For Blaine on His Birthday

Anyone can put clowns where they don’t belong, you lug pianos
to the side of roads
          where hitchhikers thumb rides
                          in sight of the federal prison,
to the North Pole, where letters to Santa Claus
          are finally addressed by bureaucrats
                         with threatening notes to children,
to corporate boardrooms where men with paste-on mustaches
          demonstrate points by flicking a whip
                          to dislodge the cigarette from the secretary’s lips,
to wherever there’s a wooden cigar store Indian,
         wherever diner bread is broken,
                          and wherever eggs benny is served.

All this is miraculous enough, but your true gift is in no one noticing
        the pianos are missing
                          from the finest jazz clubs
                                                                    you’ve squirreled them from
        with your invention that no one’s yet seen.

“Dada must be lived,” you always say, by way of explanation, but still
         you’re gracious enough to call at your latest dark nyet of the soul,
full of meta-amphetamines and pantomimes
        and pound cake and bad coffee about 3 am
                          when Flo in the Dark, yer all-nite radio dominatrix,
                                              has got you tongue-tied.

Trying to keep it real compared to Watts.

But more often than not, after hearing one of my 25 minute rants 
        about, say, the lack of cactus East of the Mississippi,                   
        or how I almost took the train to Poughkeepsie on your account,
                                             before I remembered the yellow mustard
                                                        on the submarine sandwees,
                         and I remembered the blue meanies, and was afraid,
              you make me feel that every occult detail I’d shared with you
   was important enough to avoid any mention of the reality of its truth
except for all your usual, wistful questions:

        Have you considered the benefits of a small rabid pet?
        Would you happen to know the bridge to Kwai Me a Wiver?
        Is a purple spraypainted rat wearing an eyepatch some sort of
                omen?
        Did I mention the tomatoes were canned?
        Well gee boss, why you gotta go an say a thing like that before?
        Can I get that with a pigeon pie, some Blackened Alibi, served with
                sauteed okra and air of mystery, and ah the Harvey, smoked
                rabbit dressed in a nice rich velveteen suit with matching
                smoking slippers, served in a black tophat, with a side of half-
                eaten fries and an Ethel Merman impersonation?
        Did I ever tell you about the time Frank Sinatra saved my life?

Then you’d produce a photo of you and Frankie shaking hands,
              and that would be enough.
                                                             It would always be enough.

Or I’d complain bitterly about people playing recorders in the wide-open
       spaces instead of an honest wood flute,
              calling out our favorite squatcher as an example.
You wouldn’t say anything, with your look of concern like this was
       the most urgent thing in the whole world,
              but a few days on, I’d receive a faded newspaper clipping
                           – about how sasquatches are strangely attracted to
                                                            the sound of a recorder.
Is it one of your hoaxes become real or the real becoming a hoax?
                          Who knows or cares.
                                                            The Dada is alive.

You wear the bowler’s hat befitting your stature
         as an entrepreneur of magic
               but your eyes do give away a guilty glint
                         of a certain charlatan charm.
But there was that time we talked reality off the ledge
         through deep-fried summer woods
                                                                      when suddenly,
there were marimbas waiting for us at the side of the trail,
                                                                      and you would smile
                          for what I think is the first time,
        despite the reporter who immediately appeared to question us,
for here was a theoretical universe that was worthy of you, that you
        didn’t have to create
                         out of pipe cleaners and flasks of ovaltine.

Lyrics: Borrowed Love

Did the waves ever get what they came for?
Did the sand really lose any ground?
They left with what they had and nothing more,
There was no answer in that roar of sound.
We borrowed love to serve our purposes
Not knowing it could never be returned.

We watched the surfers walk upon the water
And heard the children sing of other worlds
But never could we put it all together
Through different eyes they seemed to be so plural.
I learned to use your eyes to look at you.
I used to not exist but now I do.

Maybe I will fall in love someday
And feel the moon possess me in its way.
Maybe there’s one star out there to see
That’s clear enough the lover can be me.

I love you more now that you are not real.
I hold you in my heart now that you’re gone.
I need your kiss now that it cannot heal.
I cherish all we shared now I'm alone.
The world is in my hand but I’m not free,
I’d rather give it back than have the right to be.

Poetism

Poetry is a net
so we can say we have one

Trying to Forget My Idea for Vietnamese Baseball and You

In mourning morning fog
when even birds are down below
the cherry trees that flower in the graveyard
call us to salute them
                                     as if they'd die
without our response
                                     not just their beauty.

We do not know, somehow,
this magic show of green
is how it is supposed to be,
there is no time
                            to end in
as there's no time
                            when sleeping.

And growing never ends,
the reaching for the one within all life.
At some point we must go there alone.

Notes While Waiting for the Knock on the Door

Meme me up Scotty there's a tempest in the bean pot, a Mass-Casualty Incident in Massachusetts (god bless you), one could call it a Mass-panic, Mass-acre, or even a Mass-querade, this Boston Terror-thon, a dirty o-bomb-sniffing yellow dog with blue balls bearing through the walls on the twilight's code red finish line, the false flag that didn’t hunt, the lone wolf pulling the willies over the red, white and blues of the sheeple’s eyes, the dog without a drone who ate the lambskin bill of rights homework with a cell-phone, at the “it’s only a drill” remote-controlled-explosion pressure-cooker of a photo finish, receptacles of fire played by Terror-Vangelis, a Greece-fire smoke-filled Cyprus room to jog our memories on the Oklahoma City and the Waco Anniversaries. Who will it be? The tea party patsy on saint patriot’s day (in a grey hoodie) or the ex-pat Saudi National “dark-skinned male” with multiple black backpacks and passports and a hillbilly’s smokebomb-making skills? Either way, the Gym Fixx is in, on Tax Day in Taxachusetts (god bless ewe), where the Sandy Hook kid was never killed, the marriage never proposed, the additional unexploded devices never disposed of, the 12 people never murdered, the Saudi National dark-skinned male never arrested. Instead, a Vox Publica Castor and Pollux stamp of disapproval as sweet as Tupelo ricin beans was sent to the suddenly syrius man behind the Terror-prompter curtain waving a smoking backpack and doffing his tin-foil black hat without any ricin-able explanation. There are HAZMAT crews in Saginaw, quarantines in Beloit, three cars in a hole in Chicago, and in Boston (lettuce prey) the Moakley courthouse is now flooded and the wounded have been medi-hoovered from the cold blood code red Peter Bent Brigham Hospital, as a fertilizer plant near Waco exploded (dozens killed), and the earth suspiciously quaked near the Oil-Opium border (hundreds killed). Ah, but our eyes are fixed like muskets on massholy Maskachusetts (god bless you), watching the Lord & Taylor surveillance camera for shoplifters instead of asking about the Navy Seals with wires and skulls and multiple black backpacks, hearing “is it safe…is it safe?” from Governor Devil in the Details instead of asking who is Silk Tork and Yohanan Danino and what kind of sick, twisted fuck would send such James Bond villians here? Ask not why the bomb went off in the library, ask why the library went off with the bomb! We want this all to go away so much we don’t notice that Boston’s in lock-down now like Manhattan after 9/11 never was. Americans are such irremediable wusses – this is a Boston cream pie compared to a drone strike, and we can’t even handle a morning of it without crying Uncle to Sam for protection, for our sense of fun and games has been rudely disrupted and we’re scared, they tell us, scared, and when that happens, certain people can do anything, and anyone can be guilty, even you.

In Lieu of Dreaming

I followed Jesus around Europe last night,
chilling on metal with German morticians,
filling prescriptions for piety with French pharmacists,
watching Scottish beekeepers argue with elves.
He said things like "drinking coffee is like kissing God"
and "Hungarians really get the importance of a violin to food"
without breaking that beatific smile, which he also kept as he freed
countless people over the course of a long and yellow night
from ancient jails of guilt, remorse and terror.

But morning came, the bars closed again,
the church swept all the prisoners back in,
and before returning to bed for a few precious z's
I saw Jesus again on a bridge in Trieste
with the morning light periwinkle right.
So patient he tried to teach me the secret
of hocking a surgical looger.

Because I’m Not Allowed to Talk to Children

The pain begins. It’s always
                                               in somebody
                            else’s
               face
first.
        I want to be
                            unhappy
like that couple
                            clinging
                                         desperately
and serve my children
                                     safety in the
       endless woods.

Here too far North
                                for the graffiti
they can make like
                                there are standards
                                                                 still
and towns, and I
                             fall into their spell
                                                            so readily—
I cheer for sons
                          who cannot throw the ball
pull daffodils for daughters
                                                who no longer
                          tolerate ballet
                                                 to get an ice cream cone.

I hear the explanations
                                       —everything that’s lost
                  from father’s mouth to son,
and see kids in
                  sharp dominance of voice
because there’s only
                                     so much pride
                 and adoration
to go around.

But then, amid the ducks
                                           and keening bleachers
I hear some parents talk
                                         of dismal holidays
because the rainbow
                                  canyons
                                                  and waterfalls
                 like emeralds
       could not be shared.

Their voices lower as I walk by
                                                     and despite the trickling
of the stream, the shush
                                         of distant motors
there’s still some
                             solitary thing, some
breathing.

The Need to be Watched, and Reminders I Am

Intelligent dust—
                              bobbing,
                                             to the birdsong,
interpreting the information
                                               from the rocks
who articulate the water
                                         pulsing
                                                     through them
—maybe no more intelligent
                                                than us
but willful, as we are,
                                    who hear
                                                     marimbas
in the stream,
                        but to them...

who have no problem
                                     dissolving in aetherial waves
it's natural to know that birds
                                                 are testing out melodies
along electric wavelengths
                                             of the spheres where music is,

and even the paper trees
                                          crackle in the orchestra
and things drop to the moss
                                                and whistle through the leaves
on a score that we can't read
                                                 by the rivulets of water like
some Austrian composer
                                          who rides his charges hard
because the sound it makes
                                               is true.

The train
                in full human cry
                                              decides then to come through
but it's silent
                      in the teething of the wind
and all its hidden
                             being.

I have nothing here;
                                   I'm allowed only eyes.
Squirrels paint
                         friezes of the trees.
Forsythia cleans
                            the early evening sun.

What was not there suddenly
                                                  is,
the world of skunk cabbage
                                               and daffodils
—enough of a world—
                                      turns
to allow a moment of grace:
                                               everything
is metaphor.

Thoughts on a Spring Day

Scientists say the varian nebula cloud
would smell just like hyacinths
(with a note of cinnamon)
if you could somehow walk through it.

Why, then, can't I get the scent of flowers out of my phone?
Are they that afraid of our poetry?

I won't settle for less than total sensory communication:
you being able to feel exactly what I smell
out of this smarty-pants device!

Shut NASA down for awhile if you have to,
I need this app to happen.

Lines Escaped from Lyrics

The mystique of interpenetrations
when alone is so much
more together
alone…

To serve your target eye
or fall to the conversant me
in all peripheral
extremities.

I’ll convalesce in madness from afar
or hold my sanity
inside a luminescent
jar.

My bounding was too sensible
because too mad for you
—my compromise with rhythm
had to leap its ruinous dive

to become the essence
of the lover
alone and swimming
backwards

though bare and thinking canyons
with negligees on trees
speared flowers
for the moon,

whose play is far too large
for humans and their grieving,
their need to fly away
in pairs

to not become responsible,
to lose something
and say that they’ve
been found

having so deprived themselves
of love
they find it
in another

who looks at them
with eyes that hold the world
but crave to know themselves
through other worlds

in smirkings
of a moon
that bares
its scars.

Still, horses cross the sky
and even I must carve my
naked purple
out of moon,

my love comes from
adjacent room
a million miles
within

but even she,
despite her
otherworldly blooms,
immortal songs,

who’s waited outside time
to breathe as one,
must bless me with
forgiveness first—

I the holy
stand before
confessor priest
so I can feel.

Sonnete/Godluster

You speak and hear but let us be the night.
In sight of your gorgeosity we know we own it
'Tho we idolize the voices that you use
And think we hear what your ears can't convey.

The world of birds and trees cooperates
That we make all these sounds and call them singing,
Because we still believed that we were beasts
Not thoughtless Gods who had forgot our other.

All that's left of you's a gesture, a hollow bead of notes;
You come forth like a figure out of stone
-- We call it art -- finally a thing
That can perhaps withstand our understanding.

You would be all too easy to find
-- Impossible to know -- unless
You swirled your dress round nothingness.

I pretend you don't exist, to dream you real.

At Mead Swamp

Two geese hit the still pond
like stones from a muscle-bound skimmer
and don't miss a step in their dance

The thistle has finally turned red

These geese would be lost without people

The Softness of Spring

New York
speaks gibberish
because it is so very old.

It deserves all its jewels
to cover up the scars it has endured
from a lifetime of watching
ground balls go under
the glove of the shortstop
over and over;
a lifetime of so much hope.

The only thing it is good for anymore
is to teach the young
with a kindly kick to the teeth
and a bill for how much it costs to be wrong
—the best way of learning—

and I, unbelievably, am young.

The Thought of Mexico

"Why, why, why" --
Don't you know that every answer
                                    leads to me?
There are no rules for how life is
                                    supposed to be?
All engines lock at times,
Complaints are barely read
                                    except as loud
                                    and foreign
                                    favors to you.
Do you really want entitlement
                                    for miracles?
Does that not defeat the point
                                    that there is something more
                                    behind this raggy, threadbare,
                                    see-through screen?

Something always holds you to the light
When all the engines rust in fallow fields,
When all the voices grate like friends
                                   who disappointed
                                   years ago,
When information swirls
                                   back to the source
                                   in wakes of chaos.

It's when you think things aren't
                                   as they should be
You must remember me
                                   I'm only what is
                                   always, always
                                   there.

Another Typical James Tate Poem

It's the word "chasteness" that the Earth hates so much.
That sound, for instance, is not a wheezing fridge
but a cricket accompanying dripping water.
Good thing I didn't kill it!

The cool winds are whipping the spring into shape.
Feeling at home is only a matter of getting the knobs right
in my Mansard-slate room at the top of this lit toy-train set
with names like Quotient of Pain (bread), Pinocchio's Pizza
and The Connecticut Muffin far, far below.

I am annoyed by the sound of my own breathing,
thinking it's another voice vying for attention
now that I'm the slattern catholic about incoming noises
be they door-handle gears, or geese cheering base-hits,
or the way the treetops moan each day at sunset.
I wish that you were here sometimes
to make me feel insane again, with your Chinese water
treatments and your entrances as sweeping
as they are traumatic to doors. A pitch-perfect prisoner thinks
these pirate broadcasts are catastrophies
to endure vicariously, when each and every semi-hemi-quaver
not approved by the FCC
is a reminder to be free...

like the postcard on the fridge from Mount Estes
reminds me of the grocery list, the door jambs, slippers, batteries
I need to start my new life
that has no past or future.

I look for clues in the entrails in garbage cans
and out comes my new friend the cricket
with what looks like a key to the moon.

The Financial System Explained to a Five-Year Old

Paper covers rock
Scissors cuts paper
Rock crushes scissors

Money covers gold
Trust cuts money
Gold crushes trust

Green Curtains in the Closet

The insomnia house
with its working-class planks,
now bequeathed
to a family from Queens,

while my fat candles burn
in Victorian spires
filled with Indian drums
and bookshelves of poems.

This facade that seems so frivolous
is the shell of my protection
for my own most peculiar religion
(the only kind that matters,
the one that accepts all others
(because it is so crazy
and so true to me)).

The birds and the squirrels
who were calling me away
are now looking in through my windows.

The town with the last reputation to uphold
wakes up in the glow of spring's promising

and I sleep
right through it.

In a Moment of Reversibility

The angels are shocked
at the blondeness of the wheat,
the horizontality of the trees,
how white the pines in morning light become.

Their customary purples
cannot describe this scene,
how things don't need to move to have a being,
how they're lost in some perpetual forgetfulness
where eternities are temporary, and continual,
how they have to make some pact with rocks and grass
and rivers that with their mirrors wash away.

The sounds these things make
are what longing feels like,
as if there's something real
to threaten who they are.

And then the angels feel relieved.

Of Rocket Scientists & Hedge Fund Managers

They think 'til every second is perfection
They strain 'til every moment is more pure
They think so hard to earn their lives some reason

For only in their minds is some protection
Building to forever some vast sewer
They think 'til every second is perfection

They navigate the poles, collect the seasons
Have every guidepost marked along the tour
They think so hard to earn their lives some reason

They circumscribe all peoples into sections
Apportioned 'tween the greater and the fewer
They think 'til every second is perfection

The borders that they make are grounds for treason
To teach the young who cross to be mature
They think so hard to earn their lives some reason

They calculate by hand precise directions
But even then they really are not sure
They think 'til every second is perfection

They tolerate some crying within reason
Will let some longing sighs remain obscure
They think so hard to earn their lives some reason

Erections for destructions for protection
The greatest minds find lightning bolts to seize on
They think 'til every second is perfection
They think so hard to earn their lives some reason

New Canaan Morning

A sunrise of pink lips
the lavender line
between love and lover
a wry smile
opening to forever.

A red opened bloom
new from the hibiscus
I drove here last night
in driving Easter rain,
the last thing to move
after I burned all the boxes
instead of the innocent house
and the only thing living they say.
She spread her leaves out
the open car window
and didn't complain
she was far too large really
for my car
but along the way she asked me to sing
"The Girl in the Other Room,"
the one that explains it all
while never once losing its cool.

This morning, my eagle's nest
pimped with my moments
glistens in infinite quiet
till I walk and it responds
with how large I am,
it's like a Studebaker long dormant
in a millionaire's garage
has been tuned up at last
as if time hadn't passed
(as indeed it hasn't).
At last I can live like a human being
crooked walls and golden-age appliances
notwithstanding.

What the Angel Said to the Insomniac

That sound is not the train horn
it's the universe trying to speak.
Without longing
what purpose would love serve?

Last Supper at Gaymoor

At a certain evening light
Connecticut gets creepy
for history's too full
and has never been resolved

Three Poems

Equinox
The birds are singing
The snow is flying
First day of spring

What the Light Says

My advantage is
I travel fast
so you think first
of the thing being illumined
not the source that gives it light.

Closing Thoughts from the House
I don't care

what TV shows you watch

or how loud your arguments get

or the chaos your children cause

with their saxophones and erector sets,

I care how the garlic is sliced to honor its life

and how the pasta is stirred when water boils.

I don't care about your dining room furniture set

or the giant swap-meet urn with nothing inside of it,

I care about the length of children's laughter

and how often you have an orgasm.

Just give me some spackle and furnace filters

I don't ask for much, just love and respect,

shoes taken off, clothes put away,

everything up off the floor,

cleanliness not Godliness for me.

I don't mind the weather and the dust

but the bannister, oh boy, when it sways

it's like you are taking my back out.

Don't think because you take care of me that I'm yours

just because I can't react in terms you'd understand,

but then again, neither do your children

and you take care of them, sometimes think

you own them. Well here's the thing:

somedays, when the wind blows through the attic

we share secrets adults must never know. 

A First for Me: A Poetry Reading Video

I finally joined the 21st century by getting of those fancy smart phones, and playing around with it I noticed I could make a video of myself, so I thought it would be appropriate to read this poem from 2007...

The Scream Heard As A Whisper

"Fortunately for us Van [Morrison]'s romantic bliss didn't last too long." - Joe Smith, President of Warner Brothers Records

Art is nothing more
than the humanizing of divine engines.

There's beauty in what appears to be loss,
a blanket instead of the girl

and truth in what appears to be hidden,
the betrayal of lovers before their children.

Morality protects one from self-doubt
but it is an illusion,
art tells us,
the eccentric opposite of what we're told to do
might be the only glimmer of sanity we have.

The Bakery Shop Chimney

I know its face will remain white
when I say my courage of truth
but I also know the nature of reality
will have been changed.

I know its breaths of smoke
are nothing but an illusion
still I look, and with me the universe
sees what's real within it.

I know its imagined ovens and unknowable fires
give some comfort of certainty
but the gold they provide is not bread
but mystery.

Some Implications of the Piri Reis Map

The polarities are melting,
glaciers flow like vast unclogging toilets,
and an albatross on a stony promontory
emerges for the first time from its nest
to learn all there is to know
about the ground
until it finally finds its eight-foot-wing true nature
and flies without the need to land again
from the Chrysler Building’s feathered spires
as from the pyramids, and below its windows,
like love, a flow, not black and yellow cabs
but Emperor Penguins tobogganing inland
to incubate eggs in what is now the most hostile place on Earth,
the South Bronx.

Everything has a purpose, towards a larger order, a larger justice;
it takes 1,000 lemmings a day
to keep the Snowy Owls in cubicles in love;
polar bears rip manhole covers off to paw at seals;
on an old New Jersey coastline
five million walruses lay on one beach
and bulls fight to the death
in front of the children.

Seaweed hangs like banners inside Madison Square Garden
as kelp waves from the rafters of the old Grand Central Station
to disguise the sharks and bottom-feeders who battle on the floor.
Killer whales can fit inside the subway tunnels now
to feast upon translucent grunts
swaying like no dance troupe
peeling back the blooming onion veil
in a universal spiral that furls and then uncorks
and baffles the armored sawfish
who subsist on rainbow smelts and hake hag slime.
The octopi climb cathedral walls in deft pursuit of mussels;
the black eels chase pink pogies through barnacled art deco;
dolphins circle round the tank that was the UN Building
- they like its peaceful vibe, and besides, they can hunt
the hammerhead sharks that lurk on Dag Hammarskjold Plaza;
tautog, cusk and pout
with eyes so blank and purposeless
all leverage in on a grouper’s food
to try to gain a crumb, and they all join
each others’ conversations, completing thoughts
with a wave wand of their tails;
and the dogfish swim the streets in the most
outlandish costumes, but no one blinks an eye
unlike in LA, where everyone wants to be discovered, here
everyone wants to disappear.

The Times Square lights have crystallized in mid-air
and even the headline reels have become frozen in time.
The Jesus Petrel minds the shop on the top of the Empire State Building
while shags roost on the ledges watching white wolves track musk-oxen
down the tundra hills of reddened Central Park;
the beluga blissed out molting over stones like a loofa
have gone much further north, past 86th and Columbus Avenue,
the caribou click their electric antennae
like no bulls or bears before could ever do;
there’s starfish all down Broadway,
sea urchins in the Bowery,
oyster beds at the Waldorf Astoria,
torpedo rays along the Battery,
sea horses run at Aqueduct,
skates glide like Rockette skirts through Rockefeller Center,
tuna in the Meadowlands are eating soft sea grass,
snails cling to the Village walls quivering in their shells,
bluefish are getting schooled at the project bball hoops,
but there are no fish in Chinese restaurant tanks,
some lobsters though are skittering through FAO Schwartz
and some are at Lincoln Center, it doesn’t much matter,
for their lives are far too natural for them to have a care
about the subtle structures of their templates.

The blue whale at the center of town
breathes in every fact with the plankton,
and unknown lips are kissing
the gifts of this remembrance
and the blowhole breath, having formed it
into a variable of useful truth
can exhale now something of its original state,
what no longer must be solved,
not scrambled as it was
when it was sought.

There’s no need any more for lox or jewelry,
newspapers or cigars,
vodka or watches,
ermine or guitars,
for the people are
somewhere else,
living with the Gods
they thought were killed
instead of grief.

Before the Self Finds Itself in Resistance

Crocus and frost
the kind of a day
between waking and sleep
where memory no longer warms
but hope has yet to seed
the kind of a day
where the earth is the same
without life as it is with it
when shadow and sun have reached
a kind of compromise.

One look inside the mirror
of the still and silver pool
and time disappears
and, with it, mourning.

The Reification is Proceeding Apace

I.
One glance unglues me,
the chemical question mark,
so I, insoluble, might fit, or
the exclamation point at my core
with outward roar that knows no limit?

My breath is a body of effortless form,
my being is light as language, and within it
a glimmer of me not yet swallowed whole
so I can still see that glimmer of you

in the fields where quanta grow
as the mind's dodecahedrons
create it all
so the heart can feel
itself
(all can grow)

with the lover always further away, elusive and luring,
the chase and play, the universe empty enough for that.

II.
The constriction of time and space
is the reason we have free will.
The lights on wet streets
talk to each other
and all of us are still waiting...

The Atlantean Hangover

The voice doesn't care
how listeners respond
- so much eccentric orbit each perspective -
but the mind that let it go, become another hearer
puts on penitential robes
to feel the slightest gasp
as thunderbolts from Michael.

Some Reflections on Freedom

Dedicated to Dr. Robin Smith

The prison guard is as innocent as the prisoner
yet such anger issues through from behind the bars
at behavior far too cruel and disrespectful,
that such could be regarded as a kind of love,
a part of killing numbers, as penance for a crime
he didn't even know at the time was committed...
Somehow they did all the judgement for him
and with that pulled inside
the feelings he could not bear to recognize:
the shame, the guilt, the resentment,
from remembering what it was like
to be a bullet that was loaded in a gun -
how it kept popping back out
no matter how strong it was shoved in,
how God will pay a heavy price for that.

Door

The moment between
spring is coming, oh no
and spring is here, oh yes
is the moment we free ourselves
from angels.

Through a Small Window

I woke up to a foot of snow
and no old life to pull at me;
the trees are stuffed with cotton now,
the houses packed in foam.

The wind is mad at something
but it finally is not me;
I watch it torture branches
and sip my tea

as bombs of snow go crashing down
dissolving as they fall.
Each snowflake with its own dance
finds its own way to touch ground

as each navigates the space
'tween earth and heaven;
a silent song of sifting snow
takes form from all of them

because that space is empty
and singing is what comes between
the giver and the gift.
I hear the train - a miracle,

there's no need for a me at all
until I hold one snowflake
with my eyes and they all vie at once
for each one to be noticed

and what had seemed so soft and still
becomes a universe
exploding into all its pearls
then necklace coalescing...

It's endless, notwithstanding what the neighbor
blowing driveway snow away
and pausing to talk with the mailwoman
about the weather might say,

for they are no closer to me
than the snow, despite what it seems;
it's all impossible - far away
except inside my dreams.

The Drone of Filibusters,The Filibuster of Drones

"The drone industry is pressuring regulators to loosen restrictions on decades-old unmanned plane rules, which are still applied because of the drones' high crash rates. But they are considered model airplanes, so we have the spectre of multi-national corporations applying for hobbyist licenses...Yet, when one [a drone] gets in the way of a commercial airliner, as happened in Brooklyn two days ago, no one knows whose drone it is."

"These predator drones were authorized for border protection and national defense and now they're loaning them out to local police forces without any debate... 'We don't call them in for everything,' said the local [Brosset, North Dakota] police chief."

"Drones can snap pictures far longer than airplanes."

"Now they can monitor if the magazine you are reading is offensive to public officials"

"Just because they can see everything you are doing in your hot tub in your backyard doesn't mean they have a right to look."

"Some of these drones weigh less than an ounce. When is there a problem, when they're 2,000 feet in the air over your house or ten feet away from your window?"

"Are these drones being used with warrants? Do citizens outside their homes give up their constitutional rights?"

"How long can they hold the drone data before using it against people?"

"Signature strikes [drone kills] on the Constitution party convention could be very effective since they've already said such party members might be terrorists."

"More evidence is required to do a wiretap than a targeted killing..."

"I don't want to wait around for the memo from the President on whether the low threshold for drone kill strikes abroad would be applied on American soil. I want the Senate to write the memo telling him."

"If you are in a cafe sending an email to your cousin in the Middle East you shouldn't have a Hellfire Missile dropped on you. That's not due process of law and not a legal standard."

"If we follow the official explanation for why the underage American citizen was assassinated that he 'should have chosen more responsible parents' then we've set a pretty low bar for our killing program."

"When Sen. Wyden asked nominee Brennan directly if they intend to kill Americans on American soil he said 'We need to optimize transparancy and optimize secrecy.' That's a direct quote."

"The AG says the 5th amendment doesn't always apply when we are at war. Who are we at war with?"

"No evidence or authority ever is released after these people are targeted and then killed. How can due process be administered in private?"

"How many people on the disposition matrix (targeted killing list) have been already killed? How many names have been added to the list?"

"Are we supposed to be placated when the President tells us he hasn't killed any Americans yet but he might? That he doesn't intend to send Americans to Guantonimo bay without due process of law as enemy combatants? That's not good enough."

"Why can't the White House end the debate by saying or tweeting they're not going to kill domestic non-combatants? Their non-answer unfortunately means that they think the 5th amendment is optional."

"A war without end and a constitution without limits leads to an endless imperial presidency"

—Quotes from the Senate floor on the evening of March 6, 2012 by Rand "McNally" Paul, a curly-haired Jimmy Stewart Senator from Kentucky doing an olde-thyme filibuster to prevent Americans from being randomly killed by the US government, in what was the longest continuous display of common sense in post-war American congressional history.


Our hearts are now so large
Our oneness is so immanent
The aliens use drones
To keep a closer eye.

We know that it is envy
Fuels the watching from the skies;
We want our backyard hot tub
Friend surveilled by insect spies

That criss-cross every inch of earth,
Each window with their sights
And look like model airplanes
Veering closer to girls' skirts.

They're there to kill us all, they say,
Because that makes us look,
For they too want to be adored
And thought a part of us

For we are all just aliens
And we all are terrorists
Trying to make sense of this
Enchanted and forgiving place.

To know that it is overseen
By God as well as Satan
And that we may be taken out
For no particular reason

Provides some comfort and relief
That we can feel some working
Of gears that shift above our head,
A gentle, silent whirring.

Waiting to Land

To make sense of it all
I created a story
and because it was a story
it was true
and because it was true
it was a lie.

How quickly has my life
become another lifetime,
the mirrors so I could
perceive myself
now portraits
of imaginary kings.

My Appearance on the Type of Jack Show

Join the mirth with Jack, Rhyann and myself in our without-a-net colloquium on internet poetry that went on for a couple hours after the recording devices were turned off.

We waxed polemic with glittering generalities on the online poetry world that included some love for my sponsors: Shay's Word, The Storialist, Walking Man, Sojourn(al), Photographs from a White Space and of course Type of Jack (cue right rail, please)...

Another Poem About My Wife

If a goon comes to my door
to throw me on the street
because I must pay for
those toiling years of love:
my careful repair,
paint for the sun,
landscaping stones,
of making my home more beautiful,
doing things for others as you would
have them done for you,

the gift I felt for my gift
was immeasurable.
So to see my landlord
pull up all the stones,
blacken down the walls,
take back
the damaged mind
he'd left behind,
there must be something more that I still owe.

And if those goons do show
my son says it's all cool,
the luckless on the streets
in cardboard homes
have Obama phones.

Light Into the Mine

This house doesn't tolerate the blues
but if you listen hard enough
to what the trembling floors are saying
it's a gospel celebration,
the rafters are a pyramid
volcano of light.

The words are so tragic,
the notes so rich with pain
but if you close your eyes
the long-dead child
that you used to be
will look at you with eyes
that shine light
on being human,
on finding the gift
in the illusion
of a world gone hopeless wrong.

Sparks

All you can see
in a beautiful face
is a soul.

Newfield Elegy

Port Chester in the morning
has a quiet, blue-grey light,
the stillness of the river
nearly glints.
They said that this was Springdale,
some tradesmen and a mill,
a florist and fishmonger side-by-side
a Catholic cemetery ringing Darien
and the train horn ubiquitous
no matter where you stand.
The closed and dingy now familiar
with the sun moved to a nearby town
and I a piece of driftwood
on a slate-blank foamy tide.

The church is wrapped in scaffold nets
like some kind of cocoon,
the only thing renewed
across the plank and shingle skyline.
I should add to my "to-do" list "grieve"
but memories pass on their own schedule
like tree-buds re-awaken
outside of time.
Trying to will these people
of the Cape Cod cul-de-sacs
to be somehow less selfish
only showed how selfish I can be
to expect unnatural things
from human nature.

Where the wave lands
I can't know,
for to let go
and somehow float
beyond the wake
is gift enough;
no ships to clutter up my view
and redirect my hopes
from the purity of the horizon,
the endless catapult of clouds,
and a sun that's always closer
than the ghosts that pass for faces
in the crowd.

If Death is the Mother of BeautyWhy is the Mona Lisa Smiling, Thinking that the Sphinx is a Buzzard?

It is because we are immortal
that the present moment is all there is.

Notes from Inside It All

There is no difference,
the sun outside
and the sun within,
the diamond as prize
and the diamond where the heart is

but oh the horror
when everything
one kisses
is oneself!

When the universe is
wide enough
to be nothing
there are still two dancing.

Song Video: Down Confetti Road

Still Life on a Moving Train

At the entrance of cold
water Pisces
the slightest of snows
as juncos echo
ceaselessly
under eaves.
If I could not forgive myself
I wouldn't hear them
for fear that they would overcome
the gap of pain I am,
I wouldn't accept another realm
as a part of me,
I wouldn't know that forms are lies
we love to truth
instead I'd believe my eyes
were the lie.

A woman on the platform
is pretending not to cry...
a man does the worrying
for two...
and if I am honest
it is only inside me,
this drama,
or it is nothing,
for it was I who decided
to separate
at some toxic nub
from everything
and watch it fall
ever farther away,
too numb to see
it must connect with love
and turn to light
inevitably.
The winter sun,
loving and cold,
pulls shadows
from all things.

The Music of the Mailbox Horses

White sun on blue snow's
day moon crystals
down syrup echo drains
and racing streams;

is this the outside world
I dreamed was me?

Cold wind hollow bells
and leaf scrape rattles,
the gate creak chitter of chickadees
and bark of gulls,
a turning of knobs
where there are no doors,
or none that can be seen.

Elusive, though the chatters
use my ears
to sound incomparably
familiar.

It can all be drawn together
like it's meant to be
though its beauty's in the space
in between,
its tragedy.

Bite Sized

The star-damp sea
of infinite light years
is only a oneness of love
and this berry so close to my lips
is so we can share
its sweetness together
or, more precisely, to feel
who is already there
for recognition.
Without imagination
nothing would exist.

Song Video: Cupid to Psyche

Early Train

It's light enough to see it all,
too dark to think it's real;

The hues start showing larger things,
some glitter more immortal:

We call it beauty,
this not quite being able to speak.

The only thing that is alive
is absence with its glowstick

Before the darkness comes again
to bring the words like magic,

Explanations for what isn't
really there.

Words for Art Pepper

I batten down the Christmas lights
with Sonnys Rollins, Stitt and Criss
as the new snow weaves its jones of mad diagonals
like a bell tree wind of hi-hats,
Philly Joe from the one speaker,
Elvin from the other…
never stopping–so ephemeral,
the lyrical answer to the world
still it accumulates
like the resin in Sir Desmond’s horn
prophesying furious blowing of cool later on,
a gaining train of insane pain waxwaning its refrain
lain slain as frozen rain
without explaining–immortal.
The birds are quiet now, awaiting Charlie Parker
to play with time and space and prove
there is no universe to speak of.
They hide, for the snow is too immaculate
heroin white, but there is space
in this alicecoltraneinwonderland place
enough to hear the bass…walking.

And there was once a song about you, too,
how beautiful and blue you were,
and the melody lingers
in tangled skeins
of minor modal realms
hopping to your love
or is it to the comfort of
its hot stove
and the pathos of retreating?
Such questions need no answers now,
for the players from the cellars
milk the prosodies of funk
in my Grant Green room, Greenwich
mean time, born to be a perhapsody in blue.
The thrush she cackles so ecstatic
that the thrill is gone
she won’t feign that diamond jive
of grieving how he got away
in some Pacific car wreck sunrise Ferrari
trying to make it real compared to Watts,
for she still has her pearl
and everything else is lost
to hold to that.

When we go deep inside
where no one ever finds us
what they never get to know is
we have the blues
and no one can take that from us,
not even the bright light
streaming through the yellow linens
promising the night will come.
A sad politesse pervades the air,
rich melodies are coaxing,
always coaxing the blues,
to civilize it,
waving the red flag at the bull
but stepping back
at the last second
to be wordless and to bless it
and never stab it
for all its
ferocity,
its righteous thirst for outrage and then revenge.

There is only beauty here
on this vine.
No truth can live this high.

Aftermath Past

This amethyst you gave me’s filled with pain,

its purple not as deep as I imagined,

its green a different shade 

than the one that called me once to you

as perfect complement. I see how

you endured me now – took it all in being careful

not to show yourself at all beyond my shadow

- I didn't care, my life so needed love

I made you from my own clay,

to smother with my loving energy

you crystallized inside, without letting me see

the list of things that terrified you of who I really am.

You tried to make me change, but how could you

when couldn't let me get inside, how frustrating

that must have been, to love someone so deeply

but not feel quite safe enough in your own skin

to accept him.

I honor this, how you gave yourself

back through me, and if I couldn't accept all you were

- the madness, the greed, the constant dissatisfied need –

you at least had the grace to throw back in my face

what you couldn't deal with of me - my tapeworm

strings of thought, my becoming what I’m not,

the whole lost without even knowing it mess

that can’t once be a thing to rely on, just

a shoulder to cry on and a rock to hold on to,

without definition, like the mirror of the sky.

And all I deprived myself you gobbled down bitterly

and all I didn't have the heart to ask you for you denied

me angrily, as if it wasn't my fault that I did not have

the strength to be real, to call you on your shit, the gift 

that no one ever gave you but you needed most of all, 

from me. So my love became a running critique, 

a thorn of abuse in your side, and that old high road

that worst, most inaccessible proximity for someone

who’s wanted for so long to be known. And I knew you

but could never say – my kindness was condemnation – 

my not turning away the worst way to betray – to confer 

the prison of hope.

                               So we got in each other’s’ way

you with your piles of dilettante stuff

almost wanting to go there, to get close,

to give back as you once had wanted to reach out to me

and me with my secret life just waiting to strike

anytime you turned your back on it, in the dinghy 

basement crypt where all that was left of me was

- what you once embraced completely – but day by 

day, without even seeing it, I fell back into me –

the shame that the closet I’d locked myself into

was too comfortable, how freeing it was to escape

from being needed, how frightened at my own crime 

I became, continually re-enacting in my solitude

some ancient abandonment.

                                               I tried to tell you you were

forgiven once – you refused to believe it – I tell myself I

should have known right then, in the moment before 

everything crumbled in slow motion geologic time – 

but everything from then on was a gift, too, 

every missed connection a great lesson – all of it

was planned in the most precise permutations – 

our being so close yet so far apart, how painfully

real we forced it to be, yet how blatantly false. 

In the end, you spun too many lies for me to keep up with, 

and my sins of omission gave you too many excuses

until there was nothing even to apologize for – I said

I was sorry for everything, as if that was my right to do – 

and you withheld everything, as if you knew 

what was best for you.

                                      So much wasted time, 

twelve years, from 2000, the year of the apocalypse

through the burning Bush and the Obamanible years

our children grew, and never once could we find

a compromise – it was always your way, even when

you decided to give me what I asked. How could I 

accept that and not push back - without that sense

 of how sensitive you were, how little it took to be cruel

 – such a flimsy excuse! No wonder you’re angry! And 

even now look at me, only speaking to you through some

hidden poetry I hope you will never see, because

 – well, I still - a part of me – needs to believe 

that you know me, and your inevitable animosity 

at my presumption in speaking for you here

might trigger some recognition that you never did get me

at all - just the face I drew, wanting to be filled in – 

I never cared, not getting that, that you needed it too, 

despite the violence of your objections, the damaged state 

I knew you were in when I came in, for that – and for

everything – I’m so sorry. In how little I could tell you, 

that was the only way you could learn who you were,

and in all the ways you failed to change me

with your lock and key, it’s the only way I could 

see how I need - now - to change. 

In the little we could say to each other

it was more than enough to know.

                                                          And here I am, 2012

washed over like a wake, and I have to let go of what

I believed myself to me  – while leaping in faith to a future

where darkness holds me in love in a way that 

you couldn't. I release you from any responsibility 

for anything other than accepting the chance so eagerly 

to give me the gifts you gave, gifts more precious for being

the kind that get me where I now am more quickly.

I’d release you from more but there’s nothing more left

to let go, you gave me that gift as well. But there is

something else, something you've asked, and I’ll try 

one last time to honor your request, and not try to figure out 

where you are right now, to let you be without my hovering 

self-doubt mingled in with my love – you wanted, I see, 

after all this time, in horror, you wanted to be free

 – and now you are. I let you. go.