Aftermath Present

I've done some crazy things in desperation—
Told strangers by voice mail I wanted to marry them—
But I never did anything quite like this,
Your doubled-down Gaslight Nurse Ratched by proxy,
A letter to my parents how you think there's something wrong with me
(Or The HR Move as it is known more formally).

Such a neat parlor trick makes my job rather easy
‘Cos it hips everyone you’re now indeed bat-shit crazy,
But a part of me still wonders why you’d reach out this way
(Instead of answering my letters, say, with more than innocuous notes
To buy more time for your ransom post), thinking it would float
If you pretend that I'm the one who filed for divorce, that my actions
Through insinuation's twist would show need of your supervision.
Well I've learned a thing or two about the affliction game;
I’m aware, for example, the difference between eccentric and insane
Is the hair.

And all is fair in love and hair, but there were signs of this in hindsight,
Like when my mother quipped I was the starter child
They should have thrown right back;
I should have known you’d take to that
Like yeast takes to sugar
Creating diagnoses for your cure.

And it’s not like this hasn't happened before;
Like the time you created the deception
Of wanting to go to the couples counselor
So you could have your very own psychiatric intervention
With terms you’d learned like “dissociation disorder”
The S word, “schizophrenia,“ “borderline personality.”
I’m mightily glad paranoia wasn't thrown into the hopper
For I saw at that moment conspiracy around me everywhere.
The people I tell this to, their jaws drop and eyes water,
They can’t believe I didn't leave you and sue the therapist then and there,
But you always stayed so calm and cool, you always held your ground
No matter how I frowned or made the articulation of violations sound
Of boundaries, love and professional ethics that went down,
Your mind was always clear, your heart was always good
And all you ever really said by way of apology
Was that you were understood so poorly.

You are dangerous, my love,
Is this not enough to shame you?

Or the time you kicked me out of bed for good because I needed "therapy"
But once again the therapist said that's not the way it works, this remedy,
You’re supposed to learn to talk together, but you felt so "unsafe" near me
Such a plan was a “deal-breaker” for you, we had separate work to do
And I was not allowed to know of yours except some self-serving clues,
Just as you must stay informed at every turn of all of mine.
It was a lovely scheme, coerced therapy for the blood line,
My son and my daughter, most of my family,
With no commission at all for your trouble of suggestion
As long as your hand could stir up the slurry
Without actually spending a dime or entering a session.
And what a detective of DSM-5
As you went through drawers, emails, closets to find
Anything to make me a sinner
Which was anything that made me alive
To possibilities other than your medicine
That was always pending, still in R&D, forever undefined.
You shared some parts of psychic charts
Of how I chopped off your head in other lifetimes
Or my unconscious mind-set of abusive catastophizing
So that any correctly conditioned behavior on my part
Could be dismissed by your confidential report
Just as any expression of love no matter how sincere
Could come with an agenda, a hidden malodor
Of the dark toxic sludge at the center.

This was all one big secret—
Should I be afraid that it isn't anymore?

It was not 'til I discovered, house empty of your things,
You'd left for me like untied apron strings
A dossier carefully packaged and placed, your contortions
Of my loving heart in guilt-based, web-paste apportions,
The horn of your final diagnosis, with eager underlines
Of all the psychotic symptoms you saw in me, defined
On the side in neat and helpful annotation,
I as always the vampire and you the heroine
(Even this verse is a worse addiction of course than heroin).

You've trained me so your notes now promise nothing but it's up to me,
Words on accusatory edges, heart on arm's length sleeve.

When I put my career on hold to save your life
After you'd successfully refused as my dependent wife
To move with me to my new job in Arizona for a long, hostile year
And ended up too sick and helpless to remain angry or bitter,
You claimed your friends were outraged that you picked me up at all
From the airport. This was abuse, you said of me, plain and simple.
I cried how much of a heel I was, even though by then the news had hit
You were moving back to Arizona and there wasn't a thing I could do about it.

So it was that everything you did that didn't feel right
Became my fault.

Now I see it’s not your pepper spray that made me giddy
And I guess I wasn't fazed the times you tased me
For trying to occupy my own reality,
‘Cos when I sacrificed for you my sanity
It was all in the “why is she doing it?” my pin-point deadly
Weakest link: the lure of getting in your head.

From there it was only a step I knew
To owning all you say and do
And that there was no pleasing you
So my days were all apologized through
For the me I saw inside your eyes
That never measured up to actual size;
I almost wanted it enough
To answer all your broken cries,
I almost to the end believed
That all you said about me weren't lies.

The Blue Rose

Missing you, thus
missing everything...
It falls soundlessly a step before my arm.
What life there is mocks me with its calm, alarming
Resemblances to you.
All the flowers are grey,
But not the grey we shared, which was a rainbow,
An ocean, a laugh into the abyss
Where we heard, coming back, each other's laughter,
Mingled, hopelessly merged,
Like grass grown from a seed
Spread out immortal on the lawn,
Framing in deep green the gold of heaven's earthward light.
In the breeze this simple all unfolds as bliss,
The flowers grow from love, what's just
Remembrance of the whole
Feeding and being fed endlessly...

Winter Sun Hits the Filament

Deep in the heart
of January's empties
—laparoscopic labradoodle cold,
the loveliest of creatures,
a double-helix spider
creates the notion of form
to bind all this nothingness
together
and carry the fire.

How hard have we become
to be so twisted from the truth,
to see in broken cobwebs
anything but total freedom,
and in cadavers wrapped in shrouds
anything but transformation?

We're squeamish with caution
towards the very thing we are,
as she merges
earth and heaven
because she can
weave her creation
and travel right through it
at the same time.

The Folds in the Karmic Curtain Not the Show Itself

No sense in belaboring
the inevitable:
the debt of pathos
can't be paid
for it's the mindset
that created it
that must be freed
first...

to stand in truth
firm
while letting the opposing truth
wilt my eyes

and stay there still

hoping words
can balance out
when balance
allows no words,

no obligation
to disrupt
impeccability...

and I feel guilt
for leading others
astray
and I feel pain
for the way
they seek to punish
because they went astray
by not listening
to me

seeking words of
impeccability
when impeccability
allows no words

except:
"you are eternal now,
you can wait it out
like the sphinx."

The Urge Toward Revisionist Dreaming When Heaven is as Unknowable as the Earth

When pressed, she lays down a longing tone,
a pleasing riff and some blue notes
and I, because it's all that I have,
my ear, my axe and my fake-book,
surround her sound like David Murray,
blowing the snot out of what are
only pretenses
of her sad and sorry world
encased in ice.

The cry me a river defense
deep in the suburban diaspora:
can she reach beyond
"he hates me now"
to shed some callous skin?

The hero that I wanted to be
gave it all to her quite willingly,
the things she didn't want to take
to get to what she needed.

Wherever you are, whatever you feel,
it's not what I am feeling for you now.
There's nothing you can say
—pretending feelings are something
besides clay.

Some Short Poems about Football

Flacco
The high-pressure cold was nothing
compared to picking chicken feathers
in crabboil summer on the Eastern Shore
or listening to Brother Ray pontificate
about the best chicken wings in Halethorpe,
so he put on his hairshirt of solid purple prose,
Concord grape you can practically taste,
that doesn’t fire until they see the whites in his eyes,
the shirt heard round the world,
to rally round the purple boys,
the purple mountains majesty
to chill the Rocky Mountain high.

Belichick
They’re addicted to being exonerated
by the world's most miserable man,
who pours the milk of human kindness
down the drain and says “so much for that
– now what can you do for me that isn’t
hateful or self-serving?”
as he assaults our common sense
with his painful rigmarole
of algorithmic cleverness,
relentless Baltimore logic;
that’s why we watch the games,
to see if he’s lost a wisp of that
irremediable grey hoodie rage
at how broken is his being,
how everyone else is great
and he is poison
(along with all the people
unfortunate enough
to tag along with him)
– it tastes not quite so bitter
when you beat them back:
the heroes unassailable.

Matty Ice
Matty Ice from Filthadelphia
spends the off-season fishing
at Badwater,
lighting scorpions on fire,
waiting for the piano
on a dock loose from its mooring
to play "The Ballad of the Loneliest Monk"
as it floats down Furnace Creek
off a mold-free roll from Terre Haute
like an old soft shoe
in the new high tide.

Harbaugh
He’d jerk
the phone book
if he could.

Manti Teo
It’s all so deciduously insidious…
the Polynesians with their secret kava fruits,
and the women who don’t play in the NFL
only for the sake of the children;
it’s just the Goddess playing with us
to show she’s more than a fake girlfriend,
her love mere human violence can’t dislodge.

RG3
It’s the last game of the season,
everything at stake,
Cowboys versus Redskins,
and the Jesus of Cool knows
he has to have a bad game,
he has to give them something
not off his Superman shoulders
for his team to win
and the country to survive
hanging in the balance
off the fiscal cliff;
the legislators burn
the midnight Redskin oil,
the one perspiring smell
they will always agree on,
to see him pull out
with the impossible humility required
from his sun-splashed
dreadlocked hat
his greatest illusion yet,
to suck not bad enough to lose,
to be the leader true enough
for Alfred, the Robin to his Batman,
to load the rocks himself upon the truck
and for the Football Gods to be inspired
in Lichtensteiger, Polumbus and Garcon
while he makes like a one-legged charity saint, smiling
so the poor don’t have to die.

I Would Write...

I would write you a love song,
the thing only a man can do
to show he's right by God,
and you'd decline politely
to accept it, with your infinite
grace and mysterious tact,
for that is what you do
to keep the magic circle fires
encendered, the not-quite
turned to unrequited,
the quenched revived to dry
like butterflies to chrysalises again.

I would write you a love song
but there is no love that's left in you
to steal, no passion to pretend
it isn't mine. We walked as one
through everything connected
to find the other gone
along some smoky bend,
not knowing our reflection
from ourselves,
never learning how to feel
except as another feels.

I would write you a love song
but the finest troubadours
do not let any one before their longing
for love is in the tuning of the strings,
that blue and subtle point they can't,
the breathless throng, abide to wait for
and in their great impatience, can never hear,
for the note is meant for me alone,
the purity of my own and only being,
the sound that echoes endlessly inside.

Waiting for Nothing in Particular

The electric finds the magnetic every time
so why do I sound the depths for symmetries
instead of merely being - a throbbing light
alone in a loving universe

Young VZ and Old Weezy at the Twin Rinks

Ice skating to the Thrift Shop Song

Three Charlotte Hornets caps

“This is fucking awesome”

Parents look on from the grille upstairs

But that’s not the way I have ever rolled ‘em

It’s me and Vonny skating hand in glove

Like back in the day when she was five

But we get funny looks ‘cos she’s now 19

And says “dee-ad, look, you’re the oldest one here tonight”

As we weave through the holes in the cotton-knit swarm

That drones across the rink with its hockey tattoo

I let go for a moment to the purple onslaught

Of hip-shaking chicks and kamikaze boys

But I find her hand again before the nervous tyro corners

While the lone black dude comes out the penalty box

Keeping it real with a Dodgers cap

That matches the color of the snap-on rental skates

I can’t tell the difference anymore

Between the kids’ karaoke and the actual songs

But I know how to play the Zamboni interval

By waiting it out Southern-fried style

And roll leisurely out after the mad rush is over

It’s deep waiting – "that’s how we do it" –

I’m still wearing my grandfather’s clothes

And my kid says she feels like a kid again 

Betsy to Heaven

I'm not interested in how
men are attracted to women
and women are attracted to men,
or how natural it is for hearts
to leave their tiny frames behind,
or how there are no reasons
for souls to feel so lonely they connect.

I'm interested in alignment,
having seen the way the scales always skew,
having known the compensations
when we can't be our true natures
to each other out of fear that what we are
cannot be free:
the dressing for occasions,
the drawing in of taxes,
the skirt of obligations,
the heart kept under glass,
the scorn that turns resentment into hatred,
the greed that turns neglect into betrayal...

I've carried on my shoulders
all the blessed imperfection
that lands as loss and drama
on our souls so gently tied.

I'm not interested in pathos
anymore, or the thought that
the ideal
is a lie,
or the myriad addictions
from feeling uncompleted,
or the fears that my one woman
could not be them all.

I'm interested in perfection,
in two hearts that beat as one,
aligning, always aligning
to the heart that knows the way,
the only path to the sun we seek,
what is eternal, already center,
at the start. The balance
where two see themselves
inside the other, smiling.

All Relationships Veer Eventually Toward the Real

The beautiful shadows
that we call a world
are there so the oneness
that's everything
appears to be something.

Nightstorm

Whiteness like a second day
A clank cuts through the wind
Sparks along the snow

Rest Stop #1

Pink Hartford
and its gold buildings—
nothingness
mirrors the sun.

Rest Stop #2

The moon over Hopkinton
lets in no light but its own.

Some Basic Things You No Longer Have to Be in the Center of the Great Pyramid to Understand

I am the sun
believing I'm shadow
because I am so damn beautiful.

The Museum of Love

Egyptian women keep their men aligned;

They only see the light.

Greek women carry wine upon their heads

Sanctified naked, faces veiled, to naked men.

The mask the Dogon warrior wears, the spirit

With the biggest eyes, she rides alongside bearing wings.

The Hindu temple prostitute, who will dance the universe

In and out of its existence - she always has enormous breasts.

The blue Madonnas of fierceness and grace, more muses

Than mothers, consorts than queens, stare through the void like strippers.

The white Taras have seen it all, and give back pure compassion

As perfect as their curves, but they have no name or form for what to do.

These not-quite-human figures turn ... to the Ethereal Female in bronze,

Winged victories on chandeliers, angels and dragons of the hearthscreens

Before it’s just a pretty girl again, almost as beautiful as the women

Visiting the museum, who get none of the adoration:

No amethyst necklace or jeweled crown, no magic purple in the marble

Says their name; shame only calls to them from the stone.

But you, my love, become the soul of every face

Although you hide your own in hues of blue,

I recognize you in everything I see, every woman

I will pierce through for your secret.

I must use your eyes to wear your mitre,

Touch the way you feel to share your white glove

Love. As winter falls I breathe as you and taste your lips. When

Times Square spells “FOREVER” in pink I see - everywhere - your face.

Shift

Yesterday love
was a Vaseline jar
with maybe enough
goop left at the bottom
to smooth out some tension,
seal up a wound,
protect from effects
of climate and make-up.

Today love is a song
in the crystal
my body has become,
from the deeper earth,
the archangels within
throb with the fire
of my passion.

There is no other anymore
just a constant hum
of light.

Aldebaran...

The universe has opened
its lotus blossom
to reveal it is only a mind
always moving
forever searching
for its heart

tonight it just might catch it

...Ascension

The akasha
will recite a poem
in honor
at this midnight sun
of what we've become
that no one can hear
but all may feel

- it's that simple
this birth
that brings heaven
earth

Foreplay

I am only
light
as I leap
to the darkness
knowing I am home

Flight Delay at Kennedy

Ah, the hell
of other people,
how she seems so
close
when so far away

how I can't even see
beyond the nearness of me
to her

And the heaven
I will,
how She seems so
distant
when so close to my heart

how I can't even see
beyond the nearness of Her
to me

New Blue Town

A busy year for local news
with "Sandy" burned through picture screens
and every time they read the word "evil"
20 children cry.
Charles Ives and Laura Nyro
gave their blessings long ago
for the grief now here to show itself.
The hats came off so long ago,
the brass too quietly silenced,
the hole was there
that now is filled with love
and the nothing that had changed
now has
and 20 smiling children of the sun
make purple trees and nudge the citizens
away from their TVs
to see the selves they couldn't recognize
in the fearful holding of their inner child,
let go now like balloons
to the new blue in the skies.

Reflections on the Need to be Heard

When words
are aligned
there are no words

When the silence
is total
I got it right
and know

There is no you

The Gift of Love

Power turns to peace
Light gives way to darkness
Consciousness becomes itself
Then spirals back again -

Distinction and unity play
As if they're not one and the same

The coil of endless longing
Continues yet again
So the heart can still pretend
It's not the central sun

An eternal, unbreakable bond
Doesn't stop the charge and pull
Of the electric and magnetic
Made whole within a circle
From feeling only
Desire

Uni Verse

In infinite trust in eternity's arms
I let go
the borders fall
and home is large
my heartbeat is the same as the all

I have been a variable
and now I am a constant
yet all I have remembered now
is love

all knowledge is known
when the mind blows away
the truth becomes merely alignment
with that power at the center always pulling us closer:
love too unbelievable to hold,
rapture too immeasurable to stop.

Cupid to Psyche

I know, my love, you don't mean to peek
But you need, you say, my face to seek,

For how else will you know that it is me,
How else to believe in what you see?

But to find me would mean earth is only earth,
Heaven only heaven, their love a stillbirth,

For I am all there is, save the letting go
Of everything that is not me. I am all you need to know.

Don't rove to the jewels of some love that's never found
Or the kings and the queens without their would-be crowns.

The world indeed is curious but there no answers lie,
If you only can see me, I'll be in your eye.

Day of the Green Light

Love creates such beautiful forms
all of which die
held hostage,
turned to Gods;
just enough so we feel victimized
by what others do to us
in their guise.

Stupid earthlings!
The nature of love
is only love.

Seed of Truth

A black hole
opening
in the light,
the divine cunt
of creation.

Perception of Ubiquity 2

The cord is cut
and she floats away
like a balloon

- A birth canal
opens to the ocean.

What way
does love
have to go
but outward?

Not Quite Infamy, but...

Birthdays are sad affairs for us, my love,
for they took you away
to this half-life in the thickest of trees.

Now, let's rejoice together
at the bridal party in the clearing,
the rebirth in marked flesh of the stars.

Gloss on Sin

Honor source
Not its dead manifestations.

Stars on All the Houses

The unbearable sadness of the human condition
Is the love of daybreak reaching out in endless longing,

And that elusive place of ease and grace is what is longed for,
The continuous, ridiculous bliss of completion, absolute darkness.

Gloss on Words

No need
for names
with no boundaries
around brains.

Office Christmas Party

The harp is the sound
of the angels
listening.

Gloss on Bliss

When two
become one
there's no need
anymore
to exist.

Gloss on Love

The utter stillness of love
How we must be Gods
To even move within it

Parsing a Remark

What comes natural
has a meaning
that comes after
like a tail spin
unfolding only hints
of some intention.

An Ordinary Friday on the Train

The steel and the stone

Have agreed to be used

To abide our alignments

In the purgatory tram,

The fires that bend and purify.

They choose to serve us,

Like chicken spirits pick

The month-long stretch at the factory farm

(It’s an slog but the take-home pay is good),

But they stay so long here instead of going, say,

To the planet Christmas they came from.

As I honor this

The cabin

Fills with light

Of people’s auras never ending

Until the people themselves

Become nothing but color

(When hearts merge, bodies disappear),

And the world outside turns suddenly

Crystal and white.

The parallelograms

Tumble out like cards…

Lifetime after lifetime

We learn the consequences

Of behavior we don’t remember

 –To make repentance

For ourselves and for others harder,

But it is not repentance per se

That is required

But understanding how attaching

One’s energy in any way

To the role someone played for us

Is no different than thinking an actor is

The character he plays

After the show is over

(Not that we shouldn't still clap

For the performance).

The doodad goes skidding down the street,

No longer the last of the locust bells we all assumed,

The long and winding scrolls are blank again,

And the phantom limbs of the cat, finally coaxed,

Leap out the door.

My Own Magnificence

All of the water

clinging so close

is absorbed

into the sky

So our spirits

charged in earth

become magnetized

on the other side

Cosmic jizm

residue of unions

joined and left

in perpetual tease

That finds no end in

time or space

all that merges

must divide

The truth just shifts

adjusting its rod

to the flutter touch

torn through God

Encore: Hello

Your tongue becomes the surf
Your breath the salty spray
Your kiss the surge that moves the earth and sky
Your eye the moon
Your curves are mountain tops
And all I am collapses in your arms.

Two gull wings glide
It too fills me with such joy
But it is all only really
The pain of separation;
What we call pain
Is how that pulls us from ourselves.

And so the train bell calls the travelers home
And I release one key
From the chain,
Collect one other.
All I knew of love was simply wrong.
It’s just a little further off,
That is to say
Closer.

Wilford Brimley Haiku

Bro-chure in the sand
A movable fur home dream
Debone the Frenchness

A Smattering of Snow

Release

the sadness

to the soil,

the toil of sense
 and consequence

to bury like a cross
 that flutters in the earth

that's only life and death
revolutions.

Love takes these
solid forms

so we may let

what we love go

- for that's how pure

we have to be

to know

who we are,

love.

The Squeal of Packing Tape

It's the final red before the browns
but instead the leaves turn pink,
a shade that one can only see
at the edges of extremity,
where nothing needs to stay
for what sense it had has disappeared
and all things are allowed now to be strange.

The Absurdity of Judgment

Praise to the criminals who live on the block,
And the lazy-bones shirkers from work,
And the self-involved dilettantes who let morals slip
Too deep in their comforts of pain.
We all look the same:
Same clothes, same town, same eyes,
But oh what a rainbow each follows
And how well the pieces all fit,
Like one family chained
And yet estranged
To learn in freedom.

It's the album of someone I thought I knew:
Old photos from Georgia,
The wedding in Yuma,
Strange postcards from Horsetail Falls...

Gratitude for Words

Nothing's known about these forms
that we identify

The only light inside our minds is words
to tell us others know

A record of existence
when it's all on this one side

But I'm grateful that the unreal
has a shadow

That I feel the seeming touch of distant things
impossible though they are

I find words for even that in time
as comforting as prayer

Open-Air Church

And finally the trees give way to vision,
The truth we've been eluding comes to view,

November birds in arrows cross the sky,
And all that we have have talked about turns true

In one wind's gusty sigh - and then it goes
Like leaves are called within the one to fall.

The acorns break to fragments, like our worlds,
The pieces all we see now of the whole;

The shock is far too large to be aware
Save tremors in one leaf defined in air.

The Great One

Obscenities of tar
he spiraled from his dreadlocks
like a poodle shaking off some dirty pool
in rage against the all
that stayed numb and so oblivious
- the talking to the cell-phone selves,
the growling for the gift of food -
that's what had turned him into this
unrecoverable addict
'cos it hurt too much to notice
no one acted like a human
- someone else was an abstraction
whose suffering couldn't touch them -
they thought that they were better
than the least who lived among them
- as if his sleeping
on the floor
made a difference.

Love's Higher Octave

Thinking of Jack Gilbert (1925-2012).

The body is no place
for the body
The spirit is no place
for the spirit

Love makes them overflow
into each other
Like great rivers
without shores
Emptying the dregs of all
that was not love:

The jewels you thought
were yours,
The stones you hoped
were jewels
In the mirrored moon dissolving
just like you.

Love says what you are missing
isn't there,
Makes sure that what is hidden
can't be found

For the only thing worth having
in the end
The treasure of this ever-
dying realm

Is to lose all that you know
for what you don't
And hold on to its tether
to let go.

How else to know the stars
live in your heart
Than let them be too far away
to touch?

Off Ocean Avenue

Something was always wrong
And there were never any words:

For the attitude of the older boys as we sat on the new roof eating blue
Bugs Bunny popsicles;
For the manner Spider used, when he said to calming cops “my name is
George” a hundred times “and I didn’t do nothing”;
For the way it felt when the kindly therapist stepped outside and I was
bludgeoned by his foam-cased sticks of death;
For the laugh I heard when I caught crabs with my fingers just to watch
my teacher crush them underneath the launch ramp wheels;
For the confusion trying to right itself when I saw the bag of weed on the
babysitter’s bureau, where the magical records were kept…

The poison judgment started there...

Because I had no words for it
My spirit went to sleep
(A victim has no mouth, but always sees) —
The only thing to say, the tyrant speaks.

Still there are no words inside:

The way the wrong turned right
— The church was mocked and spat upon,
Its teachings things to shame —
What strange and quivering buoy
Stays floating in that cove,
Where sentinels sing pain not prophecy?

Autumn at Woodlawn

The cemetery hill
emblazoned with rust
a blanket of leaves tucked under headboard stones
canopies of gold like laurel for old warriors
blood-red leaves beside the mausoleum

And all I think of now
is the unfamiliar shade of green
in the flowing, flowing stream