stieg Larsson and Julian Assange,
ragtime tornadoes, fracking earthquakes, nuclear tsumanis
a self-immolation before a courthouse in New Hampshire,
the epic fail of sovereigns, the credit event bazookas,
the black swan contagions of a civilization
that can no longer stomach the gentlest of truths.

This was the year we glimpsed the mirror behind the curtain
but only to see if our eyes were open,
for the real work ahead, for all of us now
is go stark raving sane to discover the treasure
of what we have been all this time,
beyond El Greco's tarnished saints
or Caravaggio's lucent sinners,
the thing we are always urging us towards,
forever mistaken but never wrong,
the lurch through the cleansing hurricane
to the nothing inside, all eyes.

The Continuing Adventures of Mr. Bull and Mr. Bear

For one, the sun is always rising.
For the other, the sky is always falling.
Yet they both are always right,
All curvings of the roller coaster ride reveal their foresight.

One is fearless in how much they love us
(Even when they try to kill us),
Sees children as the mother of invention.
The other's always dying to the dream of sleep,
Seeking freedom from the stubborn pull of nothingness.

There's no walk through the fire without being burned
There's only the fire
And not being burned.

Yet one can learn by swaying with the balance
As markets adjust behind secretive weights,
Seek solace in the one and then in the other
Though what is put together one can't calculate.

One must let the rope out in infinite faith
And pull it back in with all of one's strength.
The gift of life is far too prevalent
It must be trimmed back, for growth is
A means to an end.

But what that end is, we still can't predict
Even with minds that encompass all,
Even with all-embracing hearts,

For we wheel in the same old orbit around
The contradictions that are the possibilities
Pretending that it matters to be right or be wrong
When our openness alone propels the journey.

Heroes in a Box

The little people
See the big wide world
In deep and shiny focus;
Every sentient thing
Wears its praise and blame.

The giant people
Have insect-like eyes
Compelled to read patterns
Only they can see;
A thread becomes a world.

The roses the little ones
Throw at their feet
Are shadows of darkness and light,
But the eyes returned in confusion
Bear bright the purest of wisdom.

It's as if they are watching a birth out of nothing,
Some color to light the familiar world,
But the giants vanish when eyes adapt to their light.
The little people fear they're too small
Swallowed in how large they've become.

Near Grafton

Sheets of ice on beveled rock
like frosting over chocolate

Cold Walk in the Middle of the Night

There are few Christmas lights
in the Marblehead Neck mansions,
but in the squid ink sea
green and red lights flash incessantly
from solitary rocks
amid swaying buoys.

Conjunction

Capricorn Connecticut, in a Capricorn sun and new moon...

It's brutal the way
the goat grows out of the spiral,
irascible ego
must learn how to flow
with the consequating whole,
to let the past go
by learning its mistakes.
The integrity of fitting
the narrow straits
requires not molding the truth
to desire
for even an instant,
but accepting the brown hills
of bare woods as beauty
so the path of the birch trees
can be seen.

It's an energy that tells me
with my precious son in a homeless shelter
on Christmas
not to break
or visit.

St. Nicholas the Banker

In honor of U.S. total debt reaching 100% of GDP (officially at least) on the winter solstice.

Hard times for he who thinks of himself as God
And every year pretends he’s not a fraud,
The middleman from a land of endless fleece,
His conspiracy unraveled piece by piece.

He’d told the slaves he’d teach them all a trade
As if it was OK they were not paid.
He called it all a global charity
For the oil-rich, offshore, tax-free territory.

When he asked them to don green felt hats and bells
To endure the sting of sawdust and the turpentine smells
It taught them every year that they were fools;
Their student loans were never paid in full

So they worked to smelt lead, sew shoes, trim elastic
And fill their lungs with fiberglass and plastic
With no health care or dental, for some children overseas
Whose parents paid five times their homes to please.

How money good turned bad he wouldn’t say,
Maybe when he discontinued real gold in his sleigh
Or maybe he created a dependency,
A sense of entitlement to drive his Ponzi scheme,

All we know for sure now is the gold is gone
And shoddy toys each year are left too soon in front of lawns
Yet each of us must fill the stocking yet again for Santa
A starting out down payment of two hundred fifty grand, a

Pittance when compared to what we really owe
To this mysterious Kringle who makes gold out of tinsel
And has nothing left to show for all his usury
Except our souls bound in perpetuity.

For this one Christmas we will owe a thousand
To fortify his compound in the northern wasteland
And so we can believe that he is real,
His bubbles all still made as out of steel.

We’ve given him the mint whose coins are cold, thin air
Leant back to us for payment at three times the share
Yet somehow we believe he can’t exist,
That coincidence could not allow such a perverse plot twist;

It’s so much easier to believe he’s a delusion
Than to know exactly what he does to children.
We lack respect, he says now; this greatest of all men
Has to hide his gifts of course in gilded wrapping.

He offered once a hope to a world torn up by war
That if we were more good each year we would gain a reward,
But these things he leant to us became what we were,
His boxes were empty of what really mattered

And chaos has ensued, the mother of all profit
That spins and spins until there is nothing left of it
And hard times have come now for even Santa Clause,
A time that should give every one of us pause,

A time to look the gift horse in the mouth,
A time for polar north to vibrate south
To rediscover our love inside the light
And bless the final passing of the long, good night.

After "The Long Christmas Dinner"

A miniskirt with sequins, December horn of Orpheus
but no one is adored...

"Titanic's sister ship!," turquoise dress with rabbit fur
but no one is adored...

It's overdrafts, lost credit cards, and pre-processing fees
that warm the people's voices,
the jingling lust of Christmas
that puts the giggle in their stride
but no one is adored...

No birds of prey look longingly
just iron wings with ruby eyes.
Panhandlers cannot even see our souls.
Couples smile arm in arm
so glad to be away from each other just this once
but no one is adored...

Some fair exchange is bartered out
in all the brisk complaining,
some wisdom comes from blackenings of vodka
but no one is adored...

The only one invisible
who floats between the rising plumes of steam,
completely empty of the storefronts in his eyes,
looks up into the fat and glistening sky:
Adoration calm and endless fuels the night.

Words of Wisdom from Bill Hicks

"The world is like a ride at an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it, you think it's real because that's how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, round and round, it has thrills and chills, it's very brightly colored, it's very loud and it's fun for a while. Some people have been on this ride for a long time and they think to question 'is this real, or is it just a ride?,' and other people have remembered and they come back to us and they say 'hey don't worry, don't be afraid ever because this is just a ride,' and we, we kill these people. We kill all the good guys who try to tell us this and let the demons run amok, but that's OK, it's just a ride." - Bill Hicks (December 16, 1961 – February 26, 1994)

Explaining the Zodiac to a Child

In the circle, like a merry-go-round, you see the same familiar faces
As you go around. Sometimes they smile,
Sometimes they frown, and by the end they’ve disappeared
Although you’re right where you began.

The red horse I am riding needs green dragon by its side,
I need to have the bad guy, to drive these pistons on,
I need to have this mirror in the center, or else I'd turn
To stone, or else I’d be afraid I was invisible,
Unable to see the wound that takes me home.

The shadows rise and fall upon the pole
Still I’m in the same place moving,
The plastic saddle, the permanent smile
Aren’t real, but my stirrups are
As I stroke the purple hair that keeps me dreaming.

And as I pass another turn around the cylinder
That hammers music, another cluster
Of notes like a hand with cubes of sugar
Makes me recognize at last

That every time I pass
It is unique, this stiff contraption
Lets me be the world revolving, for the oneness has the room
For endless ones to spin an endless candy cotton.

The Morning After the Bill of Rights Was Expunged

Geese flying west, honking into the great mystery
But touching somehow, in formation, as if attacking
When they could be picked off so easily.

A sparrow as Cassandra with its discontented plaints
Lives in a harmony of song in the air.

We round them up, and rip down their nests
But still they return, endless
With their incomprehensible squawking
And we too dumb to hear.

Five days of what we do to you,
What we now can do to any U.S. citizen
Who expresses a different opinion,
Makes you a lifelong vegetable.

I wish we could treat humans
As gently as birds.

Happy 220th birthday, and Rest In Peace

Chiron Return

Your parents had a hole
That made them abandon you.

It shines back now
With all of your glory.

What a gift
You once labeled pain.

Your only medal is a scar
As ugly and set apart as you are.

It's made you immortal,
The wound that never heals.

The Second Coming

An alternative version of Yeats’ new-age poem

The hierophant has supper with the fool,
This spade will raise my body up, he chimes,
This chalice holds my blood, that is the rule,
But the fool sees only bread and wine;
A hand turns on the Christ light one more time.

The priestess takes her crystals from her veil,
The magician turns her secrets into fuel
As if it bears on what we do, his grail,
Its vast illusion truth beyond their rule;
A hand turns on the Christ light like a jewel.

The emperor of wands and empress of swords
Fall from the tower under stars and moon
While the hanged man prize lies upside down from cords,
The devil rapt in judgment on the wheel of fortune;
A chariot turns the Christ light on the runes.

These ancient archetypes were made for us
So we could grieve for what we were with wars
And know love as an arc of endless service
With music and mathematics as our lords;
The hand that lit the Christ light brought the words.

And now we see the priests steal children’s souls,
The devil wins whatever king we choose,
The world of form has fallen through the holes,
The truths we sought an analgesic ruse,
The Christ light’s now inside us like a fuse.

Responsibility

"The IMF is the US and so ultimately, these new 'loans' to insolvent sovereigns, are being guaranteed by the US tax payer. We also know that if involved in the financings, the US IMF banks (JP Morgan and others) get preferred status in any sovereign bankruptcy. In light of what transpired during the MF Global bankruptcy, the 'preferred' status given to JP Morgan by the trustee has meant, that segregated client funds that were supposed to stay segregated, by law, have been taken by JP Morgan, an unsecured creditor. That doesn't bode very well for the US tax payers in the case of any future sovereign bankruptcies where investment banks like JP Morgan will have preferred status off the bat. In this situation, the US tax payers will have less 'protection' than the MF Global customers.

"Plus, if the IMF gets involved, countries would lose all of their sovereignty. The IMF would essentially run the country's finances and control all state assets, which basically results in the asset stripping of the said economies in order to continue to repay the new IMF loans that were necessary because the countries' GDP could not sustain the payments of the central banks's loans. Historically, borrowing from the IMF has always been devastating for countries, as after paying the IMF, there is no capital left for growth, all state assets fall into private, usually foreign hands and most wealth extracted from those assets is exported outside of the countries. It's a great deal for the IMF banks, as this means, the taking of real assets, like Italy's gold reserves for example, in exchange for paper, which in light of all the debt, QE and other inflationary policies, has questionable future value.

"Of course this is what will happen, as I am convinced that these people will not stop privatizing profits and socialising losses until they are forced to do so. They will squeeze every last drop from the tax payers of the world until everyone is paving their own roads, picking up their own mail and paying taxes on breathing. They will keep going until they cannot continue.”
-“Swani,” in a comment on Euro Zone: Another Crisis, Another Backdoor Taxpayer Bailout in today’s Zero Hedge.

They paid it forward
Goya and Moliere,
Brecht and Goethe,
Caravaggio and Voltaire,
And if we really care
About their findings,
If they’re aren’t just
Alchemy,
We won't begrudge the copper
Soul-extracted usury.
For they need inspiration too,
The boot of evil rules
To prophesy another way
And distinguish whose from whose.
This bounteous land is there for us
To starve and kill and lose
What other purpose could it serve?
For life is ever complete,
We chomp like horses at a bit
To charge our aching feet.

My Poems

The gathering of poets
share their deepest secrets.

In the library next door
all the books of men are kept.

I had to leave,
through the trapdoor of the evening

to the Burger King,
where all the poems I'll ever need are found.

Post-Face

For Jerome Rothenberg on his 80th Birthday

And why can’t I live
With the cavemen and vagabonds
Sharing wordless screams that they call poems?

Why can’t I look
To the dead and to the darkness
For the words they need to speak to me today?

If you’re patient enough
A poem eventually comes from the iguana’s mouth.

Are we ever large enough
For even the smallest of poems?
You wouldn’t know, weaving all
Into The book, the long-dreamt endless book,
The prayer that never ends, the voice that
Never strays from its beginnings –

One tribe when every person is a wolf
—Who dreams that? That night could unify like that?
Who shows that day can be dismantled
By pulling plugs out of its sockets?

So easy, do you do this,
As if—the way you look at us—we did it all.

Beauty's Dualities

Thanks, MattRusty, for hepping me to Tolstoy’s “What is Art?” as if the 20th century never existed. Here are some ruminations on the subject.

Beauty frees us from our separation, yet isolates us from everyone else.

Beauty’s like a laugh that infects others to laughter, yet no one gets the joke.

Beauty’s nothing but rhythm, logic and form, yet it brings out the deepest, darkest feelings.

Beauty consists of sharp combinations, yet it only exists as a whole.

Beauty is truth and truth beauty, yet beauty's an illusion and truth is ugly.

Beauty is impractical, yet the only thing humanity cares about.

We all by instinct know and savor beauty, yet no one can agree on what is beautiful.

Beauty takes away the sadness from love, and gives compassion to fear.

Beauty magnifies the finite, and sets boundaries to the infinite.

Beauty shows us what we look like using things that aren’t us.

Beauty shows us new ways to think by repeating what we already know.

Beauty is everywhere, in all that humans are and do, yet it is rare in works of art.

Beauty can't be put into words, yet it doesn’t exist without them.