Nay, learned doctor,: 2009

DECEMBER 23

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Some silences, and a two-fronted cold
stay emblazoned, demurely, swathed
in palpebral near-black, and detached
and looking on, over shoulders unseen
at a bare aping of acts thought real,
and pressing fingers against arms,
expectant.

For something not new, not novel
but remembered and re-substantiated
in touch, in the gloaming of indents
more real than the imagined hand
pulsing,

dull and noisily, should you listen.
But the pulsing is not what you remember.
The touch of comforting vespers,
and wordless, though significant, whispers
unbidden
explicitly, though anticipated and now,
perhaps, made for the first time,
aggregated incognito and drawn regardant,
still, mingling with dreams' periphery.

DECEMBER 22

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

A stepping up, out balconies' snow,
pressed low to a belted sky darkened
by bright stars, and the warrior hallowed
form becoming and there, just- right
in a shared looking for Godhead;
in treed skyline, wary of disappearing
feet,

into snow; and should the whole dome
collapse, and the earth grow ravenous
in a clay feasting on the riverbank,
and bridges and men be oceaned
out,

this I will; towards terminal,
towards a deft everywhere bounding
peopled and upon roads cast out
crossing rivers, under them. Tired, ignorant
rivers.
Below and unsightly, take the tunnel now
and I will! for the belted sky above
is static with courage and folly, will yield
(so long as is told). Time enough.

DECEMBER 21

Monday, December 21, 2009

Daughters two, comforted sororal
round the wrist, pocketed
once safely harboured
and traveling as in odes up
Father the river, river lining
great incandescent reeds among
incident.

From the swelling ground,
now contented upon it
and assertive in song
to such effects and further
glories.

Abductions of these two,
though, are divined and troublesome
for such settled direction
that once behind, all others
behind
and swept back upon looking
closely even in desperation
confronting a callow new timbre
that is to be there.

DECEMBER 20

Maybe a panorama slapstick?
Hard Times Song of Annunciation:
see-saw rail refugees,
and sad country song-singers
walking lolled and taped,
prophetic, earning apostles'
tearfalls.

Flowers context round the wounds.
Black scrapes of acute metallic
distraction. Pain is of the true
full steady guitjo sideways
strums.

Hanging out of consciousness,
and outside, outside always
approaching boundaries waxed
or worse things within territories
intimate.
Hummed out, lost quickly.
The physical thing- that
ephemra and proof, right?
Newcomers, the tracks are on fire sometimes.

DECEMBER 19

Saturday, December 19, 2009

Gently gone, sun-seduced snow
reroutes clumsily the mundane foot-falls
off the curb, inspiring single bolts
of motion and dance, and a hand
brought up in triumph upon landing,
all that is attached to it nearly
toppled,

by a cord sunken in, grown over
in piety or folly still plucked
in expectation of reverb let be
or pressed, distorted with flexed
pick-ups

feeding a white fuzzed roar
bereft of malice in intentions
toward the center, but at transients
(as are all else vaguely defined)
seen,
this great distance above the sea
newly formed, feeds rivers suckling
of separate trials, rushing round
the holy pillar that may have loved, itself.

DECEMBER 18

Nestled in malfocused glaze
throbbing and living, sung forth
in crescendoed pixelated mass
brightly projects, thought of sweetly
and looped and left on past
a realization of abstraction
forward

to sparse cars and accordion
licks say you in unison with-
bus turns and cramped crowds
of complexity not considered,
sanely,

as blood-lettings' fall from vogue
mis-mystification, clunkily let
a way for harmony, and awe,
dripped like love over gessoed
hearts
of uncertain Dolmenic form.
Give way! all of it! the impotent
gesticulations and feedback howls
lacking concrete, are respite.

DECEMBER 17

Bridges' legs tattooed and painted
up for a hand-reddening cold day,
counting minutes precisely, smothering
signals of well-wishes and feebled sighs
concerning arrivals planned poorly,
in tandem with beloveds lacking
agency,

standing amid dear frosted drift-
wood, denied title of relics holy
by their abundance and anonymity,
conversing one-sidedly in tepid prayer-
sounds

lost amid superfluous clanging
for those newly boarded, not
slowing the trip but in thought
anxious for ever-quickening
departures
to pry open a timèd trip by
pantomimed rapidity for your sake;
thoughty tics and movements done seated
pale passenger for ticket not journey.

DECEMBER 16

Wednesday, December 16, 2009

Set down, twinned steely aeons
of passing, of fixity and things
unfelt upon the sleepers' tongues.
The stone lifted, the split wood
and stations established and unseen
but perennial with the people
waiting,

in loss and becoming, stamped
over lines of poetry handled
by lines of gravid couriers
hanging onto trapezes metallic
grounded

with the heel of the machinations
they guide. Themselves the sons
and dream-works of the train
unbeknown and impoverished
by this,
harsh towing of a passing car
bearing the wind and the light
in a still dark morning funk
addressed by a floating ballast.

DECEMBER 15

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Bear on in singularity, proper,
it did. Through a glazed darkness,
rendering aspects of worldliness
all conflated, now struck
by winters' individualization of bare
things; branches succoring sky fully
themselves.

People puffed up, under roses
and fragile ceilings, warmed and dull
in fragments of personhood, blue
or black or shivering bare,
thin,

and exposed as yet unnoticed victims
of a seasonal haranguing,
the forces of frosted dead ground
hard around dawdling feet,
held,
as pins and nails, fast to terrain.
Stationary and ruddy, dried out
around lips and eyes cracked red
looking for motion, an annunciation.

DECEMBER 14

Scene, still for now, of cars lined
white-eyed with hoary glass
speaking of expanse unthought,
sanely neglected and passed over
by milquetoast wandering wipers,
impotent on the sheet slick
unseeing

snow, crystalline in fixation
its wet-statured hoardings
coating vehicles, nonchalantly
a nuisance blessed by pure
formation,

white and complete in being,
attracting feet only in the manner
that a page does thought; prayer
for the sake of time matched vrs.
immaculate
space such as you present now,
wholly approximating endless,
singing passed white dirges, scraped
way to less complete sights.

DECEMBER 13

Sunday, December 13, 2009

It came in on the right, heading
behind us, I think, and the slow
motivic movements of the train
second-guess us, our travel up
into a mistiness called rain, lit
from above us, leaving puddles
black

as pavement. Working out the real
and the symbolic, violence
and populism. Hum the left-out verse
of a song made kindergarten-
safe.

Warmed up feet and soft altos left,
chastise the crowd as we teem
as one with them, hurrying for seats
and a chaste corner, dry,
supportive.
The plastic falls out of the doors,
I've seen. Multiplied thousands,
hands miss by minutes
despite a common meanness.

DECEMBER 12

Saturday, December 12, 2009

Stop softly now for us, sunk
deeply into a crawling move
through Ohio and the local
galaxies riding alongside, level
and doubled in a window darkly, my
thin light confounding the many
more

alien ones of the landscape, free
of time in its egregious size,
cast starkly against consistency
of the rail and our paled
movements

with it, turbulent rolling conducive
to sleep and other stupors
embraced fearfully, out of emotion
effected by taut gazes
out
and the taking into yourself this
compromise, with your country,
its lights and sometimes fearsome
others passing you, woke too by you.

DECEMBER 11

Order you holiday pie here,
lighted optimistic gas station
left a time before, current
as smong0smeared light stretched
rod-like past comfort spherical
to us, passing cramped and heat-bringing
trembling,

blinking on and off, panorama entire
contingent on hillèd wants,
vaulting vision anyways with glee
ending it, wavering garage light
out,

forgotten, lit for hours following
its spirited flight from memory,
airily extant, dragged groundward,
flickering cleanly as with motion
bound,
ceded to a green, cleansed
archipelago of certain brilliance,
set tight in smog, ignorant of origin,
prelapsarian and passed, of course. Of course.

DECEMBER 10

Thursday, December 10, 2009

Brush your hair demurely alert,
ever-welcoming sound & rain,
assuage shoulder pangs,
attentive right? Loving
always, sing a song now
you've begun, full and low,
to go,

and rest looking on lit, righteous
harbours themselves reflectionless
supporting bright faces refractory
and turned, pinned unawares of
shufflings

cast up, lost and trafficked.
The beginning concluded
left restless and empty of eye-
sighted tenderness headed back
shivering
and deaf now, detached
from impressions quickened
by a sly knowing, and a story
sustained in not-sleeping thought.

DECEMBER 9

Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Days wasting flurries and boundaries
of feeling, the layers reinforce
and construct separately, slipt
away from potential touches
and dangerous saying-ons,
going-ons and all the other
souls

left. This blearied green edge,
none else but these listening stones,
pushed drawn in circlings
looking behind and feeling
in unison.

Associational gusts ear'd,
dreams of want, wanton flights
of waxed substance too-low
tides baring marks uncleared yet
shallow,
filled with affectations sincere
and cool, tears less so,
a buoying shakes all too obscured
extempore smiles, stuttered seagulls.

DECEMBER 8

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Dimmed forms of others
limited here to hesitant expectation,
the distraction of divine
Belovèds, necks and being
traced by tracks and machineries
in Orphic solemn weighty-toned
voices,

calling departed, gathering
into itself: diaphanous greeneries,
grey-cast of stolid presence
as of coherence and effusive
reveries

moving towards a gradual being
in weeks and other such divisions
elegiac, rallied to truth, daily
successes for conversations
mirror'd.
Smile now and sillily come
thusly, steal away from poetry
and imaginations proffered
and lived in vain (I raise my hand!)

DECEMBER 7

Monday, December 7, 2009

Tracks times and pensive legs
avail caught up, of
one another sleeping.
Notes composed round absence
and impaired having been
largely the whole of you
here,

stopped backlit too long
too orange sky too waxed
moon crouched there,
idle makings among things
vital,

swept up, starried frenzy
of an aria sustained, once,
seen and given witness to,
held in sickness vaguely,
unfinished
and fervent. Brought in quickly
melding into others' days
benign and horrible, for that
and its implications.

DECEMBER 6

Sunday, December 6, 2009

She the thin grate
water and cars and
bridge I am on
unwelcoming, laneless
lacking clean air
though I'm passed
now,

many times away.
Single ride back. Go
under ground returning round
airy bridges, slickly
darkened.

From passing a memory:
of the bridge, adjacent,
contained and steel
granting crossing to freights
needed
over water mucked
poles and lines
supported historical
away from the making new.

DECEMBER 5

Saturday, December 5, 2009

It goes on unfathomable,
arable forms of stations,
formations memorial flowing
forth, particular source-spring
fond of odes and dying words.
Shades lacking beauty,
lost,

but relieved: sung to and with,
trail and strummings full
metallic and hidden upon
banal bedrock, cradling expectant
transit

line, rail line in furrows
essential. Being and making
new memory relived. Artifact
arranged and excavated
words,
decoded and mystical.
Persons and things constructed
poorly, and worldly,
writ of scraping-out.

DECEMBER 4

Friday, December 4, 2009

Whys and ares, sees, be
close to you, I, close
as letters and tresses.
They disdain each other,
see, three rows back,
embittered (not) lovers'
contact.

Before they met they
piped on down, timed
and perplexing. Not the
object of fear quite not
beneath

the terminal grandiose stairway
above in the sense
of roped off, save–
I call you, face of the meek
Host!
Be, always, like vision
endless as our life is,
endless in song for
thou that art.

December Epigraph

I swear I take no pleasure
in being on the earth

but a longing seizes me to die
and see the dewy
lotus banks...

-Sappho

Nay, learned doctor, these fine leeches fresh
From the pond's edge my cause cannot remove:
Alas the sick disorder in my flesh
Is deeper than your skill, is very love.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Everything is not enough
and nothin' is too much to bear.

-Townes Van Zandt

DECEMBER 3

Wednesday, December 2, 2009

Coherence fretting yet still,
benched and chilly clamoring
for greatness and legitimacy
concerning varied arrogations,
jittery and weary both
and things are maybe
too much.

Sun bearing down, heralded
loudly and again and soon
the clamor and the light
is become forcane past jilted
causality.

Affect as overload arrives.
Senses run ragged, full dealings
with the scheduled bleating
arrival of journey and
other
times, other things
privy to catechismal narration
seen unseen etc
and all just– here.

DECEMBER 2

Rusting at rest, embraced
dewily by supplicant grass,
its grey lambency
coddled close, warmly
and stern with hesitation
belying permanence with defiant
coldness.

Manifest westward,
engineered lyre without end
clanging out songs to stones
bereaved on steely picked
tresses:

Song of passing, song
of timetables, source
giving forth in anger
a wind its own afflicting
deferents
awash upon the platform
possessing impatient certainty
of purpose, giving themselves
into the bosom of Eos.

DECEMBER 1

Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Roads splayed over terrain,
cast now in a delicate dance
as of a haphazard fawn round a shot,
the sombre esurience qua being
of the rails. Pregnant with parking
complexes and middling dreamed
people.

A gate transient
in tall grass and disguisèd brambles
open perpetually sporadically
by impassioned touches
of asthmatic runners of
wind-

'round and cloaking
limbs and minds, frozen as a body
sits there
is__there
is
dry, cold and stuck
in breaths as no
mere negation; a smothering chill
like warm smothering damp
.

Above (Deconstructed)

Thursday, November 26, 2009

It is your neck I see from here
that is viscous with sunlight,
shrugging off clouds
and rising into them,
in disbelief at their solidness,
and wet comforting fluff
that is sky all around you
(because technically it is all
sky we breathe and sleep and fall
around). We except ourselves
from sky; it is as much between
the sun and I as I and you,
a sky apart midst what I suppose
are clouds, stepping over what
might be rainbows on ground
(that is still ground). That much
is the same, still, and it connects
us as well, most of the time,
but not like the sky or space
called aether by those
who insist nothingness
is a silly idea (with whom I
am sympathetic). So I swim
through your sky and kiss you.

Moment

Thursday, November 12, 2009

There is love
and two displaced
knocks beget uncertain stillness
beached upon darkness,
cognizant of abstract sound
clusters there, orphaned
aspects of motion
perhaps calling for me.
I believe it is real.
Is it mine? Eh,
no cries at all,
not anymore.

Windowside

Specks of wonder
in sunlight gathered, thrown
as best one can-
they go
Out, I think, to you.
Breaths they hurry on
like thoughts they manifest
and are weighted and float
softly there, longing and being
caught, clustered,
raked in as gold, bundled
and serene in strange
hands that I think are yours,
is it you?
I think it is.
Or, it pleases me to think so. Yes.

Sleeptalk

That dreaming look
Contortions such as the face
makes, if one swallows
their own top lip.
That look
so lucky ducky
in love.
_____Maybe
it is an attempt to stifle unlove (dislove)
prone to topple out.
But he finds himself,
conveniently, without much
to say. He is dreaming.
And so he has that look
lucky ducky
in love.

A Gift, With Love

My next letter to you
Will have a book in it.
It is my book.
I will seal the envelope with glued hands
Soiled cleanly through
assembling your book.
This poem
will be in this (your) book.
And if you smile I will see it.
Such is the joy of books.

Her Forgotten Collected Works

Friday, November 6, 2009

-I hurry with
Translating and cementing in memory
Your flailed tears
In a well-bound edition.
They are throwaway and impetuous
Love poems beholden
to a specific absence that
I chronicled, here, for you
_________________now
to peruse. And she then from him
Took her cast off,
noble words,
Words of purity enough
To justify pilgrimage
to distant objects,
bowed in unvindicated trust
of being noted,
arrogating an immortal shred
of love.

When she reads them
again there is a harvest feast
for the crusaders, their piety proven
and manifest immaculately
in choice lines, and the lives
of the just are threaded once more
to cover heads anew
in the mourning party.

Allegro ma non troppo

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

Lines of recollected love poems
Flit brightly as confettied emotion
With chimes of scattered sentiment.

Now goodbyes a quaint mistruth
Lapped in thoughts of you,
Scattered poetry in your form,
"You, the sun." A presumed dawn
____________of empty arms,
Lips inked by touch
Feeling____________out
Speaking softly.

Room

Monday, November 2, 2009

Some water came down
Old wallpaper hissing
With gluey leaks, yellow
covered skin and hairs rushing
in the same direction as bathing
rubs, held steady past shivers
bearing me up. Twinged in my wet neck
Stubborn tinny vertebrae.
Six walls without Up in
failed recognition.

Brushes of strangers
held still the ruminant.
The cards and lips beside me sigh,
Smile, easy. Pillowed face 'neath
Meek private sleep
Draped on us
Holding ourselves between
Salt-block bedposts.

Circulation

The air is warm still
and filling humid lungs
She is tired, a
sodden hand masks her.
She has not moved.
Her feet are warm.
The air moves over her
in time with tranquil abstract.

In a Chinese Restaurant in New England

Sunday, October 25, 2009

He left his shoes in a car,
Locked, with his mechanic.
Resigned since Sunday
to feet soft and dirty. Its
dry, at least,
and a man has to eat.

A View

The clouds move too slowly for sound.
The crashes of solid dew into yielding green mountainside
Misting the shoulders of nomadic shades
Dextrous, fading shades
Singing faded dirges from notebook
___________________pages
While we sit in silence.

Two More Blocks Home

A bridge settled down
In the paved valley
Is fog of concrete pillars
Pushing at your side
____________As you accept passing
through the brume
Up high but right around envoloping
me, bearing me through
Rough exhaust-wind
in my ears held up to the world.
It holds me
As I would a seashell,
Hearing cyclones
Of breaths and breaths
That dampen my chest.
And a religion stirs.

Col. Inlet

Long curved theatre
Pressed up against the surf
Holding there stone attention
To srayed white froth
Deep billowings
And the hands of multitudes.

Masts of ships
eyes_____inhale the ocean's tears
for Relief.
Gasped libations and pagan steps
Sounds
You no longer stare right at the sun
There is a crowd.
Too polite to titter and move
Adopting instead a subtle rippling sway;
You are tired salted and damp
and you accept Rest.

An Angled Rain

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

I lean upon a balcony during the storm and I am not rained upon.
My breaths come wetly
And I drink inhale or sigh
As the wind, as the others
I see huddling laughing, running tip-toed
and resignedly across new-found shores
waiting on streets doppled by too-heavy clouds.
Gods and calloused Saints they pass, those who walk more heavily,
happy for the slight tree cover
and for the wind not dampening their eyes.
It is cold now, colder than summer
and more jarring for being neighborly
with scant handfuls of cool breezes.
The nights are polite in their coldness
Tolerant so far of lingering upon balconies.
Though it is raining now. When I return inside
I am half wet with dry breaths.
So I change and I sleep seeing only local finite rainbows
Against the backdrop of patter and thunder
Like things in my sleep,
In gulfs pushing up and away from the curb
Reflecting a reflection of the light that will wake me,
Dancing like the others across and over the gathered pools.

Anxious Wake

Friday, September 25, 2009

Pinch into a dream
take grains of being
and sleep upon
above vague anxieties
maybe escape to the awning
wake eyes full
in the morning process
relearning light and Real.

The humming Gloria of waking-
each tone held long
but wavering, rolling
and ordered like the smoke
dying slowly, then we notice, and then,

- - - - -

September 21

There is the moon in the slick
Black high-wire
garbed in the rain-
heavy leaves
as a piano drizzles down, outside.
And the window is open
expelling light in sublime white wafts
and a subtly reminding gust
ushers into the world
an ambivalent shower.

One Eye Frowning

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

The hill sets early the sun
Billowing up, zealous and impatient
Hopping altitudes with glee
And reveling in the mock indecision
Taunting the setting's wash
The colour and the passion
To the last sliver, the last degree
That clipses the now deaf, silent,
Tired land of anxious heights.

Re-Imaginings

Monday, September 14, 2009

Pockled arms, inky fingers
Moist gazes that linger
On hovering grazing touches
Singular grasps with whispered
Implications and scenes that pass
Are re-imagined imperfections
Of reclining ethereal loves
In deathlessness, slaying Gods
For pleasure and kissing lines
Round your lips
With sweet nothings such that birds fly upon.

Love, Bibulous

That our skin is porous is a thought
We wisely avoid
When open when we so wish
And I kiss happiness into your mouth
And shoulder, neck
As my hand breaths calm into yours
Your cheek weeps joy into mine
Close approaching immediacy
All unfazed by love across the room
That I my body drink in.

Of Stars, Sleep, and Anxiety

This Fall building off of last Fall
Indirectly but still
With more to worry about
As breathing is harder
By just enough
And I can't sleep on my back
And I never could
I love you but I can't sleep
And you don't love me you are sleeping
While that anxious thought
Stays longer than it should
Until it and my love and unrest
Dissolve with dreams of you and sunlight.

The sky has no stars
But is a solid orange-purple canopy
Heavy with secondhand lights
Too soft too see through in their multitude
Being the whole of the sky
Tasting of us, that little bit of us
Sleep while the sky hangs solid
No room for stars save the sun
Whose light we defer to.

Song of Distraction

Monday, July 13, 2009

I love you I meant to write
But I instead fell to reading
Deep, deep into a mirror
And learning, just barely
Just a small idea
That I picked and scraped right off the glass
Off my skin itself
And examined curiously.

Infused with dallying light
I held it for about 7 or 8 minutes
And it was curved sheen crystal of black green white
Brightly rippling violently out
In dramatically ordered form
Impressive from here
With a surely amazing view

And yes,
The shapes are becoming more distinct now
Its nicely suspended above the glass
Supported in all directions
Braced against the aether
Until I pluck it and it rushes weight
To my hand and I feel the ocean entire
The beachhead swallowed whole
In cold sleeping and sudden waking
I remember I meant to write
And I hand over the approximations of you I have picked.

Seasonal Song

This is not to you.
This is of you as much as it is of me
And of the oceans and vast expanses
Of cliched languages and worn, tired words
Forged each time anew
In the same enough way
Until the steady, insistent fires
Of hammer after hammer of feeling
Leave a broken casing of intent
The thought worth more
Than the useless coined word
Now a ruined currency
Mourned only by the sentimental
Hopping through metaphor
Praying with conviction for enough to die or forget
So their love can bloom truly again,
Thawed from frost after frost
Like they said your roses would
If you would only have patience for Spring
And not fall in love in September.

Prudence

The tree is leaning away from the house
In an act of photosynthetic genius.
Survival: it is too tall by now
Its leaves are too high up to be noticed
Their ceiling discrete enough
More discrete, at least
Than the ivy floor
Lain neatly centered around the tree
Symmetry unnoticed by tired pedestrians
They only see the roots cresting
And so it seems like an upside-down
And dangerous tree
Leaning towards the house.

Belayed Rain

Monday, June 29, 2009

Held by nostalgic trees
I am the rain that falls in sunlight
Onto heads of those unwilling
To accept that urgent storms
Like to dawdle
Sometimes.

A Resetting of Old Footprints

I open
I open myself my eyes
My mouth - with a cry
For being
And dreams
I still see dreams
____I have not shaken
____That are not yet unreal

But air fills me
I gaspingly inhale-
Something in it will revive me

I cough and my throat
______is papery, shaking like a tossed notebook
a bird__cast off
____l__learning loudly of gravity
___speaking____crying with its wings
____Singing passionately
____Its song of all-consuming fear
Flapping, Flapping . . .
_
My eyes see fantasy
_My being is dreamstuff
_____ The air rends__ me

___________I open __.

Variations on Borrowed Themes

Sunday, June 21, 2009

The preternatural names of the bastards of Adam
The trumpet notes that signal the Last Judgment
We are penance __ sin
Words of salvation and surrender
Brief, approximating the divine
Gasps____in the____wakes
Of arrows in one martyr's side
Those impious last attempts at life
Removed from God

We are shadows in the shape of love
We are Legion we are Poetry

The Beach (At Midnight In Darkness)

Monday, June 15, 2009

We hear:
Nothing but the elegiac din
And only that, the constant
___impossibly vast sounds of this shore
_consuming itself
a by-product of being
_____ we are blind
_____ we might as well be deaf
For the thousand breaks we hear
Roar, roar, roar and bellow
Far from our language
Far from our understanding

We are tired.
You are calm
And I am too, somehow.

And we stand
And we ___listen.

Song of Waking Dreams

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

I open
I open myself my eyes
My mouth - with a cry
For being
And dreams
I still see dreams
____I have not shaken
____That are not yet unreal

But air fills me
I gaspingly inhale-
Something in it will revive me

I cough and my throat
______is papery, shaking like notebook paper
As the air__rustles it loudly
____and____there is stiff fluttering
___I____cannot breathe
_My eyes see fantasy
_My being is dreamstuff
Pages upon pages
blowing violently, spiraling winds
Rotating with the world
_____________ on it in it of it
___Its destroyer and renewer

I exist only within this storm,
Drinking my fill from baleful rain water

________The air rends__ me

___________I open __.

Five Songs of Permanence

Monday, June 8, 2009

I

Love is draped loosely around her
Masks her, makes her anonymous
And she goes serenely unnoticed
Recording notes and emotions
Meticulously piercing and profound
With understanding
Cathartic religiosity
___________And paradox

___________________and surreality
_________with truth in contradictions

_____That she reflects
____Through so many poetic lenses
Before moving on in the silence
__of prayer or mourning.

II

She stands there
Still despite the cold
While I shiver
Mildly, anxious for the train
and its old electrical heat
____and its exhausting embrace
____She does not look out
_______She is remembering
Actively remembering
Days upon days of
Tiny observed changes
In the landscape of this
____temporary pause
Wrought and molded by anxious winds
_________that blow predictably
___________with each morning storm

III

_______My half-detatched waiting
Was dominated by
The contents of then
Sent but unread letters and silence
_____when she came and now is
_________here vaguely commanding
__Curious attention
She stands amid my thoughts themselves
As a rabbit in a field
____And the wind shakes my mind
And I see ripples and
_______waves
_______around her.
_She sees me and knows me as a part of the scenery.

IV

The train arrives and she has her spot
Where the doors will open
________________and
out out all around her
Is the crowd of
Pilgrims, all movings
Towards their stillness
and their scheduled respite.

V

She is on the car
She will see the sight
Of buildings and people
and haggard zephyrs
___recede, all recede
____She will leave
__________on the tracks that curve to the horizon
___and bisect me and my
changing daily landmarks.

Sunday, June 7, 2009

I write of sleep because I know nothing of death.

Sand Dreams

Saturday, June 6, 2009

When I sleep
I sleep at the bottom
Of a shallow rocky pool

When the tide recedes
I play idly with sand and dreams

Days I lie afloat
Serene when not
Choked by water

Lowtide dreams
The sand
The tail-end of a coughing fit

Absent-minded dawdling
Until the repetitively surreal dawn.

There Are No Shadows

There are no shadows
Of anything at all today
People in front keep me
Out of their darkness.

I think I return the favor
To someone else entirely.

He seems serious and familiar.

He grasps a sheet with writing upon it
I think I recognize the hand
But the words--
The words I can't begin to make out
They are drenched through
And the only hints I can see
Are far-fetched reflections.

Another Address

Friday, June 5, 2009

Through many millions
Of one-dimensional conversations
I steal poems from you
Visions ideas
Metaphors turns
of phrase and words
Heavy with the weight
Of the brilliance
You make seem so natural
And daily, repetitive
That I cannot help
But aspire to more You
And to take you into myself
To understand as fully as you are
And have been, world.

To A Friend

Monday, June 1, 2009

Translate me
Make my words
My speech my thoughts
My being
Exist outside of me and my language
Turn me into meaning
Distill me, drain me
And say if I must be louder

You do not mind
Playing catch with yarn or
String thrown back and forth
Even when the net we weave
I take and use
To catch poems

I'm sorry I left you then
But look
I caught you a nice one.
Its yours
Excuse me
If I mumbled it.

Song for a Dissonant Parting

Sunday, May 31, 2009

A new place of
Nestled starkness
Few marks for walls
Attempting recognition
Though chaotic
Unpersoning anger
Pounds upon them
To flatten out spots
For mirrors.

There
Take notes
My conversations
And tics and joys
Awkward displays
Epiphanic smoke
Puffing puffing its
Rough fragrance
From hollow sparks
Halo of smog
No core felt or seen
When one passes through.

He packed up
Oblivious strife
Within vastness
Of no conclusion
Stale answers left
In the twitter of pidgeons.

Discord Discord gone away.

Interrogation At 1:18 AM

Monday, May 25, 2009

It is in my room
It and everything was _alien
Familiar crowding uninvited
My bed their focus

I am upon a pyre
Or carried now?
A sterile table
Clean clean clean
Uncomfortably so for me

They tell me I am -mistaken-
And -misunderstood-
Vaguely shaking their heads
Its not all - together

My head shakes too

Anxiously
I lie.
I sleep
and they stay
________With me.

Fine, how are you?

Thursday, May 14, 2009

The perfect ecstatic moment
Leaves me by way of inexact sounds
Not an infinite point
I can pin myself to
There is a hold-there--i see
I can -maybe- grasp

Everywhere: and it cannot see me
Overflowing from me
I hide from it
The serene eternity I am fearful
I am fearful the slightest-
Movement will shatter

My sight is commanded
The black and varied altar on the page
There is only one line
One single line
That is-can-must be read
Fills and rests in my vision entire

Linger on and
The moment has been.
How are you?

Sunday Afternoon (With Work To Be Done)

Sunday, May 3, 2009

My heels barely touch the ground
I point them down to scrape the asphalt
As I glide down towards the lake.
We see the light glowing
From the field off to the side.
We hop down as to begin
Picking dandelions
That seep into our beings
Coloring us our fingers
With golden prints
We move on shortly
Aware of how little we picked
Only when we see the yellow patch still shines
With the same bright alluring whimsy
As when we stopped.

At that first stop we crashed into one another
We said we did it on purpose
To remember We're Mortal.
And laughs were had.

And the next batch is just as affable
Inviting us to pick and soon
Fingers yellow Arms red
Knees green we move on again
With strained backs but
Feeling its wonderful.

It Was Fun

It was fun
And you're a cool person
But I think that it would be rude
Of me to keep this going.

Overservations- Sitting Upright In Bed

The hinges on my closet doorway
Are unburdened by the weight of doors
It opens up the room but
They flap loudly wildly
When a breeze comes in.
The air stagnates otherwise
So I can live with the sound.
I should write a letter tomorrow

Other Distant Worlds

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Its a nice night I suppose
Nice enough to enjoy being outside
Few thoughts occupy me
Although that girl across from me
Has been still for quite a while
Looking slightly upwards
Its gotten chilly
So she hugs herself
I pull my jacket closed
And I go inside.

Now You Know

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Resolutions written in the late "night"
Are dangerous Things
And we most earnestly stress for you to
Please disregard them completely.

For Want Of Conciseness

For want of conciseness
She buys a travel-sized bottle
To lend me, for the burn
I obtained two weeks earlier
I took a day off and went
To a baseball game I left early from
So present day
It sits on my desk discretely
In the same place she had
Forgotten it while packing.

Its not social, he says to me
Regarding that which she could not bear
To tell him in person so she wrote
An email to him that she soon found
Impossible to send
So you had better get some sleep
While I pull myself together
And figure some things out.

She had just assumed it would end in April
And was confused by your misunderstanding.

Overused Words

Monday, April 27, 2009

When you awake we eat and I ask you
To play your songs for me and you do
And then you ask me what I think and
I feel as if I could spend the rest of my
Life listening to you apologize for your
Imperfect piano playing and I tell you
I liked it and you look unconvinced
And I cough and write poetry later
That night.

Lemon Slice

You stuck a lemon slice in your mouth
And I took a polaroid of your face
And asked you what you most
Disliked about yourself
You said, "Want of conciseness."

"I am so happy"
You don't believe me
So I repeat myself.

In Pondering Your Sleep

Sunday, April 26, 2009

In pondering your sleep
I find myself- watching
A choreographed scene
I somehow see
In the after-hours practice room
Behind closed eyes-
Feeling serene and refreshed
As if I had just awoke.

A Small Fit

Thursday, April 23, 2009

You hold your arm up by a single nail
Between your teeth without apparent effort
Steady with a poet's observation
Until I hear something?
A sound from you
and odd pop
To set things in motion
Your eyes call quickly
Far back behind them
Looking for confirmation that
Rushes (not a moment to waste!) out your mouth
In a mirthful cough
That sends you back a step with the recoil
And you bow with reverence
For life itself.

Too-Full Trees

Monday, April 20, 2009

With the heat almost too heavy
He is passing through a wood
The shortcut to the train station
Just a few blocks away
Wading through leaves
That smell of autumn high tide
Reaching almost up to his waist
Reaching for trees like ski poles
Careful. Sometimes stopping.

The trees seem too full
And I am tapering off
To a smaller and smaller endlessly smaller point
As the trees become immense
And the wood does not end
As far as I can tell.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

A dream-work barrier gone nova
Collapsed under the weight of
What he took from the vast
Imposing and unfathomable world at large
That moved away from him
Speeding up
The more distant the more unreal
It became the faster and faster it receded

Then despite impossible geometry
He took in his grasp
The distant hems and pulled it closer
Closer closer to him
Wrapped himself in it and
Dove headlong into a deep cold state of frenzy
And was happy?

He is survived by a few lines of a moment's rest.

Stressed Back

Monday, April 13, 2009

The mattress of stiff wood
That serves to fix my
Stressed back and to
Let my spine wrest itself
Free from my clenched muscles
And doubts.
My body feels good
In the morning
And I am healthy and
I would kill
To have gasoline and matches
And a halfway soft pillow

Against The Cold

The cold remains very much the cold
It still creeps around corners
To gnaw at naked ears
And punish the ungloved hands of smokers
Who soldier on bravely
Their slow paced suicide attack
A defiance that says
They will show the cold and they
Will not be left numbed
Any longer than they can help it.

Star Formation

With ocean visible in all directions
For as far as one chooses
An odd shape breaks the surface
Of the dark placid waters
And forces up in a stream
Pillars of water that quickly
Turn gaseous and similar to
Sulfur billows
Not quite like a horse's head
But better approximating some Victorian Queen
Twisting and turning
And moving with unreal consistency
And they are squeezed from within
To dense pockets
Expelling anxieties
In a stream from both poles
Until they cease to compress
Into a single bright point
The core not beating
But still and laden with love.

Belief In Sight

Warmed by the focus
The lens grants the sun
On an oddly serene March day
And falling as a needle does
Into the grooves with a clang
That echoes and sounds
My reflection is illuminated in short
blip blip
blips
My vision shaky
in and----
-------out -----
my eyes sting

I hold steady on other figures
I pray they see more clearly.

Beneath Abram's Bridge

I have, I think, not yet really begun
That journey so ardently traversed in the epics.
The being that takes my journey
Stretches but a few years backwards in time
The “I” that was myself then
Is as unrecognizable to me now
As the faint sketches I have of
Something new and daunting
From the center where to which from out of the corners
And pockets of my being is dragged a vast sum of weighty thoughts.
From there has emerged this fear of -------
That lurks just further on ahead
And hangs loosely upon me
In the same anxious manner that the damp ocean air
Settles down over the dark side
Of Route 88.

The beaches down in that other state
Fill the air with salt and drizzle
And the muddy endless vacant lots
Swell in the roomy darkness
I drive through the light rain
Past the miles of marsh and industrial skyline
On my all too familiar route into
Jersey City
I see the ghosts beheld by the eyes of poets past
Our circles ring up and up
Like an Escher onramp, hopes abandoned
And left in desolate breakdown lanes
I am holding tight to the wheel
In the long dramatic jug-handles
Where it just feels right to lean in
It feels right and comes from
The image of something beautiful
That I maybe want to make people see
And share the sense
That myself in another
A line of mirrors with my image
That I strained to see and where again it just felt right to
Lean in
All the way and see maybe where this endless reflection ceases
And is covered by the earth under the blank horizon.
More strength to my hands
Warms them and makes them vital again
After having been numbed by ice cold handlebars
That kept steady
My early high school bicycle
In the times before the family car
With far too many miles on it that they kept around for you
And you know still runs very well
Became your means
Of negotiating the crossed parkways of the state that birthed you and I.

Cigarette smoke escapes
Through the thin window crack
Meeting the rain on its way in
I move past the towers
Built of shipping containers on the port.
A few miles back
They excavated the marshes
And upon finding two dead bodies
Disposed of them to make room
For Xanadu.
I enter into the city
My teacher and my muse
Are close to me
Green signs look with recognition
At me in my car
And that recommend that familiar way.

And there lies that long plot
That kept me awake
Feverish and entranced
And writing lines in praise of it
Before it ceased to be
And now calls for me to hold my breath as I pass.
The verses come in memory
And as witness to what is left
And that soft ground not to be trodden on.

My headlights point
Where thoughts are let loose from everything
Flanked by the core and the frozen crust
But I am reliant on the eyes of my machine
And their beams that strike the van
In front of me at two points
Grow brighter and more defined
As I creep close and stop.
They do have free parking here
In the back alleys and secondary roads
Where strangers and nonresidents
Can rest unmolested.

From these streets
From which I am now exiled,
Watered and fertilized by the skyline across the river,
Given the faculties for growth
By greater souls
Whom I had needed to believe could see more clearly
And call forth luminous depths
From beautiful surfaces.
I had hoped for some sort of guide to come forth
From their ranks
To aid my travels and give me cover
In the deepest ring
When the shelter disappears
From the mute landscape
The ice muffling cries of anguish from the shades.

They who spoke
Revealed to me the image of things
Their beings and deeds and words
Illuminated much
Of my benign lost dreams.
Following the threads they offered
To their ends without ends
I am growing weary in the pursuit.
Without a guide to carry me
Up the steep cliff face or through
The closed gate.
Under the city I feel it will be safer
With no place further down to fall.
This destination asserts itself at eye level with me
When I turn onto the steep hill
And begin a slow descent
Under the city’s passive eye.

The dome sits bright against
The intersection’s backdrop.
The light here is tinged orange
And never fully dark-
We have almost succeeded in the death of the night
Replacing infinite points
With an insatiable dim glow.
It is mesmerizing
And keeps my eyes drawn still
Beneath this dome and through the turnstiles
I move among a varied crowd
Of late night drifters and
Others
Like me looking for the stars
They keep their gaze up
For air they breathed in another life.
I lean into the tunnel
Crane my neck
Try and see what it is that is approaching
In this tunnel unseen by the absent stars.

Bus Ride

Vents on the bus bus
Scream like an opera singer
Who in turn howls like a turbine.
Its a solid and unyielding
IAOO
(pronounced with a proper
Italian accent)
It becomes an enchanting
Industrial lullaby
Once pledged a fermata's detached support
Held held and held until
It seizes and consumes me
And I am engulfed
For an indeterminable time
By this single note
Constant and expanding

and ascending

To godhead
The sky shatters
And I receive the shards like a hallowed rain.

Against The Backdrop of Distant Sirens

A shuffling and bouncing
And slightly damp
Deluge of envelopes
Cascades down the dirty
Staircase from the mouth of
A bag held by a man
With thick glasses and a
Cigarette tucked behind his ear.

He scans the stationary river
For something other than coupons or
Bills or magazines or
Official-looking confetti
From the top of the steps leading to
The second floor of his
Damp-looking house behind a
Mail truck with screwdriver in the ignition.

He finds a handful of what promises to be
Love letters
And, gingerly stacking them before him
Sits amongst the paper
To read.

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