Conflict Resolution

The crow on the lawn reminds us

That the truth is law

Though it rips apart our hearts

When it's finally told

As a necessary harmony

For anxious silence

And the projectiles fly,

The lunges commence,

Wounds are raised 

Like a m'aider flag,

And there remains only

The steady cry

Of someone who can only

Break down

Instead of acknowledging

What she herself has done

In her habit of assaults

To get what she wants,

The white not yellow cheese,

The soda not the water,

Something as small

And insignificant as her

To be worthy of

Absolutely,

Without another person in the way

Of her traumatized love.

She can't listen to any no's

Though she needs to hear them more than most,

She won't yield to any pleas,

Just the demons of impulse

Tearing down the house again

If she cannot have that crumb,

For it is worth, every time,

Taking down everyone,

For there is someone

Who will understand,

Take her away from the scene

With a gentle voice

And promise her she matters 

One more time ...

Thank God there's someone left

Who believes that I am evil.

Tilt

Slippery elm, bioplasma and moon drops

But only as pastilles,

It has to be pastilles always ...

Soon this whole erroneous civilization will fall,

All its set pieces and themes

Deleted like a bad meal

And if you think that thought pleases me

You don't know what I am seeing,

A callalily practicing humility.

Back-Home Limerick

There once was a man named Gerry

Who drew a map quite contrary 

But the people grew tired

And wanted him fired

But of his map we are still wary

Buddy's House

Suffice it to say there is more care and honor

Given to serial killers in New Orleans

Than to the inventor of what we know now as Jazz:

Henry Lee Lucas's deeply felt portrait of

George Jones, recipes from Dorothea Puente,

John Wayne Gacy's painted tributes to Indian chiefs --

Their legacy's and letters lovingly preserved ...

Ah but Buddy's house pulls like slave-ship shackles

Around his soul, held in perpetual disrepair,

As proof he was owned, while the city continues

To melt inexorably into the muddy.

He's still here, as he explained when I passed what was

McKenna's Hall, where the music was delivered

Along with amniotic fluid and with blood

But now, he pointed out, a combination

Potter's studio, coin laundry, Voodoo Pharmacy ...

The place is still evil, he added when prompted,

Evil pretending to be good pretending to 

Be evil, this Vieux Carre Southern Museum

Of Slavery, which makes Sinners out to be Saints

And acts crazy to masquerade as innocence,

With a debauchery that's only possible

Among those who've lost the pretense they are free.

What can a lone cornet do in a nest of lies?

The balls hang heavily for Mardi Gras, the time

Of the ritual sacrifice, masking secrets

To hide behind. Only the skeletons can play

Those quadrilles now, where the blood's not yet returned like

Mosquito bites, for only the dead can attempt 

To gain their souls back ... so he went on in this vein,

Remarking on each balcony and colonnade

As a raw beacon of oppression, with the poor

Locals living that role in sauced perpetuity,

For even to blow his horn from the second story 

Required the near selling of his soul, for the more 

In his voice than could ever be allowed. Lonely

To be genius, he simply said, to hear everything

Work together: the hollers, the blues, the martial

Brass, gospel grooves, player-piano pyrotechnics 

As one ... no, the gumbo is a centuries-old dish,

Jazz is a word that came from an L.A. writer,

The truth, he said, is that there cannot be enough

Rhythms that are just not supposed to be there in

Polyvalent syncopation when the shutters

Are all closed, improvisation must live on to

Escape from what embalms, the terrible perfume

Formaldehyde in jars that hangs over the world,

Freeing the spirit to call the children back home

And give them voices, those he could no longer hold,

It was that, and not the poison or what they stole

That made him let it go, the madness in the music,

So that now in every song, no matter how maudlin,

One can hear him glaring the blues with his loud horn

That will never be heard, except as imagined.

Crescent City Haiku

1.

Shuttered morning in the secret city

Sunlight falls like wine

2.

The container ships pass silently

With deafening waves

3.

The homeless have the most sympathetic eyes

They give their beads to the tourist in a wheelchair

4.

He played Wagon Wheel on his washboard 

As if it wasn't just another day

5.

The old man by the river is genteel enough 

To pretend civilization has ended here too

But he's held on for years just like this

Muddy with ghosts

6.

The river is purple

The moment all the beads and flags

Have been waiting for

7.

Full moon birds continue to fly

Above the rising theater lights

Over the Bayou

Galveston looks like a lava field

As the rice fires rise like weather balloons,

The canals refine fuel down the curves

Into the money jaw of Houston.

Then the shrub and flow of low Louisiana,

Where no journey can come easy,

Even though that's how it seems,

The patties too far inland from the quasi-mythic sea.

Nothing like a city, what must be a dream,

Double-crossed at its dreaming,

Lake Pontchartrain and its deep blue

The only exit from the refuge.

From Balboa Island

The ferris wheel keeps on spinning,

Threads the cotton candy thought

Across an impermeable pass

Of water charged with mind

Where all reflection fragments

On the ever-watching mirror.

Another Out of No Body Experience

I'm far more that flower than my face,

As this cricket sometimes needs to be 

A fairy with a wand -- Identity 

Is that which metamorphosizes, 

Taking with it every idea, which,

Like the cricket, dissolves when it finds

The right frequency, into a master ideal,

The ethereal cricket, which pulses 

With a life too deeply kept inside

This pale likeness, the physical world.

It's a life that dissolves galaxies 

In its need of unknown light,

Makes nebulae rise like pottery.

As Wasps Eat the Lettuce

Maybe each angel's offices are different ...

The sunlit hedge wall hangs

Like the leaves of philosophy.

The birds gather seeds on the grass

Like professors in airy classrooms.

The truth is in the movements of the branch

But, as soon as you look, the patterns lapse.

The birds fly away

As if the knowledge disappears

But it is still as transparent or opaque

As the landed sun's gaze placed it

As a response

To words you can't yet form

Whose figurations prove nothing more

Than how clever they were listening.

The Frequency Turns

The iron weight of waking life

With its cul de sac timelines

And magnetized tracks,

You can build upon its stories,

Add more sugar, pour some cream,

But still it seems to lurch with engines

Unequal to your dreams,

Which aren't really even dreams at all,

Just thoughts of how things are,

From the same electric streams

All the creatures travel down

That this dumb, insensate world

Won't even say are impossible

-- There's something missing from its soul,

The branches move but the mind won't budge,

In fear that Colin Farrell, say, 

Might be seen to play the role

Of J. Depp in Murder on the Orient Express, 

Which is now about the Lindbergh baby,

Who has now been unalterably killed ...

Such dangerous games they play

With the plot lines,

To test what we may remember,

To deny us the fruits of thought,

As if our spirits could be stopped cold

By being ignored.

But they can't prevent the facts

From turning archetype,

Where they cede to deeper meanings

In the time that we call sleep,

To shadow us through daylight

Like a premonition of home,

And even the spotlight sun

On the radiant wall of faces

Must break for intermission,

Where in the stillness crickets tone

The stage of grass to nothingness.

Convoy Days

They had to wait 'til everyone was black on TV 

To have the non-televised revolution.

The First Nations want those Coutts truckers in chains,

How dare they presume what it feels like for a day

The iron thumb that is only there because 

They've agreed for it to be, because they live

Their lives oblivious to invisibility.

It is racist, the fleeing blackface leaders say,  

To not take their bondage like the colored ones did, 

With powerless violence and the slogans of distance, 

And claim we are one, undivided people

Feeding the homeless beside the Capitol,

Reciting the forgotten speeches of liberty,

Cleaning the patriot statues and war memorial streets,

Reviving pride in the old flag l'Unifolié.

The only way to deny their right to their bodies

Is to quietly take them away, in a censored massacre,

But the censorious press has allowed too much truth

To slip through their impenetrable cracks,

The people can feel each others' body heat

And so know, as if for the first time 

What it feels like not to be free.

The seven degrees of slavery peel back like an onion

As the hockey puck flows down the street

At the barbecue party of being.

It takes the 100th monkey to see

They are all the same, these numbers that have

So much strength to break through 

Paper barricades as red as their flag 

But with only what they no longer fear inside.

The Fixed and the Transient

How does the moon stay in the cup?

The dead weight bounces when I jerk the string.

Experience doesn't know what it is

And never takes the same arc again.

The ball in the cup's become a memory,

The only thing that doesn't leave

As it falls further in the dream,

That part of me that doesn't cease.

But the moon, the moon seems real,

Projects some structure of the rational.

Things already disappeared assume a permanence 

That makes each passing light a wound.

Hum at the Threshold

The sunrise could not be more unobtrusive,

The slightest whirr of inner chemistry,

Light pasted like frosting 

On a two-dimensional sky

But there's no doubt that things are different,

The vines and leaves don't dare to move,

The old world gives no clues

To what is needed --

Where you come from, who you were

Finally matters

Though the voice may be as subtle

As it always was.

Sunrise in Vegas

A thick mist of pity has clung overnight

As the monsters announce themselves again

In yellow, and the relentless silver drill

Welds the day to the palms, the streets, the cars

And yawning morning towers ...

Something about this town makes everyone

Bring their worst. It seems to want it that way, 

For the compassion that can be bestowed

In this hangover glare, as if there is no

Separation between our monstrous deeds

And the monstrous deeds that made us that way,

And each flinch away from the garter blade

Or fiendish mustache twist turns into guilt 

Automatically, for having lived,

Just for a day, without that leaden club

Swaying over your head, and to have had, 

Even for a day, some lucky seven

Combination, no matter how long ago 

It went unrecovered.

The sun here lets us know we're less the victim 

That the low hum has the manners not to stir

To words yet, for we cannot handle

A syllable, so acute is the pain

Of others, so little we can say or do,

Just following like this ridiculous sun

From one end of the strip to the other

Saying "I'm so sorry" and "I want you

To have fun" as if it's almost enough,

Though fate spins like the inevitable 

Roulette wheel on losing hands, the eyes of

The croupier and customer the same

As it lands, but that is all

They are ever allowed to share.

Cherella Envisions Nigeria

All equations, you say, equal love,

A term I don't know that much about,

But it has something to do with moving,

Which has something to do with being free

And that most of what we would call love

Is a place we are compelled to stay,

To "Prove you love only me" 

Or "Don't — I need you — go away."

The mind is so good at pity

Our ability to see ourselves in

Those who we're willing to believe the best

Is as close as we seem to divine,

But the mind paralyzes 

— Every point-of-view is truth.

The heart, they say, is far too cruel,

But it always knows when to take flight.

The Afternoon Plasma

On invalid lawn once again

With my one friend the sun

Who wipes clean what I've been 

And what I've done

With unintelligible light

That fills my bones

Too familiar with this creaking joint

Though I never could call it home.

I am used to the revulsion,

Accustomed to the trauma,

That when heaven's wings move in

It seems bereft, of drama,

The shiny grass seems for climbing in

Defeated unto sleep,

Not the giggle slick illusion

Beckoning a leap

To what needs all that detritus

To weave its bracelet of light.

It invites us

With baggage on our flight.

The angels want to feel the weight 

Of something unredeemable 

As something to appreciate,

Something esteemable 

With their smile that makes the body shake

And thoughts reduce to stars

In the ranks of the newly awake

Learning nothing's ever far.

I pull a blanket over my legs,

Spin one last double-or-nothing wheel

Like a cylinder of cigarette,

My brain at last a sponge, to feel.

Stars

The moon is in front of the clouds

But Norah knows that cannot be,

She's been taken the same place as he

In the guise of mercurial immortality.

And if we believe a moon in front of the clouds

The better for her to noodle aimlessly

And make believe she's still a child

Who still can make believe,

Or that she ever was a child

Despite the eyes in the dark

That depend on her to be

In her puppet play of tunings on the strings.

Her voice can be poignant, without meaning

And she needs to have no meaning

Though it hangs from every note

Masquerading as mere grief:

The life she'll never live,

The death she'll never have,

Jealous how Jesus with the voice of God

Was taken in quite different circumstances,

To serve to her as a warning

And to make him look less fortunate

To those who were tuned to worship his star

When it wore a cloak of black.

The moon is not the moon.

A black sun cannot be.

Snake eyes gaze on the few

And let the others free

Who keep their innocence despite

Her heartbreaking pleas that these words,

These meanings, are more than they appear to be,

As the keys won't release her hands, won't let it end.

Of Begging Indulgences for the Self

I’m going out of the forgiveness business —
Everything must go:
Each elbow to the ribs,
All tourniquets to imagined stabs.

The innocent were conscientious
In taking over what I had:
The urge to change what didn’t work for me,
The white pattern's lone black frequency.

It was something that I said
And only heard in different words;
The sharpened swords are always contending,
Always only defending.

I made the choice to lift and hold the blade,
For that was the rule taught in grammar school,
Don’t raise your brow unless prepared to freeze
Like a statue, scaring ghosts and new issue.

“At ease,” the General says,
But the Corporal chafes beneath the weight
Of what is nothing
But must be seen as Atlas-ean,

The cowardly as brave,
The temporary as permanent,
The wound as something to cover the globe
In emergency red,

Which is true at least to the feeling
Of not being forgiven
By the one who drew blood at the dance,
The steps so quick and complicated

And so far away in time and space
There is only the memory now of the hole ...
There was always someone in the way of atonement,
An extension of my intention that strayed

Into a distant, beating heart unswayed
And impossible to reach, except to say, to myself,
“Let them be, they did not know what to do
About me, for I hardly crossed at their light.”

I was hurt because the laws said I should be
And cultivated my animosity so I could barter
My forgiveness to return back to the cell
Where I left the straw suit and coconut head in the bed.

They were creatures of the environment
Who nosed me out of that cramped, dark space,
What I would have seen as a gift were it not
For the other creatures I’d fantasized in their place.

And the ones who knew me well enough to steal
A ribbon of my soul, how I wanted them to stay
For a moment, share some strong, bitter tea
On their way to the getaway car.

And you, the big Kahuna, who waved a mirror
In front of my face as you pilfered the furniture,
All the blame reflects even now on myself
And the battered old scarecrow, Absentia, mere straw.

I perform ablution on it all, in one fell swoop,
One mighty flood of tears, wherever it is needed,
Some dark spot in the whole where you and I,
The thing we did together, suffered.

Or is it all one, the same, absolution?
For the courage to live and not to know,
The shame accruing like spores
To the raw and ever-exfoliated forest?

This will all get clarified
When the grades are handed out
At the life review, and everyone will laugh
How they really knew

And said “yes” to what they never wanted
And “no” to what they didn't understand
And were saddled with something real after all
To slough off, some shade of yellow or such,

Some evidence still fresh
That they were here
Despite all the evidence
To the contrary.

After a Nap

The evening smells like a lit match.

The moon glows behind smoke.

That's the way it must be these days.

Every move the mind makes is binary:

Yes or no, love or fear. The earth

Will yield to this, like any lover

To the moistening of soil. The choice

— Beyond all that is — the choice.

Two Songs

I.
After The Killing of a Chinese Bookie

I never lose, I never win.
I never learned how to give in
Though the voice it cried.
I would take a bullet just for you
As long as you never knew
What’s inside
My always playing movie.
Laugh with me
Say you need me,
Say you need me.
It’s all because of you.
I can’t think about myself.

I learned to never show my pain,
That’s the way to win,
But never learned how not to feel
Beneath the skin.
When I took that bullet just for you
Into the street you threw me,
But first you tried
To ask me why I couldn’t cry.
I couldn’t say
How I got that way.
Let me help.
Say you need me,
Say you need me.

II.

The rose battlefield
Was still stained with white and gold,
Not a soul
Goes down the rows except alone.

The words we said still cling to glasses
Put back on the shelves,
And photographs turned back to the walls
Still talk through
Who would take the fall
From the carousel.

We never knew
How to play the lover cruel
Or who was the fool
Feigning cool?

Song of the Divided Soul

The victims always win,

Their insults are mightier than guns,

Their acid tears corrode the most contained souls.

Soon we long for them to be happy again
After everything we've given them

Had turned into our biggest burden.

The worst are human

And thus we become them,

Far better to be fleeced by their pain
Than to confer on their madness
Our sanity — that thing they will take

Forcibly, as you turn away.

I can't escape the elusive voices,

The pleas that make no sense

But must, if I am to be among them

And not a wing with only soul

Flitting an indifferent shadow,

Like the branches merely were to rise above.

The Insomniac's Ear

There comes a time, in the dark 3's

Or wee 4's, where I can hear my own voice

Through the hi-fi, on the radio station,

As the groggy dj picks up the phone

And lets me speak my mind, on what could be,

In theory, anything, but I land tonight

On how the so-called "home of the free"

Feels somehow, at this moment, like a prison.

And quicker than a loan spot reader

The insults fly, recriminations dressed

And waiting in the wings, condescensions 

Condensed for black and bitter late-night joe.

The crystal turntable crashes most painfully

To the floor. It's as if a wound has opened up

In the manicures of time, and the world moans

In unison, in hatred just for me.

But after a few bossa nova songs

It's apparent it's always like this —

The screams, the ridicule, the breaking glass —

It's merely part of the show, any non-

Approved thought caressed to be strangled like 

A comic turn at a nihilist's ball,

Running round and round a center

Like a dog zeroing in on its tail.

But there is something different, to me, this night,

As the first grey light blues the windows:

There are other stations, thousands of them,

In the interstices of what used to be

Static, as my ear can finally hear

What would be there, and always was,

The tunes so strange I understand them,

Voices so plain they leave the outlines of the town.

God Without Apologies

We must calm the angry God

By withdrawing our hands

From the flesh of fresh faces.

We have forgotten that,

As if the brutal truth

Is just some demon inside

That must be exorcised

The same as it was created,

Glaring full in on our sin,

Ye children of

What should be the God of love.

As if the God of every day

Doesn’t kill the weak for fun

Or set in motion consequence in misery

For every selfish thought and deed.

It’s we who are the sun

Shining equally upon 

All we fail to understand,

Taking all our cues from shadows

That form outlines only when

The arc of afternoon’s set in.

If the kudzu won’t stop growing

And the brown rats multiply

How is that our problem?

A helpful God explains

They must be eradicated

With ruthless dispassion ...

All the creatures are disposable

To the I,

Which may not, after all,

Include me

Except in some higher vines

Where I can see the master plan

Above the violence 

Necessary for it to be.

It doesn’t matter, you see,

The individual piece,

That is why one must be kind

To hearts expendable like ours,

For there is no other

Custodian to the free.

How viciously God’s whiskers

Raise at that, and how little

Such judgement matters.

In the Field Where Memories are the Common

Every thought, no matter how remote

Concocts an odd response

From the spiral river flow

To change the course of what goes through

Each cell and demi-nebula.

There is nothing too small

To make the all

Turn to something else in every moment.

These blocks of stone, that stand

Alone in colorless vacuum

Have earned

The imprimatur of life.

"Curtains" After Dark

With apologies to B. Taupin

The only song I left for you to know

Was that dark aubade of the lustrous crow

Counting out his sorrow

As he flew from who caused it to come

Away, and he was never seen by anyone.

A cat hung under fern

To almost form the sound

Before it vanished in the wind

Not to return

Though music was the language we preferred.

This song was supposed to be of joy,

The way we feel the true.

In secret roosts

I brought down such heavenly tunes for you.

But it's okay

I always ran away

To places no one finds

And if they never do

How could they mind?

What did we lose?

After the Fever Dreams

The past has no weight anymore,

Its signature scanned by ocular blades

And it's as buoyant as

A dandelion stalk

Waving the seeds it carries

That will yield nothing of its grief.

The birds here remember something,

Their voices betray that much,

But what it is is loose and flows

To the needs of the moment,

Unlike me, where the scents the past blows in

Reform to crystals of loss within,

My regrets the better part, as it were, of my pride.

I need the hoarders squad to empty my brain

Of sacred, saved contaminants 

So that their all-important vapors

Can finally float to the sky

And these words can be a miracle.

Somewhere In the Spiral Eye

The voice of limitation
     reduces the most
          miraculous truths
To bite-sized bitter candies
     befitting the bile 
           that's been produced
In constant negation of change,
The thing creation asks
      in its reign.

Cenote Song

Swim in the cenote

In sun-gold green

Down the moving stream

As the osprey flies

From mangrove skies

Love flows free

Down in the cenote

In cool lime green

Through the mirrored stream

Of the morning sun

As the fishes come

One can see

Deep in the cenote

In aquamarine 

Down the endless stream

Floating toward the one

In currents of sun

Two will be

One in the cenote

In the heart of green

Down electric streams

Only waves within a field

Of a slow, incessant yield

Love flows free

At Cobá

The Mayans inside the raindrops are crying

As the chattel made into heroes of the story,

With sports where the victors who evoked the jaguar spirit

Were purified and then decapitated (the highest glory),

And with numerals that expanded through posterity,

Past the corn, beans and honey from the local cenotes.

There is no time, so it fairly can be said

That the tours are but a prelude to

The ritual enslavements, the glorification of murder,

The red-painted faces in gold armor carrying torches

That the tour guides cannot comprehend or foresee.

That is why they need our prayers.

Decapitated jaguars hold their heads

While the night is a jaguar holding the earth 

For the future light of the distant ones

To electrify each stone in a transcendent glow,

The hoops they say are for games conductors

Of current that flows up the pyramid walls

Where the giant ones live on slabs in meditation 

Calling through the portal with the other chambers in the series

Aligned with the galaxies to the stars they called their home,

So lonely they made even their lowly prisoners sad,

Who served them as desolate Gods, and so remain

Desolate to this day, as their people

Market calendars and claim the invention of zero

And, in quiet tones, explain how the population dwindled

As an act of will, what separates the human from the animal,

To winnow the herd to equilibrium through sacrifice 

(The highest glory), the spider monkey cenote nearby,

As the locals know, filled with infant skulls.

Kalupte the black bird stands in stelae stone here

As on the t-shirts in the store,

The last of the Mayan kings, they say,

As a black vulture sits at the top of Nohoch Mul.

The God of the bees is turned upside down

And they wait in sadness for the Gods to return.

The shaman takes sap from the tree of life, Yaxche,

With its nine roots (for its nine eras of construction)

And 13 branches (for the 13 gods) to pacify the wait.

The undeciphered stone sits undisturbed 

At the head of the temple. Time will someday melt into truth

In Coba's turbulent waters, where stillness presides.

Akumal

Francisco the turtle

Brought us the turtles

Or at least the heart

That shines out of their eyes

Below the snorkel line

Of inexperienced floaters

From the world over

Who tumbled through the pat-downs

And hands out to land 

On this pristine sand

Clotted with life jackets,

An ecological preserve, it's called, 

The turtles nearly captured in their shells

Nibbling the sea grass

And drinking the air

In a cage of eyes.

The camera that we lost

Not near enough a cost

For the need to seek the turtle

Outside one's being,

The need to say hello

To the alien

Instead of greeting it within,

Brush stroked face and all.

At Sac Actun

The cavern she is ravenous; bones and offerings

Proliferate under the stalagtites, in the darkness

Where she swims, the one with ALS 

Through claustrophobic neurons and tree brain stems

The dripping calcium of a world turned upside down,

Where bats hang and tarantulas hide

And the water moves you as far as you let it go,

To the Mayan Gods still glowing in stone

Or the green ocean blessed with crocodiles

Or the secret cities where the ideal has been realized.

Such consequence would be nothing for the mermaid

Who flows with her camera like a vision,

Were it not for the brutal steps

To the world that doesn't comprehend,

Too full of themselves and compassion,

How fierce each step becomes up the wet planks,

As if no other bravery is needed.

In a Room at Tulum

The sound of running water

Lifts my heart to heaven,

Where my love is,

Running her hands under the water.

The Empty Monastery

Elvis has left the building,

The Circus is on its way

To another town 

And this is just one more familiar

One-third full Cancun hotel

In the middle of December.

There's no sign of the humans

Who became divine

And made Jesus look like an amateur.

They've gone off to their 63 countries

To rescue dead seas, heal the incurables,

Touch the fabric of the real

With a technique 

That finally leaked out

From the infrastructure.

The material world has been replaced

But is still a moment or two away

From realizing it.

Can you feel the compassion for that

Crackling through the palms

From the electric ocean?

Can you hear the fibronacci music

The monks embroidered 

In every cell?

Certainties of the Elect

It is nothing that is the creation

As if just for women

Because their hearts are too large.

Men of prayer put up the veils

With upmost care and subtlety

For the light was too strong,

Generating on its own,

Too obvious to be seen

By anyone but the faithful

Who know nothing of the walls

Painstakingly put up

By the suffering and artifice of man,

Or even which ones are temples

And which are jails,

Only that the only thing that matters

Is the green water of love

That grinds down the destruction 

To sublime design

Through prayer alone,

Without an outward hand to sully the miracle

Or help the profane understand.

In the Field, Without People

You've got it all wrong, Ezra replied,

Walls embossed with ideas,

Buildings made out of words,

Statues still enough to be kissed

Are far more lasting 

Than perpetual people,

Who cackle at the first opportunity 

And will see only obligation

At elegant tables

In the first flip of light.

I may think I want, he sd,

Readings in amphitheaters,

Acolytes kneeling,

Beings who burst spontaneously 

Into lights,

But there is more in occult clubs

Who hide your name in darkened cloaks

On balconies in empty cities

And dens for secret books

Where the key maker speaks in code ...

It's the ultimate laurel

To not be worthy of the masses,

For it’s work to make the choices

Kept in libraries

And work to turn the spotlight away

To a grave,

Someone one can love

Without knowing,

Always wondering,

Never being sure.

Birthday Manifest

Form is an endless work of art

When I have no self to speak of,

So I follow the monks

In black robes with brushes

Whose every stroke is a cathedral 

Waiting for light

And vast enough to hold all the tears,

Every one of them a tear of joy.

Wave off a Leaf

The Yucatan has a way

Of making everything dissipate —

Mind resolves to feeling,

Feeling into flame,

Flame to disappearing movement

In the endless green.

Hotel Iconography

Hallucinogenic Mexican coffee

In a clay pot

Served by Mayan queens with wide cheek bones,

The kings are made of stone

In glyphs of crystalline wisdom

Attended by giant blowing horns,

Elongated skull headresses,

Bird feathers that are not bird feathers.

A brown basilisk ascends

Before the pyramid eye,

The clouds bolt upright 

From the end of the horizon,

The white light overwhelms 

The snake flamingo tile

Whose colors can't be seen

By naked human eyes.

The merbird plays a lute,

The rana-frogs chirp,

The green broom sweeps,

The old king holds a jaguar pot 

Of golden lightning

Disguised as quetzel feathers

As if our immortality is not

Always near enough to us.

Palm Ribs in the Road

The fog rolls in

The victim card.

Evidence of wind

Harder than the Chopin

Vonny mastered

In the day

Without end.

Memories are to be

Squandered for this

Time now,

How everything that's new

Bears a resemblance 

Like a cross 

Worn to keep warm 

In the darkness.

Andrea

She's still there smiling, trying to give me 

A proper pose of farewell

But her curtsy was too sexually charged

And she was too much in love to not

Dominate the photo, indeed the whole 

Photo book, crumbled with its dead

And yellowed with adult innuendo preserved.

She was nine years old

And nobody knew what we did downstairs

As she directed her own versions

Of the shows the grown ups put on,

Especially when they got naked,

The closest thing a child can see to truth.

I was far too young myself 

To understand the lines I said

But of course I knew them all 

As well as her. And my private flag

Snapped to her attention

As for any nocturnal bride.

There was no one else, really,

She took any innocence I had

When I was ripped away to another state

So my parents could discover more intriguing partners

And I could find with the driftwood some water-logged

Not quite virginal approximation of her.

Often I've imagined never letting go,

Her waking in my arms, knowing love

Never has to disappear and find new forms,

For there is only ever one

Despite the soul eyes changing,

The end growing further out of sight.

Love's been the roughest of journeys,

The pleasures so much less than what I felt,

The pains much larger than what they were.

She went to a college nearby, became a preacher's bride,

Saves souls in her free time, and everything

Of what I remember or imagined is in her eyes.

It was never meant to be, but somewhere 

The tears went away, and somewhere they 

Never came. The impossible hung 

Like a star and never lost its allure. 

What was could never compensate for the feeling 

It created, what created by itself,

Far, too far from lovers and their scars.

"In February" by Hugh McCulloch Jr.

In gratitude for spending Thanksgiving in Massachusetts with my family at my childhood home, here is a lovely poem by my great-great uncle, Hugh McCulloch (1869-1902), one of a generation of Harvard fin de siecle poets who died young and who was notable enough to be mentioned by fellow Harvardian Wallace Stevens in "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction." Taken from his final volume, Written in Florence, this early spring lyric touches on the alienations of forbidden gay love, the weight of history on reincarnated souls, and the spiritual values of despair the Decadents cultivated.

The trees, all dripping since the tardy dawn

     With dewy raindrops fathered in the night,

Half shuddered, shedding on the mossy lawn

     Their drops of light.

The many branches seen against the sky 

     (That rain-dark grey against the unclouding blue!),

That forest multitude which stretched on high,

     Made earth seem new.

And we two wandering 'midst the craven trees,

     Together close, my arm about you thrown,

Our eyes made dreamy by the rain-wet breeze —

     We felt alone.

The world was maddened by some subtile sting;

     Some last resistance to supreme despair

Crushing to life each gently slumbering thing

     Which languished there.

Our spirits, drowsy in their fleshly tomb,

     Half rose to life, and half they seemed to know 

The wonders which from Nature's mighty womb

     Were soon to grow;

Half knew where, in the vast abyss of time,

     Their past had been, and what their name and place;

Their monstrous deeds; — where sung in buried rhyme

     Their primal grace.

The naked boughs which hung a-quivering there,

     Which shrank with fear through all their vague delight,

Were yet compelled to yield, compelled to bear, 

     By Nature's might.

Our souls, however, seemed like things apart;

     They turned again, for not yet was the dawn.

Desire, the Spring sent quivering through the heart, —

     The soul slept on.

Contradiction in Witch City

They react now to the witches cackle
And draw back from the human tallow 
In the costume shop behind the candles.
The majick spoken here is black,
The ghost of old Nat Hawthorne can't compete
With the delirium of occupation
400 years too late, a float thrown just in time
For voodoo binding, sacrificial knives, 

Rh negative brains in jars,
The commodification of mysteries
Only believed by the initiates
Who hide their eyes in robes for decades, 

Some say centuries, as they memorize

The incantations passed down by the martyrs

Just for them, who had come here from Turin 

And Abruzzi, Potsdam and Billerica

To ride the mushroom brooms across the sky
Through Noirvember purple and the grave sites
That emptied out their loads so long ago.

The ghosts float through the homes like lights
But no one gives them here the time of day,
Too much history has passed and been recorded
For a posterity very much alive in the idea
That there must be something more for them
Than a life that only transcends the rule
When the young wander past their stones 
In dreams of being ghouls.

Afterglow of Museum

Art, they say, comes from life,

Some sketched lines to remind of what is seen,

But it is quite the other way,

Life comes out of art,

Provides the 3D,

For the great imagination

To steal scenes and tableaus 

From the generous palette of the field.

They would multiply into cities

Were it not for the poor cramped hand

Of the painter, who calls the struggle 

With his will a question of his sanity,

To protect some sacrosanct separation 

Between the hand and the eye

From the ever-elusive mind, the one thing

That won't be contained in any form.

There is only what is left on the ground,

The impoverished architecture 

Of what can’t be grown

Out of the genius of all that is.

The visible trees 

With colors impossible to see

And movements too nuanced to track

Want to break free from the sky

That holds them down 

And express who they are, 

What they can be

In the longing and the glory

Of the other thing 

Inside us all

That dares to call a dream

As it's waiting to be born.

Christian Science Plaza

God appreciates the pathos,

The long steps up to the heal thyself church --

The incurable in the wheelchair below

Just wants to record the bells

For a kind of posterity

Where the city lights the reflecting pool

Empty but still full

Of a kind of life

We can't consciously quantify 

But is oh-too-easy to feel

In the soul

That is kind of called to here,

In scientific arches of faith

And spacious concrete towers

That allow anything you want

With a smile,

But there is something beyond the door,

There always is,

"Cleanliness is impossible" and "bless this mess"

Prevail on the construction tableau,

More repairs for a vessel impenetrable 

Except by faith.

There will never be another Sunday evening like this

-- Even the lights in the dome remember that.

At Copley Square

Youth blows through the perpetual

     Pedestals long-dead glory,

Glows like bulbs through ancient galleries,

Throws its shade on haunted Mansard roofs

    And Boylston's Masonic geometries.

The store displays on Newbury change,

     The names unrecognizable 

But youth, strong and frail, is eternal.

Slow Convalescence

Without the energy of being wronged
The heaviness of forgiveness 
Wouldn't weigh down this plane to Boston:
The guilt of the ticket taker,
The shame of the steward,
The anger of the discomforted passenger.
The discerning traveler will grimace and bear
The rage of children,
The opinions of teens,
The talk of the lonely 
As if they are strong enough
To look down with kindness
On what they have forgiven in themselves.
It's the nature of co-existence,
The bravely unmasked 
Who could not compromise with truth
And the bravely masked
Who will not surrender their humanity;
Both refuse, in short, to be victims,
Something inherent in the human,
To strike a divine pose
In the face of unrelenting noise.
And if we falter sometimes,
When we hear the sirens
Cry out all the pity
We never hear about ourselves 
As the face of the rocks against spray,
We can always lift away
From what we've brought inside us,
The distant other
We only know as ourselves --
Until the tap on the shoulder comes,
"You should be just like me,
You're required to sit in your seat 
This way, don't you see?"
But it's only a voice
Despite the fluttering 
Of the heart,
A distant warmth
That stirs a heat inside you 
To resist, correct, scold --
But it is better,
One always knew,
To love,
To do this for them
Because nothing is lost
From the self
In service --
Of honoring
The raw, the unschooled, the limited,
For we once knew not 
What we knew
And told the world off
On a whim,
Sending it spiraling downward
To a break of tears.
One has learned
Not to hurt
As one as learned how not
To feel wounded,
A slow convalescence 
Forever picking at the scab
But growing something 
Beyond a thicker skin,
A kind of compassion,
An inner resilience,
The idea that one's soul
Does not need keeping,
For it watches like a clock
In the place without time
Marking each moment of movement 
So that each one connects 
In a jeweled thread,
A beginning, then an end,
With a spring in between,
Each tick another choice
On how to be,
What is the scale
Of the journey.
The innocent are wise
As the action rises
On the play,
The costumes we don't recognize 
Become the characters 
We wear our hearts inside:
The garish red, the torn velour,
The front of lace 
Woven to deceive
The distant eyes;
How could we not react
To a bauble the size of an egg?
Backstage it must be a relief
To peel the greasepaint away
But deadly serious on the stage
In the silence of lamplit dust --
What words will slake the endless flame?
I have only these I was given to say. 

Asheville Notes

Rusted roofs below the rocks
Along the springs of Trillium,
The blood of the lamb like silver pee
Flows from the free will hills in Tennessee
And winds below the hard-carved road
In its fury to go below, past the roots and lodes,
And if our souls lie beyond these rills
Above some crag of glistening hill
Not so our blood, for sinners as for lambs,
We plant our bones like hoes in ground
We’ve hallowed with our hands
But we are told to turn our gaze away,
From the gravestone’s proofs of heaven,
From the faces that grow laurel from the clay,
From the jade-edged shadows to the azure blur Elysium
And call that God
To whom all blessings flow,
Except, of course, all those we know,
A God found, one may suppose, in silence, just beyond
The whispering of the glades,
The murmur of the water
Dropping down from stones,
But, no, what small space there is is filled with praise,
Prayers to what can’t be seen, or known,
To see it and to know it
Instead of fear and death and hopelessness
More easily defined than heaven,
To tell them to flee, to take us back outside of knowledge
Before the first pickaxe fell.

Even the birds speak down
This God of the silence,
Here, even the stone moves
In waves of tourmaline and granite.
The mists lift and it’s only trees
Still as if for a thousand years 
Covering the furthest hills.

Like the breeze blowing up the mountain
The crackle of hickory’s sweet smells bring alive
A humbler, realer life than hell prescribes.
It sizzles like birdsong, and warms like low sun
And carries its light through darkness like mica
Carries spirit shine up the mountain –
How could this great gift
Be so small
Against the invisible liquor
Of withheld love and withheld fire?
How could all this be blessed at all,
But for an aberration,
A innocent laugh against the grain of the sky?

They can drink to you now

At the wood where old Asheville figures

Hung their coats on the hooks by the stools.
No restriction on cheers
From where they sit,
Their smiles tilted outward, from the stars.
Sitting in late afternoon sorrows,
Every word they heard
Sounded the dark note of the void,
And now the doom they forestalled
Is upon them, and they laugh
At how what they escaped
Was never there,
And the unholy concocted consolation
Was the only holy thing
In the whole town.

No matter where you go, 
Mountain or vale,
There’s always the sound of a train
Carrying coal, never seen.
Even its exhalations lay still in the smokies’ haze.

Is there no corner where the green doesn’t go,
Or where the human eyes prying forward
Dare not dwell?

The End of History

He could not fold the children's laundry tonight.

He needed to see what earthquakes were fake

And correlate those operations with 

Missing children, perhaps they were rescued,

Or maybe the hybrid ones who can't survive

In the sun, maybe there's medical ships

He can contribute time and money to.

Mopping the dust from under the sneezing 

Child's bed, at any rate, would have to wait.

This wormhole is too urgent. Silly man,

His wife laughed, he's fighting a war that is

Already over. The Goddess has won.

The children are free. Now he can clean the john.

Downtown

Early one fine morning, the sun never did rise

On sweet Melissa walking, guns behind the blinds.

The rain fell on the street. They say it civilized.

But standing on the pavement, I could not believe my eyes.

It was over in a moment, the terrors of the night.

Some other place somewhere, a shotgun Chevrolet,

Heavy-hooded huntsmen, it’s claimed they got away.

Who’s to say what happened when the killing had begun,

But while the whole town’s watching not a soul could be tried.

The killers hide nearby, not out of sight.

They closed this part of town down many years ago.

The buses run on time. Time moves so slow.

Lost places shaken and stoned, the storefronts live on

While the visionaries and the bankers know exactly what to do:

Put the garbage out the window, keep the many from the few.

All he came with was the story of his name,

Some passed-down fairy tale that filled their hearts 

       with so much shame.

They tried to tell him he could not escape their eyes,

But he just smiled and told them “I’m just lucky to be alive.

Your whole world’s a foreign language but I rob you blind.”

The streets are loneliest at the edges of the day.

Sad rabbits in their safety nets carry home their prey.

They pass the bread around, so proud of what they grew.

I wish that I could say, sweet darling, why it’s not the same for you.

You’re given poisons to forget all the wonders you could do.

Triptych

Rosie’s Eyes
Rosie’s eyes have focused again
seems the same as way back when
back when we believed the lies
we wanted to pretend

The night when it ended
that’s the way I remember her
told me then I was to blame
I watched the full moon die

I had a choice 
to rise above 
it was the same either way

Rosie’s eyes are August again
same old breeze south of the bend
same old waiting moonless skies
dancing in heaven my friend

and if her eyes forecast my end
that’s the way it will always be
some things I can never mend
not far enough away

Nathanael
Here’s the suitcase of my bones
There are rides to everything
I shook the painting off the wall 
I saw the fix works down the hall
Old hookers on their knees 
Begging baby please be in my movie
I see those hills and I believe
There’ll be no more retreat
In my room
I come in shoes without string
I come believing I’ll breathe again
We all wait sadly for the call
We see the mold grow in the hall
I feel the stone inside of me
As a poem left of my heart
With words that say what no one knows
My eyes are closed
And it’s all in my head
Somewhere the sea
Has a table set for me
I welcome you again
My friend
It’s going away

People of the Sun
The streets are too soft
Forgiveness comes too easily
Redemption comes back up the drain
Stands in the basin pretending that it's playing
Pretending that it's playing

There are no words just ghosts
Moving 'cross that old dance floor
To show how long they've held on 

To the dream that followed in the dark
They broke their silence on
They broke their silence on

It's only the lost
Who know the place I'm hiding in
They look through curtains from below
Stare at me through the grate
Like I'm their hero
Like I'm their hero

Go back to a world
Where no one has forgiven them
And where they are invisible
We cannot hear the screaming
Of the living in their dreams
Move like shadows past
Those who think their pain isn't real
Who think their pain isn't real