Reconsideration of Jenny

The emotion has been stilled

In strange crystal

Accessible to other traumas

If not the original

Frisson of shock,

How all that we knew

Went into that,

As if to build a structure

Of becoming 

To take in

What would only moan in pain

As it does today

In an auburn whisper,

Still rarefied, still raw,

But almost knowing.

A pattern has been captured,

Some vague resemblance 

To something else

That lives on in the tendons

Of our reach, 

Lodged in so many 

Layers of pathos

The heart no longer knows

How to feel about it,

As it stretches for the exercise

Like a surfer

Riding away the years 

In pursuit of the perfect

Rise into the wave,

Increasingly alone

With what never yields

And never comprehends,

A testament to time spent,

As foam obliterates its line

Again and again,

As if the seeking is

The only thing that lasts,

The unknown is all

We can see,

The table washed clean.

Strum of an Old Song

Self-doubt resolves
To doubt of God 
In the golden turning 
— These decades, for example,
Wasted trying
To wrestle truth
From a stubborn crevasse
— How the window opened to dust
And the greyness of the living
Permeated the ancient 
Ruins of city.

What couldn’t be contained
Finally is 
In the wreck that was salvaged
To be thrown away
Someday,
Wistful gifts
Of consoling
We thought would echo
Through the years
With our ambitions —
Instead are nested 
In reliquarial chlorophyll 
Like border guards
In glass cases
On the waiting roads.

How cleverly they never resolve
And never seem to get their point
Of holding space in an impossible
Tightness of spirit,
What living did to us
And what the voices tried to
Save us from,
As angels often do,
Sending aperçus for us to waste,
Thinking that better than
Their being consumed,
And better than being caught
In it, the dark moment,
For we thought we could become
Some star, however dim,
However theoretical
To shine from a distance —

So that it might be said, in the end,
We never lived — except in this,

The refraction, as if it could subsist
Outside of us, like it was something
We could escape from
Ourselves in.

Atlantean Prayer

On the 11:11 Portal

We are now

Where we were

Before it fell

But now we rise

Through the griefs

Not half-remembered

For we must know

Within our faith

Somehow

We've suffered well

And we are worthy,

We have been chosen

For we know

We have chosen

Ourselves.

In Gratitude for Darkness

We live in prophecy,

A world is dying

Miraculously,

Every crack is a celebration.

O caterpillar 

Of hearts desire

Trust the chaos,

Trust the breaking,

For the birthing comes 

Through pain

At the widest opening

Nurturing dream

Through the dark

That gives it form

As an owl brings change,

A Samhain butterfly.

Robinson Jeffers

The crow uses its whole body to speak

— Noble in its misery, November 

Taxonomies, the pathos tragedies 

That come from looking below, the crow caw

Not quite forgiveness, more a poem of the fall

For a God who feigns indifference, compassion 

Being so much better served in its absence.

For someone has to watch the creatures gut

Each other, as long as they don't interfere

With the innocence that seems too much part

Of the plan, as sufficient for the pain 

In trajectories that are escaping

To the rising action of wings released 

Beyond our sense of meaning — no more needs

To be said, yet the silence is keening,

As if there's too much pity in the balance

Between enduring and killing, loving

And being loved that is still a children's game

Up on the ridge-top, shadows in the clouds

Laughing and tagging, then blood-curdling screams.

How hard in the echo not to correct

What will not be learned except in silence

Long and hard. And we gaze, mute humans,

As the short day's last sun purples that mountain.

Villanelle of the Revolution

The world's become heaven today.

The one bread that's left us is fear.

The truth's come from such a long way.

They won't let us take holiday

And Christmas can't quite make it here.

The world's become heaven today.

The hospitalized pass away.

The doctors were disgraced this year.

The truth's come from such a long way.

No one cares what the news has to say;

The lies they no longer cohere.

The world's become heaven today.

We choose between freedom or pay.

Our children are made volunteers.

The truth's come from such a long way.

The one thought allowed is obey,

For reasons that never are clear.

The world's become heaven today.

The truth's come from such a long way.

An Incidental Regression

The radio towers brought the pandemic

To Lihue, and the Japanese cane laborers

Died in waves through the early 1920s,

A devastation mostly unremarked

By history — per se — but now it makes sense:

The masks, the distancing, the closings of

Theatres, churches and schools; the strands connect

In the next lives of those who've forgotten 

— How some know, without proving how, and some don't 

Because they didn't learn the first time —

How they hold hands now, teachers and learners,

Never puncturing the silence, what's holy

And lies between them, what's become the only thing.

Psych Ward on Blackbird

They are divided by gate,

Masked on one side,

Sedated on the other,

And between them

A mirror's polarities,

The inability to communicate

Seen as argument.

Above the floor-plan maze

It all looks the same,

Raw information

Waiting for each one to weigh,

But here, there is the gate,

The bars, the locked door,

The frightened eyes when we say "hello,"

Oh, but you, you

Complete my script

For our movie "Hilarity Ensues,"

You remember the dayglo anecdote 

And its rude Montpelier purple,

You always sequiturize 

My non-sequiturs.

At least you show with your eyes

What others say, 

That they understand.

Without those coherent waves

It's only words,

A salad like the news,

The unbridgeable gap.

Evening Vignette

Salt life

Mist over the stacks

Flannel

As we turn inward

On the quiet streets

Save the occasional 

Scrape of in-line skates.

The patio people

Have moved inside.

I feel the pull 

From that old friend

Lassitude

Like a light bulb 

Freeing my brain.

The community 

Is finally

Available for me

To imagine.

Elon Musk Tweets a Poem

The twitter “verse” has been in an uproar for two days over South African billionaire Elon Musk’s posting of a famous ancient Chinese poem, without explanation, in traditional kanji. As with all famous ancient Chinese poems, many theories have been proposed. Is Musk sending a message of peace and brotherhood to the Chinese Communist Party? Is he thanking them for saving his life? Celebrating the anniversary of the apparent takeover of the United States by China? Admitting that his companies also benefit from Ughyur prisoner and child slave labor? Distinguishing himself from other plutocratic DARPA puppets like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates as someone considered to be an enemy but actually a brother? Slyly noting that the same AI programs now being used to manage the human race can be / are being used against the technocrats in charge? Or is he reminding the most populous country on earth that the human race must work together in the face of the overwhelming power and influence of off-world civilizations? 

As with all things Musk, the answer is inscrutable. He is like the fool (or joker) in the tarot deck, revealing truths while professing no fixed identity. 

The poem, attributed to the poet Cao Zhi, is taught to Chinese schoolchildren as “the quatrain of seven steps”, and it dates from a time when brothers vied, sometimes to the death, for kingdoms and privileges in China’s dynastic system. According to legend, one brother was about to kill another brother to take control of some minor belt of countryside but, seeing his eyes, offered him a chance to save his life by composing a beautiful poem. The life-saving poem reads as Musk tweeted it:

煮豆燃豆萁
豆在釜中泣
本是同根生
相煎何太急

My translation is as follows:

Bean straw heats the beans
Weeping in the pot
Out of the same root
Why are you afraid?

In other words, the burning straw that kills the soybeans formerly helped them grow, because it was part of the same plant. Thus, what the oppressor does to the victim it does to itself – in fact, it may be the true victim because it destroys what it created. The last line seals the anxiety created when one recognizes oneself in what one seeks to destroy. It also – as a work of poetic beauty – recognizes that there is nothing unnatural even in the killing of one’s brother, no need for emotion or attachment, it is only self-judgment that makes one’s actions painful.

From this basic framework, all the potential Musk interpretations listed above “fit.” Any authority seeking to deny the people their natural human rights will inevitably be toppled, because it is their humanity that ultimately gives them their power. And that is the delicate and subtle game of chicken transpiring now on the international / galactic stage, as the fundamental corruption at the root of how humanity is organized is slowly and painfully revealed to everyone. None of the current structures of society can survive in the new world, but people must first retract their consent. The extent to which the mass of humanity never noticed their enslavement before can be found in the gruesome long march currently ongoing where humanity is being silently herded into figurative and literal death camps until they finally scream “enough”. 

But, as the poem suggests, such collective dynamics need not cause weeping. One does not recognize one’s brother until a sword has been unsheathed against him. Such knowledge is more valuable than life itself, or at least more lasting than the courtly feuds of 2nd century AD. 

Night the Generous One

Night the generous one comes

To soften what could not stay true

Like strings that must be retuned

In the heat of a day's toil

It doesn't matter what the night

Believes or tries to say

The music doesn't end

And voices bend beyond the horizon

What we have done with limitation 

As possibility unfolds

Night the generous one comes

To make us all its equal

Free to pontificate and feel

Without restraint 

There is an opening to all that is

What is yet to be created

The only thing to stop us is the light

The glorious morning light

The Trail of Fairy Tears

Every memory is offered

On All Hallows Eve

In a platter of grief

By the spirits at the glass 

Laughing with us, watching our eyes,

Inviting our minds to partake

Of generosities only known to

The temporarily dead.

We call them what has passed,

Still they float, are held in crystal,

Safe beyond our reach

Even as the veil boasts transparence.

Our task of forgetting

Is so large

That the black must seem

To take over.

There is so much here to do

That begs transcendence

And the dress-up ghosts go gleeful

To the darkness.

The spirits are content 

That we know that they are here

And we are as children weighed

With someone else's dreams.

And the memories 

Are satisfied

That we can live in them

As we decide.

The future seems 

So far away

At times like these,

As if it's passed us by.

The New Illusion

The old books give way to the new illusion

Not by ending the stories (they never end)

Or running out of similes (they never do)

Or growing tired of style or rhyme or some-such

Contrivance to keep one within the leaves --

No they are destroyed entire, their reason

For being exposed, built on lies that can't 

Disguise their corruption any longer.

Oh how they served us back in the day, 

Such wisdom given to hold in our hearts,

Of progress made against superstition,

How iconoclasts inherit the earth

And spread dogma like light to the dark burghs

Where being different is still a crime.

It thrilled us to see the black curtains torn,

To experience wars won vicariously;

It brought new flowerings with their whiz-bang

Trust in the consensus lie, the factual

Fantasy, how that made the story simple

But sophisticated, in the sense that

Being skeptical of hope is sophisticated.

This sufficed as the means of our coping

When there was Jesus, and all the Jesus

Wanna-be's and never-was's, the Stalins,

J P Morgans, the Louis Quatorzes,

When the powerful could be blamed

When no longer powerful, and the meek

Extolled when they are no more -- how carefully

The real power was excised from the story,

How skillfully the victims erased --

It was all to forget oneself -- 

                                                    But now there's 

Nothing else, no mar on the tabula rasa

To signal a martyrs blood, for the show

Only starts when the audience sits down,

The figures move when the spotlights turn on,

Lines memorized, positions marked with tape,

And one must rely on the empathy of actors

To catapult the moral of the plot,

Which offers no lifeline

                                            Now that we know

Its purpose was to coerce innocent blood

-- The entertainment just had to be good

Enough -- but now that we've put the stake through 

The vampire's heart the stage is empty and grey,

The backlit lamp has died away, the stories

Are within -- formerly taken, now returned

With the rest of the universe you carry

In every cell.

                         As the light now expands

There's no more paper world to set aflame.

Prayer for Draco

The iguana looks outside 

At trees that he should climb

Beyond his upstairs cage

Where the daily feed of grapes

And mustard greens

Suffices for the wild.

He paces the hacienda,

Looking for the stray branch

Or wire to climb away

From the humans,

Who are equally bound by law 

To keep him safe

With all his fits and spasms,

His leaping into hair,

His not surviving long

If we don't stoop to clean his poop

And spray his cage and never

Look him square in the face.

The living room window 

Is almost a hole,

He understands that

Better than the need to make him

A pet, because he's cute

And different,

As he crawls around

On his last 3 legs,

All his contortionist tricks

Going to waste,

And so much rage that's lost

On everyone but the cat,

But not those eyes,

So suffering, so human,

Impossible to imagine we can't 

Console them

Or make the grief

Subside.

It is his private struggle,

Born of choices 

None of us can know,

That intangible thing 

Called karma

That rises corporeal 

In every thick-gloved exchange,

In every duck for cover

When I enter the cage;

Is it his or mine,

Impossible to say,

Perhaps it is the same.

Night Ride: St. Petersburg

From the German of Rainer Maria Rilke

When we were back with the glossy trotters
(The black Orloff studs’ distinguishing sheen) -,
Behind the exalted candelabras
When city windows displayed an early green 
Adrift from the hour, saying nothing --, 
Drove, no: vanished or, rather, winged our way
Round the overbearing palace hairpins 
Wafting all the way to the Neva quays,

Carried away by the vigilant night
That had left both heaven and earth behind
By the time we came upon the rank blight
Of a garden unguarded, ill-defined
In the Letney-Sad, where the stone figures
Ascended from their impotent contours
And passed amidst us as we rode, transfigured -:

Then we heard the city 
Lift her being as well. She admitted 
She had never existed, and her plea
Was only for rest; like a madman stewed
And long confused comes suddenly unglued,
No longer able to be distracted
And betrayed from having to think again, 
As he feels himself facing a granite wall, 
Falling through his vacant, swaying brain 
Until you can no longer see him at all.

Rainer Maria Rilke, between August 9th and 17th, 1907, Paris
------------------------------------------------------------

Nächtliche Fahrt
Sankt Petersburg

Damals als wir mit den glatten Trabern
(schwarzen, aus dem Orloff'schen Gestüt) -,
wahrend hinter hohen Kandelabern
Stadtnachtfronten lagen, angefrüht,
stumm und keiner Stunde mehr gemäß -,
fuhren, nein: vergingen oder flogen
und um lastende Paläste bogen
in das Wehn der Newa-Quais,

hingerissen durch das wache Nachten,
das nicht Himmel und nicht Erde hat, -
als das Drängende von unbewachten
Garten gärend aus dem Ljetnij-Ssad
aufstieg, während seine Steinfiguren
schwindend mit ohnmächtigen Konturen
hinter uns vergingen, wie wir fuhren -:

damals hörte diese Stadt
auf zu sein. Auf einmal gab sie zu,
dass sie niemals war, um nichts als Ruh
flehend; wie ein Irrer, dem das Wirrn
plötzlich sich entwirrt, das ihn verriet,
und der einen jahrelangen kranken
gar nicht zu verwandelnden Gedanken,
den er nie mehr denken muss: Granit -
aus dem leeren schwankenden Gehirn
fallen fühlt, bis man ihn nicht mehr sieht.

Rainer Maria Rilke, zwischen dem 9. und 17.8.1907, Paris

Crack in the Morning

Choose your silence carefully 

— It will be remembered

In the leaves of the trees

As the birds and dogs bay.

The crows look for what you have to say 

But fly off as you open your mouth.

Only scarecrows are allowed to be fools.

The rest must be wrong on their own.

The light leaves nothing out

— It is only ear.

Evening with Variations

The grim reaper weeds our backyard garden

And my spirit guide says it takes lifetimes

To understand Art Blakey's drums.

It is October,

Where every shiver is music

And all chords are dissonant,

For that's what angels like, it turns out,

And the old ones who linger here

Remind you that that's what you like too

Or used to, when there was no space between worlds

And you picked flowers freely from the skull —

There was no Bach to guard the unmarked gates.

Black and white the limbs, the webs, the skeletons,

Seeing with only wisdom, in only outline,

Beyond experience, outside of mind,

That certain clarity

In the visible air

That will no longer be there

When the veil rolls back in like fog

To leave only shadow and your theoretical beacon

Like a wand, craftsman of air.

The sundial is turning,

How much healing can you bear

Before drowning?

The woodsmoke is far away

But the vapor's inside you now,

Emptying out what you never were 

With its whisper "The illusion."

The guitar plays itself

With pale, thin hands.

Its memories are not your own

But they become their final offering,

As some consummate summation

Of the light you used to be

When only feeling ...

What calls out still

In the things that can only be known

By looking in the cat's eyes,

The wild blueberries,

The waverings of gossamer across

The eaves and pylons of your world.

The costumes you once wore

Revealed your ambiguity,

As the lights enhanced the darkness,

And the colonnades you shadowed

Were doorways

To what was known already,

Despite the ancient hand depositing

A hundred thousand dollar bar

And the strangers from another town

Who just moved in, too soon to know

You were a wren, a goddess who could

Release the bones and transform

From a craftsman to a witch of fire,

In black sun reborn, as chrysalis mummy,

The landscape now washed clean

In a skull of stars.

Contact High

Betty Boop is in the laundry,

Though she died before I was born,

Along with the latest teenager trends:

Bell bottoms and gold velour.

Memories are buried

But fashion is immortal.

The wash cycle never ends.

Power Outage

This flicker does not console

Our restless spirits

At green evening.

The candles dancing

In the still room

Do not answer

The last space of light,

White clouds and pink padding,

Some wisdom from beyond

That never reached

Our comprehension,

Even when the dark gave birth.

The phantom life of flame

Inspires a makeshift church

Where our home used to be,

A hope against the void

In the golden glow of faces

Beautiful, substantial

Yet insufficient 

For the earth at night

Dotted with white mercury,

Human, not natural,

Habitual, as we remember

How to play cards,

Have dinner together,

Read books by the fire!

Our city has become a wilderness. 

When the lights come on

We applaud, our frantic minds 

Entertainable once more.

HB Sunday

The outside world has left my grip.

It flowers on its own.

Now everything aches with beauty

Every moment

From far away -- it has no home,

It is not real, at last I can call it

My own.

Under the Skies of Instagram

Dozens of phones face off 

Against the twilight

And as many smiles share gifts of colors,

Never saying what it means.

I want to explain

It's a cry from the victims

To honor the despots 

For all they've taken on

But I see the moment looks of

Strawberry leaves in autumn,

And even that much separation 

Diminishes the oneness of love.

The Hard Things

We sat around the table,

Virtual of course,

All business, as usual,

Which is to say, personal.

I dropped, with 

The utmost tact

One salient fact

Out of far too many.

Six months ago

There would have been a war

Over so much less,

As little as this crack of light bore.

But now there was a rough calm,

At what they couldn't bear to hear,

What they never hear, but know,

Somehow, from the air.

It was almost like tears,

The urge against self-pity,

In those faces

Of stony professionals,

A sadness that couldn't be

Swept from the room,

A silence, at last,

A silence.

Notes from a Voluntary Holocaust

Ah, the recall of fall ivy:
Hofstadter, Gibbons, Toynbee,
The warnings for posterity

From the picked-clean bones of people
Whose pasts have not aged well,
Their inexplicable docility.

And here we are now, reason unwound
For the masses on the ground
In the petri-dish of fear drowned
To divine skepticism, free choice,
Any raising of a voice
Against the trick that left them spellbound

And panicked, in pleas for relief
Through whatever motifs
Kept alive their beliefs
That they are right, in what they were told
When their souls were borrowed and sold,
Robbed of a rationale for grief,

So intent on that suicide shot
No matter what facts or what thought
They are shown, for they’re caught
In the nets coursing their veins,
Replacement parts for their brains
As each organ fails clot by clot.

They can’t question their extermination,
They war for a vaccine nation
On pariahs before condemnation,
Anything to give them relief,
Even death, the ultimate thief,
What is left at the end of the ration.

Will there be Gibbons, Hofstadter, Toynbee?
Any plum ruins left of their theories?
Or will they be disgraced too easily
As cogs in the great chain of being
That led to this great unfreeing,
As if no one present could see?

The colleges are emptied out now,
The old play of mind not allowed,
To sterilize the high-browed
Required now, to beat at the past 
Without reason or decency at last,
Every last hold-out cowed.

But a wild viral strain will survive
With the reckoning drive
Of the outlawed to revive
Their cause with the now-harmless dead,
And the light air will go to their head;
This curse to preserve: being alive. 

The Genocide Listeners

If a scream falls in the forest

Does it make a sound?

Can words be formed?

Thoughts heard?

Or is it exactly the same as everyday,

Any conversation?

The door where the knocking grows louder

But never opens.

The Challenge of Faith

The cold truth of winter

Hangs in the breeze 

But few of them can see

The clouds that prophesy

Or hear the words

The wind speaks quite plainly.

They've forgotten their lives

And what the sun used to look like,

Still I gaze into their eyes,

Put on hold what I know

Until they remember

(Though I know they never will).

Thus have I squandered the gift of the future,

That says nothing and is never wrong.

Collab

Your freedom enslaves the world,

We're all too eager to believe

So it's impossible to agree!

Yet we make the movie together 

Painstakingly,

Some ceding

Of the trigonometric scheme

Or how vampiric the empath

Turns out to be 

Accomplished

By the audience

Idealized

But no less real.

The Looking Glass Cat

The illusion of the individual ...

The lover only recognizes love,

Our masks all feel uncomfortable,

We cling to the theory of the hero

Because there is no I

But of course there's nothing else:

The consciousness disguised 

As identifiable, 

It seems to become,

Longs to belong,

Magnetizes foreign objects

Yet it has nothing for the swaying of the trees,

It cannot be the light on the leaves,

The salt in the breeze

Though of course it always is.

Morning at the Clinic

There will be another summer 

Of bicycle days

And pink-haired ladies

And cicadas ringing your ears

As you lay in the immovable chaise

On a perpetual beach

Near the mystical piers.

There will always be time 

For skimming stones

That echo nonsense,

For boats to go 

To giddy nowhere 

And drinks on balconies 

That last as long as the days.

There will always be boys

To fight off jellyfish with sticks

And girls who travel everywhere

On skates.

These things will not go away

Despite the dessicated vines

And warty pumpkins,

The calling from the other side

To pay the lost attention

Never satisfied

With grief and atonement,

For somewhere roots

Take hold already of the stones,

Impossible flowers

Start their inevitable course.

The dormant days

Become much less a warning,

More soft a curse,

Yet they hold 

In arid arrangements 

What old moments

Failed to catch:

The frisbee offered to the sea,

The lights at the end of midnight journeys,

The girl who stared at you all day.

Fame

Tumbleweeds blow through tinsel town now,

Long-abandoned sets line every street,

As every sidewalk crack sprouts thriving weeds

And zombies loiter north as far as Beverly.

The shopping carts are grounded now and empty,

The playgrounds of the fast-food factories

No longer spew out human meat,

All that's left is the white packaging 

That clings to the living embankments

Where veterans fold their vintage clothes

And sweep out their cardboard openings

Oblivious to the flow above them

Of those who came before,

To Hollywood once to be a star, 

And who now lie stalled forever

In a line of not-yet-paid-for cars.

Comms by Scavino

It's a strange awakening 

Where we must tiptoe

     Among the sleepers;

I spin like a dancer in a Cornell box,

Doily folded over like it's a portrait of the deceased

     So the would-be revolutionaries cannot see,

For there is no truth in what I know,

My eyes are too obscure to enlighten,

     Too much a window on my own soul.

I am just another bird on a unicycle.

There is something they need to be shown:

     A precipice of their own.

Breeze in the Evening

Even in heaven here

     There is the storm,

Elephant ears waving

      Some ancient telephony,

But we have faith 

      In our love

For all who suffer

      Will keep us free.

The twists and turns of wind

      Move the feathers of immortality,

Palm fronds dancing 

      More elegantly

To a more complete symphony

      That we will never hear,

Just an RSVP to fear

      In the envelope -- white noise --

The things we do not have to know,

      And what we never will.

Part of our bliss is to see the silence

      Play out without our complicity --

There is only prayer,

      More specifically

How we notice what's around us

      As a response.

Georgia and her Painting

If I could have back that winter evening
In Madison, Wisconsin, near the Oscar Mayer plant,
At the respectable house of my then-sister-in-law
Along with her husband Steve. We had just flown in
And they wanted to show us some Badger hospitality
But there was no Hamm’s, there was no Tom & Jerry,
Only a simple glass of wine, they made a point of saying,
As they passed the leaded crystal, they would only serve us
This one. It was some family ritual to express what they’d
Kept inside, what they never felt safe in saying about the others,
Although I, never having met them, couldn’t possibly comprehend,
But my wife at the time did, seething, staring down her brother’s
Tightwad eyes, that he only had his carefully cleaned gun collection
To show for being a man. So it wasn’t the most hospitable
Night, or room, or karmic situation, but that suited those two
Just fine, as we sat in red velour wanna-be chairs, looking for
Something to say, when the occasion called
Our eyes abruptly away from their faces
So sad, to above the fireplace, as Georgia let us know
That this painting of hers was extremely valuable.
It had a museum-size gilt frame and even had a golden
Lamp affixed below it, low-keying the canvas like a horror flick.
The painter’s name was Thomas Kincaide, someone
We were supposed to have heard of, and she catalogued
Her acquisition’s complexities, as raw and as convolved
As the Fall of Rome, except that it all
Revolved around her, her pluck, her savvy, her open wounds,
The way she procured this limited, limited edition
And it would some day go like Van Gogh
Faster than we were sipping drips of wine
And more certainly than we were perusing
The winter scene of cottages and trees
And snow that glowed with a nauseous patina.
We looked from them to that, rat-a-tat-tat,
Eyeing the door and the fresh floating snow
To slip away into, forever undetected,
But it was not to be, for I sit there still
In the dark nights of my soul, wondering why
I chose bathos before the truth, how I
Acted then, to not offend, and left them
Nothing to be remembered by, instead of, say,
Helpfully pointing out that he would be dead
In disgrace in a decade, Kinkaide, his paintings
A giant ponzi scheme, and that she should sell
Her painting immediately while they still can,
For, soon, even in cruise ship art galleries,
Where all manner of out-of-date kitsch is served
As a panoply of every misconstrued style and
Whitewashed era of the arts, you will only see,
If you go to the back, a few Kincades turned to the wall,
That’s how embarrassing this whole thing will become,
Or I, lacking this foresight, should have been able
To answer when she asked my honest opinion
And say, “Looks like kidnapped children,” or at least
Challenge the equation of her perilous self-esteem
With the ancient art of painting by asking
How did this Kincaid make her feel?
                                                                   Even now I form
The words for her: It is cold and so crisp,
Yet it warms the winter with its glow.
Even the rabbit’s eyes glow, in the blue snow
And gleaming copper trees, and soft soft shadow,
A solitude that won’t ask any questions of you.
Who needed any other kind of art? It is the perfect
Hearth picture, for the fantasy projection
Of how middle-aged American women 
Crave the fake lost past and the smoke of its mawkish 

Chiaroscuro. You mention Van Gogh, who sold one 

Single painting in his life, and that out of pity,
And whose canvasses evoke a strange and disturbing
Excess of feeling, and the fire and cool needed to endure

The chaos that comfort is built upon. They risk sharing

What it means to be human, including what is rotten 

But not yet dead, the kinky bunny in my own back yard,

The bark of peeling trees and the funk of entropy,
As far away from Kinkaid as can be, for they carry
The flawed baroque pearl, the light underneath,
Pulled from the beyond by a shaman,
Some piece of felt experience utterly at odds
With what the viewer wants to see and feels ashamed
To understand. 
                               I now know why I could not say
Anything, it was to disguise what I knew, her and

My pity, which opened like a bud to such enmity for
Humanity, and I wanted to be not the critic but the bard
But needing to say something, for it’s part
Of the shaman’s job, to remind the others
And forget himself, in the Kinkade of his mind
Recalling, how everything was beautiful,
So transcendently beautiful, and wrong.

A Pause in Conversation

I see them take hemlock to their mouths and sigh,

How my objection seems poison to their bliss.

I see the acid curl around their lips

And still they smile,

Satisfied at being right, at last, the consolation

For a life well-lived, at least, 

The most intangible of theories ...

As I'm overcome with grief:

I cannot know these people!

They are more than fashionably post-rational,

It's like they disappear before they go

Only to come back as an ugly bug

From a fondly-forgotten worm,

The gift, for all our discourse, of nothing

-- Autonomy! -- and if I'm agreeable 

I still might be allowed my own opinion,

Unless, of course, I'm wrong

About the worms or how pain is somehow distinct

From the beautiful ...

And who am I to blame my confusion

On other humans

Much less God's inscrutable mercies?

Not so much as an answer as to defy me

The young child cried "humans are evil" definitively

And the weight of that made me weary,

Too tired to justify the crimes of commission 

Like every rehabilitated innocent has always done.

Drunken Susan

From the Spanish of Jorge Luis Borges

With love she looked as the twilight hues

Agonized their slow dissipation.

It pleased her to disappear into

Curious verse, the tune’s complication.

But ‘twas not the root red but the grays

That spun her delicate destination;

She was made for nuance and delay

In her practice of discrimination.

So, not daring to tread any nearer

To the labyrinth’s perplexions she’d hide

Like that other lady in the mirror 

In the forms, their course, a cry from outside. 

At such prayers the Gods who dwell higher

Abandoned her to that tiger, the fire.

------------------------------------------------------------------

Susana Soca

Con lento amor miraba los disperses

Colores de la tarde. Le placía

Perderse en la compleja melodía

O en la curiosa vida de los versos.

No el rojo elemental sino los grises

Hilaron su destino delicado,

Hecho a discriminar y ejercitado

En la vacilación y en los matices.

Sin atreverse a hollar este perplejo

Laberinto, atisbaba desde afuera

Las formas, el tumulto y la carrera,

Como aquella otra dama del espejo.

Dioses que moran más allá del ruego

La abandonaron a ese tigre, el Fuego.

Song of the Times

At every archway to God I recoil:

How, after all I had to throw away to fit in

I had to choose myself over immortality

And be happy with a tiny voice 

In a deafening wind

And an infinitesimal plot of land

Though it grew larger than the universe

If not trimmed.

Music

I was born in the state of music
Where meaning is held, complete:

Every port has a band

To explain what the sun never can

And to enhance, under its wing,

The high ideals and tender feelings,

Even the notes of sadness offer reasons

To embrace what I had no business trying to love.

Much later came the Gods and the statistics
And the knives to make the bolts of blue make sense

And the words that would explain 
Oneself by way of the world

And it slipped away to separate fiefdoms
None of them real or true

Though the music we still shared
Made it so appear.

The Synchronous Storm

The tender thunderclaps can't stop their tears

For spirits who're possessed and, thus, have suffered,

Thinking they were blue, electric, free 

Not sovereign as a circuit in a series,

For they always flow too easily to know

Their slavery, its shame, except to go

Along, with something they'd decided, a lack

From too far back, some impulsive fatal crack.

The rain that would redeem seems far away,

For someone else some pointless sympathy

— Relentless drops assault the roof's tin ear;

At last it has no words that they can hear.

World Animal Day in Huntington Beach

World Without Stevens

This day won't stay still — 

The wind blows fresh wisdom

Empty as usual.

His time and his place stand in shadow

And where he came from

Whistles at us even now.

And what is left is for us 

To lend gravitas to our silence

And give our tongues some small resistance.

It was always, what he said, for the others,

Those he could not hear

And those he heard too late.

But it always was a losing cause ...

He became us

As readily as we became the Gods.

How we knew him, how we knew ourselves

Came in on such wisps of wind

There was no separation.

Such is the feeling of oneness,

A puncture so gentle

We still stare with all our yearning at the chasm.

Along the Slopes of Mauna Loa

I.

The pink grass blows,

The only thing that moves,

Stone clouds, old trees, black fields

Then the slow flow of light rain

Wipes it all away.

II.

At the end of the world

The ocean is as black

As the sand,

The swirls of rock,

The tidal pools

All refracting

Immortality

For the white that's alive

For just this moment.

III.

The lily pad quivers 

The length of the pond,

A thousand purple flowers

In the rain where a grebe stands

So still it vanishes through the scene.

IV.

The turtle floats and disappears

Into a fabric that reveals

All is pattern, form illusion

And then he emerges again

As if to train our eyes on him,

An object anchored in a distance,

His face an ancient mural,

All mirror.

He rolls away like any stone.

V.

Blue smoke from the cliff

To infinity,

The white sun 

Brings ultraviolet

To the delivery room,

The few trees here sway like fans

The cold birth,

Rainbows almost breaking through,

The red beneath waits for darkness

Just like stars.

VI.

The hour of the frogs

At endless sunset,

The entire ocean seems to turn purple.

Traveler's End

I believe in the Java tea

And sun streaming down the Banyon tree

And the painted bamboo shagged with green

And jungle velvet and torch ginger harmonies

And the sound of streams everywhere.

But there are birds that I can't see,

Mynah and Macaw they say,

Who speak familiar tongues

That I can't comprehend

Except by knowing.

And the people here,

Weighed down by rain,

Look at me

Like I'm some different species,

One they can believe in.

And the mountainsides 

Rolled with lava,

Dotted with pink,

Seem to say something distinct

As the grasses glow translucent.

But what's delivered in my heart

Is my belief in it, nothing more.

It turns gray with the rain

To a dismal field 

Of undifferentiated waste.

Such is the scam of make-believe

We paint onto our faces,

The exotic clothes that we parade 

Across the stage. We sell who we're not

And wait for our hands to applaud

A little more weakly

As each consummation 

Seems more of the same,

A waiting, expectant, 

For what is still deferred.

At the Shore

The distinct vibration 

     Intersects, merges,

Easily becomes everything 

     While staying itself.

The light within the earth

     Pours out of the crown

And finds itself in form

     Seeking the ocean.

The waves march in,

     A continuous yearn,

To meet the lava stones

     Holding their position ...

At the end of endlessness

     Nothing will yield.

How to Heal a Death Sentence

There is time for the Dragonfly Ranch,

For the societies of ants and the Hawaii Gourd,

For the closed church and road paving delay

In a torrential rain by the coffee plantations

And the yellow butterflies on the lava fields,

The universal vacationers aimless and catatonic

As one by the two-step sea, 

For dynasties of tang and parrotfish,

Manta rays, mamaki and papaya trees,

There is time for the light breaking through

The rapture of green and grey, for the rain,

And for every day that only seems to end

With melodramatic fanfare

And a dark night of the soul

And gratitude at reveille 

For all delays mean you love,

All grace comes in the waiting.

There are only these moments, of course,

There is no time, of course, that exists

Except, of course, that only time can grow

This rainbow flooding the sky in this moment,

As we finally discuss how to tell the world

What is painful, what is real,

What is private.

Road Sign: Save Hawaii

We've all taken more than we can bear,

Oh, but here, here

The trauma's so much worse

As paradise bursts and spits upon our slavery 

Like it's done so many times before:

Life so rich can only be countered with death

To make the place anything more than a postcard

Stored with forgotten clothes.

                                                 The tourists don't know

What it is to suffer each desecration 

And wear it, in fact, as a badge of honor -- 

Those who've eaten the bitter, holy noni fruit

And lived through the cleansing fumes

And overdue tsunamis 

And been scored with Hawaiian tattoos

And barely notice the shadows overtaken by dawn.

Birds should be heard and not seen.

The palms should sway clean 

Without reigning their alien blades

To toss like galaxies. A slow

Decline the clouds on Mauna Loa

Know, but will not say

Except a reddening at dusk

When all the windows turn to gold.

Seascape

The clouds cling over the island

In a field of blue

As electric haze floats from a distance 

Across the sea surface

And thunderheads show rain from far away

On a watery stage.

The sun falls from one cloud bank

To another, spraying mists of gold

Even to the water,

Which trembles

As only something alive can do,

As if to tell the ocean,

So profoundly blue,

That it must turn purple.

The sky is grey 

Save a thin band of sunset

Where the clouds are red.

Flight to Kona

Traces of the slack key

Echo in the overhang

Of muscles deteriorating

With all of our dreams

Of jungle alpine escapades

In essential mist

Where one still can see

As far as forever reveals

And the tradewinds of Lemuria

Invite us to feel,

The hope that never quite came true

Except as blueprint,

Some flag to wave against the pain

We embraced, of this place,

The old school.

So many honors

From all-nighters, burned brews,

Ravaged pencils, savaged books,

What all seemed in memory 

As love: secret trysts,

Breathless kissing, bodies scored 

Like the sun in that radiant rapture

Known as heaven, in dusty alcoves,

Cold cafeterias, crowded halls

Where we were alone

As one ... combustion,

One all-seeing-eye, companion

Taken-for-granted angels

Formed into speech and listening,

Words and understanding, as easy

As a corridor flows from source

To classroom, intent on

The clinging ambrosia along the way 

But oblivious to the lines 

That define their trajectory, 

For every detail translates

To play and the laughter

Echoes louder than the bells

That sweep mad youth away.

The ghosts of nameless bands

Come through the latest

Radio silence dispatch

Of this time and this place

And we lose all those years

As if we never could change

— The dreams are as ephemeral as ever

And they never lost their hold

On our souls,

And we never lost

Our capacity for boredom

To open the next gift

With an expectation 

We would be home.

And we made it that way

For a time, as we made this place

Home, in our minds,

Never touching the thing that it is

For all our glorious

Reenactments

And ecstatic shocks

At what was just

Unfamiliar enough

To spill out of us

All manner of unrequited love --

For the earth, for the country,

For ourselves in the mist

Of other people's gravesites,

The envy of mansions

That can’t look away,

The untransportable clay

Of what is a theory, still, for us,

At best, a place in the world

For the place-less,

An escape into ourselves

From what we needed to leave behind.

And here it is,

Everything gone, a new skin

At last, the heart

Uncoerced, unrepentant,

As fresh as the morning air

Blowing from somewhere

The wishes of the elders

On the couple joined,

The new souls cajoled,

The plans for service

Laid out like the colors in the sky,

Permanent yet a moment

Where Ohana becomes Mahalo

And things are seen

Despite the earth

That tells you she is

Everything you need

To know.

And she is all, and always will be,

Despite these words

That burn — how they 

Burn now — like gold.

Fall's First Fireball

A yellow sun

From the Shasta fire

Showing

Ascension codes

Like a golden candle

Through the grey zone

Gauze unrolling —

A wandering ball

Foreign and alone,

How fragile

The raw sky is,

How it needs us.

Alternate Timeline Blues

Information comes in like sun.

But the time of learning is done.

The world stumbles forward on broken limbs.

They are waiting to be rounded up, 

Shot and buried alone 

By those who say there is no God

Only darkness and extinction 

Of all they ever were 

As a final prayer.

They need something more,

But the sun streams in

Beyond any capacity of blinds

To filter.

I will walk outside,

Feel the codes,

Know that everything is perfect as it is.

I am too far away to help.

Notes from the Harvest

The last full moon of summer 

There are codes in the air

As Antares the gateway rides volunteer.

The grape leaves are red.

The future news of poets

Peels bloated skins away

And blows an autumn horn

In all its savagery.

The reckoning will not be delegated.

Ganesh parades in golden lace

And blue diligence.

The talk is of the future.

Implications of a Dream

The sun rises so white in the morning

And there are only so many clouds here

To move with one's mind. The general store 

Has a board to track down missing children,

Everybody loves Virginia's cactus garden

And the Katz's made a museum of their children

But that's about all the diversion

On this endless plain and its scorching days.

The stores not far away have little to say.

The tavern is pink and has no windows.

But every night the people from the town

Sneak inside the lighted mound down the road,

Some secret program where they store the clones

And hold the dead in a suspended animation

So that they still think they are alive.

The ladies raid the wardrobe case

Of celebrities for vintage finery 

They parade across the town all night

And return before first tell-tale light.

They fall to sleep gruntled pleasantly.