STRIKE ANYWHERE

For a while there
it seems like
anything goes, but then

you learn it's because—
the past
is a matchbox,

is a glorious
hot little head-full
of zillions

of identical
perfect hair-triggers—
and the future

is pure sandpaper,
is grainy
brick mortar,

is your greasy itchy
shaking serious
perfect reverent

nicotine fingers
tingling below your
sulfur-tinged nostrils;

and every time
one single thing
happens—lookit

how quick
and hot
and lusciously

two others—
just get
annihilated.

ORIGINAL SCORE

In the quick thaw—
so many

incipient little brooks
and gullies

babble
independently—

their dirty
prosaic

motifs
and non sequiturs

all layering
together

to weave
the impossible

unified
roar

of this
ancient,

this distant—but
madly

believed-in
ocean.

NEEDLES IN THE CAMEL'S EYE

A little siren sleighbell shrieking
outside the Jewel-Osco,
binds together all hypnotized
wayfarers passing,

by parting one and all
from a little pocket money
with the following
incessant incantation:

Even in your most perfect
earthly dream, passing stranger,
your picture of recompense
might rig the whole game,

such that—by the time
you finally stagger
sunburned and blistered,
hardened but tenderized,

and with terrible headaches
in each of your heels
into your private-beach-
notion of heaven,

your homecoming'll be dread-
fully anticlimactic.
No one to talk to
about any of this;

none to compare,
contrast,
to rejoice
with, concerning

the everlasting-
ness of your bliss—since
of course,
the whole place

is literally
all yours—is
completely
deserted.

SOLSTICE

On a dark winter's day,

a sudden mysterious

breeze'll go 

wheezing through blue bristles

of spruce branches,
and in a snap

you think how—those trees 

back in Eden 

must have sounded 

exactly like these—explicit,
equally 

misunderstood,

underutilized,

never listened-to,

and so on. 

Only, in Adam 

and Eve's defense, you figure—
they had a good excuse.

Since that mighty 

wind rending those bleak, 

original branches 

likely didn't 

scare out such perfect
English as these do—

probably more like
some of that ugly Church
Latin, or something.

EXAMINATION

A white head glowing on the other side
of a heavy wide
desk
from me (I feel

like there
ought to be
a Newton's Cradle
clacking as it goes on)

talking,
pausing severely
to hear,
then instructing
the same fingers,

which have mapped
and confidently
criticized thousands of pasty
quivering bodies
before mine,

to type away capriciously
on an antique computer
next to the typewriter.

Gradually, I fearfully gather
I'm being hunted
out here
in the gap:

Is that you?
or me? The voice asks
incongruously
at the second sounding
of a ring tone,

before those giant hands envelop,
unclasp
and then quickly
and loudly
snap shut a shiny flip-phone—

GATES OF EDEN

Scene One—
in the near permanently
beige light

which hovers
around the rectory
at year's end,

a man is sitting
in glum hard soles
at the kitchen table,

hooked like a sliver
over coffee
cups and notebooks—

fretting over
the sermon's climax,

worried
about his credibility,

mumbling to himself
that it's absolute heresy

how
Bringing It All Back Home 
is probably his favorite

album of Dylan's—
but almost entirely
because of the acoustic side.

NO TIME FOR A NOVEL

Felt like every day, for a while

we relied on

cheap, plentiful wooden reminders:

one plus one is equal to two,

fair and foul 

can cancel each other.

But when the hard times hit, 

the orders we got 

were to ration the abstract and

restrict the rational.

Belts grew tighter, skins thinner

ashy and redder 

in the cold, and all the poor devils' 

kids had to use

dry bony sticks 

to do their simple math with instead.

Only problem was: 

stick-plus-stick wasn't always 

two sticks; once or twice, it
was fire.

SINGLE DIGITS

I feel, in this freezing
wind, my oneness—
drawn and haphazardly
pushed around,

scribbled, spit,
scratch-tallied, and
X-ed out—as if this
ponderous, senile planet

is struggling
to teach a piss-ant sky
how to do basic
math with me. And he

(the smarmy idiot)
keeps making
a blustery show
of his trying—but really

doesn't understand—nor does he
see, if the whole world gets it
already, why he should also
have to be bothered.

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

At first, there's these
four pretty
poor and unpopular
schoolboys—

formerly sick
with measles
and colic, they stutter
and stammer a lot.

Uncoordinated skippers,
petrified out-loud readers,
domestic animal killers, closeted
floral painting-lovers—

each taking turns of equal duration
hating and resenting and resisting
just how similar he is
to the others.

*

After a few repetitions, they're now
four anxious and fiercely
nationalistic countries—
all running with equal swiftness

toward the mountain of glory
and its crater of oblivion—
but all four
packing so incredibly

close to its precarious rim
as to prevent any
of the others
from daring to jump in, shouting:

Germany! Italy!
Russia! Japan!
Germany! Italy!
Russia! Japan!

and so on,
systematically, but with
no endgame planned.
Until—that first weary note

of dissatisfaction kicks in,
puts a pretty
constipated-looking
human face on everything.

Then suddenly,
it's more like:
Hello, hello, hello, hello—
everyone's cool

just letting it play-out,
even going so far as
to label the whole
scene—a denial.

BACKSPACE ODE

At last—
can you imagine
how anything
halfway decently enduring
ever got written

before this
latest, au courant, up-to-
the-minute
master creator
was given

his benevolent druthers, his
capricious dominion—
to whoosh back
and obliterate all offenders
to the missive

with quick
cataclysmic bolts
of sterilizing lightning
waggled from the
merest tip of his

fat itchy
pink and bald trigger pinky—

two, three—wait,
half

a dozen times now, at
least?

MINISTRY OF WINTER

At the mercy of such pristine majesty,
everything manmade simplifies,
like some haphazard fraction.

No terrific, mottled Appaloosas—only the innocent
infinity of their barnyards
everywhere; simultaneous lengths of all

time and roads compacted,
creaking, and anonymously on display.
Even at the bracing

smokewhite of daybreak,
all seems equally
dazzling and incidental,

slowed to a dead pause on the brink
of immeasurable sleep. But in this breach,
what unsought but remarkable

freedom exists: every tightfisted
and usual path
having just been—humanely erased.

FOREST

Once, I felt these shallow aspirations
dislocating my body

from tomorrow, breathed deep and
supposed I needed to

get somewhere new.
But instead of changing my address,

my tack was—to continue
to stay in the exact same place,

not moving, rarely talking
(and only then in a kind of raspy whisper),

never sitting, but always
standing-up in front

of a desk all day
with my arms held out.

And sure enough,
after a while, everything I could see

out my window on the street
began to look complete-

ly wrong to me—except, I guess,
for the trees.

PSST

The poem you want
is over there—
off to your right. It's
the way
the coffee sits
so still
in your cup,
so calm
on the roiled table,
so black and
so warm-
looking
next to the white high-gloss
cover of this
wretched little book.
Doesn't it? Um,
I mean—
isn't it?

THE SOLUTION

Some say—
the best defense
is to make ourselves
used to this,

with words as old
and gentle
as rain—

softly spoken,
and spoken regularly, to soak
and dilute the potency
of their poetry.

For example—
How catastrophic could
a symbol be?
those increasingly

less-frightened
people go
mumbling, almost inaudibly.

Others know—
the best offense
is probably
not to talk at all,

instead letting
giant billboard signs
do all the proclaiming.

I Just Want To Be Ordinary,
the boldest of those
signs might read,

meaning—

not perceived
as part

of the problem.

WHAT'S THE FUTURE GOT TO DO WITH ME?

Walking around
any big bomb-
gray city
is

a great way
to re-
assure oneself—that

at least
God's creation

is both

way
too
lumbering-huge

and
far too
unsure of itself

to ever really be changed all that quickly.

Still,
considering such

a gross
timescale,

one then
imagines

He—
would have
vastly preferred

dealing with
trees—
to all these

unstable motherfucking

megatons

of people.

IT'S YOU

Fight it, if you like.
It's still going to happen.

It's not
that it's meaningless. Meaningless—

you could do
easily. Unfortunately,

it's you—
staring down another faultless

surface every morning,
watching it

defy you, with that indomitable
prestige, called

The Way Things Are,
to improve somehow upon

its chaste perfection
with your prejudiced

and hypothetical burdens,
to somehow

trade places
with an uninjured rectangle.

It's you—
you

verses art.
But—just the thought of that

and it's like you've
already set to the task.

No greater pressure.
How can you lose?

Perhaps only ever
by endeavoring not to.

OLD MOON IN THE NEW MOON'S ARMS

Whenever you see
me—bumbling
down the street, I

assure you,
I'm only about half as
distracted

as I look.
It's actually just almost
exactly the

opposite.
It's just that—most
evenings, I

already feel myself—such
a concentrated
poor husk of bulk,

a prematurely
frightened and terrible
old widower;

all those blithe ideas
from before
I knew her—now ringing

as ponder-
ously many, as difficult
to imagine

hurling into motion, and alas
as equally
cold, dull, and relentless

as every last
bell that has tolled
since after.

SPHINX RIDDLE DO-OVER

I walk for miles in darkness, but down
familiar roads, disappearing often

not into space, but curious silence.
There are no red letter dates, nor any peculiar

atrocities there—just many, many
coincidences, reams of exemplary scenes

from one epic master-movie, created
a long time ago by those huge faceless proto-

human shades—and then cut-copy-pasted
over generations and reduced, so ruthless and hard

as to to fit on a white three-by-five index card
which I carry creased neatly inside an otherwise

empty wallet. Presently, I'll unfold it and
reanimate the words one-by-one, each as

perfect as your growing discontent is. I'll watch
as you hear them gradually disappearing,

and those snippets which you couldn't seem to
make-out or understand will be my grim masochistic

pleasure never to forget. One last hint—I am
pretty famous as a pretender. My stage-name is:

let me think about it for a
minute and get back to you.

BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS

By early afternoon,
late evening
invades downtown—

hungrily
spinning dollops
of unseasonable light

into long, candied filaments,
which flicker their
semaphore lectures

across the grim, dis-
concerted faces
which improvise this cab stand—

just like
so many twenty-
five cent candles did

back
in that dingy
crimson church vestibule,

back when
poor grandma, and then
grandpa, quickly departed—

as if
our precious dead

are here
with us still, ever so

faintly,
but insistently

criticizing the living.

SERENITY NOW—

It's just
as I thought—this
evening tide,

gold and
unfolding
gradually before me, at last

reveals tranquility
to be only
one half

of a cold math equation.

Humbly, I read
proofs. Glumly,
I'm convinced—absolute stillness

does not exist.

Since,
these mysterious phantom
silent spaces I witness

must only
advance
and improve

over time
upon their
opponent's decline.

Even now,
as the pitch
of placidity rises
to high tide,

I can
just make out,
far off in the distance,

temporarily
ebbing—the flagrant din
of the actual.

ORWELL MISSED THE POINT

There in the fire-pale
sapphire eyes

of some sloppy younger kin's
digital photos online,

you can see
perfectly quick—why

doublethink
must exist.

Not that two
plus two equals five;

that trick's too obvious. It's
a much weirder glitch,

perpetrated by this
slick algorithmic arrangement

of dovetailed generations
who still share the same space

but no longer
the same geography.

In this far-less everlasting
new infinity of capacity,

two things really are
true at once. For instance—

to those kids, staring
up down in Texas,

there's actually
no such things as lone stars,

but you, here? Turns out, no matter
which books you look in,

you still only own
those old few; and likewise, wherever

you choose to gaze
up in this big city, you can see

there's really
properly—only

such lonely things
as those.

THE SNOW GLOBE

Sometimes, my gift is just

the stark purity of reassurance—that no, 

you're not alone;

that yes, it's okay—that all of those ways

you suppose you've invented

to torment yourself

are actually shared, are culturally

predestined. That, in fact, all of the omnipotent 

possessors who came before you 

have clutched the very same 

small world in their hands 

and offhandedly declared,

oh well, to hell with any such 

hard-earned and 

terminal serenity—

before bathing their dominion

in the antiseptic chaos 

of another controlled calamity.

AMERICAN REVOLUTION

All our protagonist can say now

about last night is—

there was the sting of cold

rain, and that certain luckless

tang that emanates

from all hectic laundromats, and then

suddenly, when

Tom Petty's Free Fallin' came

piped in on shuffle—

his life became,

in the instant when he was

walking past the Blue Line,

such an enmeshed blend

of The Bittersweet and The Cinematic

that his only options

were—to either

step right in front of

the very next train coming,

or else to get on it

and head downtown.

And yes, looking back, he can

sort of see see how

that almost sounds like an act

of rebellion—

but it didn't feel at all like that

to him at the time, since

he knew it wasn't

the first—or even close

to the last

of its kind.

CORNER OF REINDEER LN. & MULHOLLAND DR.

Crossing this balding and broad-
shouldered city alone in early winter—

still tasting faintly those bitter endnotes
of a very aggressive autumn

which still linger like burnt toast on the
thin morning air—and knowing

it's still just a little too soon
for those peppermint-soothing

diversions of fiber-optic barber-
pole holiday fare—this is the moment

when there's really no forest
toward which this street's column-collated

trees can aspire; when the strange projections
of daily life, caught between such frivolous

and complex preoccupations, feels like they
might as well be broadcast from Mars.

Suddenly, summer was a laughable theory.
Everything is cold and small and concrete—and yet,

still a little soft, too roomy, and strangely light
for its size—like a movie set

that's all held together with spit
and little bits of insulation, with

gaffers' black tape, union electricians' chewing gum
and craft services' leftover peanut butter, where

everything's only temporary, all is
just for show—intended by the higher-ups

and executive producers, only to give
the casual impression—not of a cast and crew

fused in commercial cooperation,
but of an entire civilization

all having agreed—that this distracted nexus
between the past and the future tense

will be believable, was
wanted, and is doable.

INTERDEPENDENCE OF LIVING THINGS

As if inspired by
talk—of those
locked and edgeless oceans,

swimming imaginary
inside the
factually tangible

hearts of so many
frozen, disavowed
former planets—

just by one glance
in her small dog's
bottomless black eye, she

swears she would
bet a million dollars—
it contains a wet

secret or two
that could (depending) either
rend or sire,

either drown
or inspire
countless trillion billions

of future civilizations,
all those competing gravities
of their fleeting

generational theories,
all of their valiant
hopeless pretensions toward forging

any artifice that tries to last,
and the one mundane thing
common to all creatures

which grants them
any validation for having
lasted this long at all—

that simple
comfort of feeling—you're being
looked-after.

WICHITA VORTEX SUTRA

Outside, a murdering rain
and lashing wind—threaten
to disturb the last remaining

fig leaf of our tacit
and fragile
national dignity;

but meanwhile,
somewhere in Kansas,

emerges alone
from a dim leaky basement

some fretful punchy
spawn of Ginsberg

who cannot be distracted
from his or her gleefully
impossible mission—

not to ride out this storm,
but instead, to ride
inside it more deeply;

to understand both
its forces
and counter-forces,

to willingly become
both the end-product
and the engine—and then finally,

to speak, if only
to coax out of silence,
the dry and complacent tongues

of all those survivors
still locked-up
in their shelters.

SUPERFLUOUS

All the lonely insignificant supermen
marooned on
the planet must

feel, each time
earth's chromeyellow sun
stumbles down, flickers

of the sheer power-
lessness inherent
to such a cosmic and

ungodly bravery.
Where are all those 
good helpless 

bright-eyed and light-brimming 
old flames 
of ours? they must wonder.

We can no longer 
see them. Why won't they
wave? 

But what good? would
all the flints
and the wicks

and the matchsticks
in the universe be, any-
way—when

there's no
day
to save.

I AM THE TYRANNY OF EVIL MEN

The tale's as
old as time, because
in the

grand scheme—
no sin
is original.

No imagination has ever
considered whether—it was locked
inside Beauty

or the Beast;
just like, no pair of eyes
ever stopped to notice

that the young man
strung-up on a
Jerusalem lawn

was actually
the one
who needed—us,

each mind
suspiciously failing
to realize simultaneously

that there's only one
perfect and
bottomless love—a wellspring

from which all other
ideas are dredged-up
and diluted.

INTERNAL COMBUSTION

One day—from earth, it was observed
that the indisputably wrong thing had happened.

A gleaming incandescent star,

the mysterious diamond they'd all wished
upon—exploded.

The showers of shrapnel were savage,
and toxic, and horrible;

and the subsequent darkness was total.

But then—the day after,
by the weird chilly light emitted

from some kind
of hack, forgotten back-up generator,

each survivor rose to wrote a poem.

And though no one felt an iota better,
everyone felt this

at last, simultaneously. And that, it turned out,
was the whole miracle—

the only and most certain epistolary angel,

the obscure, unsolicited message,
born in the blazing hearts of billions,

the spark of conscious imagination—finally
perched and glowing with intention,

at home at last atop the withered wick of the soul.

KIDDO

Riding home
in our parents' cars together,

sometimes
the silence would feel impenetrable.

But now—in ours,
it more just feels unanimous

and terrific.
It's like how, back then—

some kinds of beauty
were deemed too true to be useful:

steely, indomitable,
and about as expensive

as a mono-
chromatic necklace of pearls;

whereas
many now are simply too good

to be true: like
that invaluable, polysyllabic jewel

which presently,
I'll give you—and which contains

too many facets
of fierce, simple elegance

to ever resemble
your regular name.

GENERAL ELECTION

All over America
in November, the dead
leaves fall incessant—

expressing there
upon the bare land,
a quiet, even pressure

so generic
and
so mutual—that

no one man
or woman living
could ever dare—to realize

how utterly
all other men
and women feel it.

VERSES (AFTER WHITMAN)

When, in the incongruously broad
brimming Wednesday
morning daylight,

dozens or hundreds or
thousands or more
of disparate pairs

of the puffy solicitous
eyes you'll encounter
might start to beleaguer—

Is it possible the song 
that America is singing 
is wrong? 

What good are so many verses
which don't rhyme 
and lack a chorus?

Can it be that the whole world
is such a less kind place
than it was yesterday?—

may these few short lines exist here
so that you never squander
a moment before responding:

such a deficit
of energy is
impossible.

Mildness on earth will never
lessen, for I alone
shall make up the difference.

Day after day,
as before
I'll keep singing,

articulating, albeit with a
melancholy tongue,
the great mystery

of—how it can be
that even melancholia
is a warm feeling,

since—to be truly
sad, or angry,
or afraid

posits, at its
center, an illimitable
relation to all others.

NON-GMO

Put aside tangerine trees
and skies made of marmalade—
picture your grimacing
face circumscribed,

penned in, with a diagonal
line running through it—
and then try
not regarding anyone

or anything
you come across from now on
as either—

some bland and colorless
food to be consumed,
slid through a grate
in your camped
circadian cage—

or else
one of the miserable creatures 
who greedily 
consumes it:

hungry
but always eating,

groggy 
but never dreaming, 

doomed
but never self-aware enough to brood.

KINTSUGI

Little by little, all of our 

small supple hours 

will go leaping 

and whirling cocksure 

into heaps, which are, at first 

gently shaped into silent 

resilient days—but then

become compacted and glazed 

by the stiffening hands of discipline

into ruthlessly strong and 

stubborn vessels called decades—

until eventually,

even the slightest changes 

in temperature, moisture 

and atmospheric pressure

act as needles 

to breach their integrity, causing

every splendid old one of them 

to crumble 

into an indefensible waste 

of clipped shards and pieces.

But curiously, it's not the opposite, 

but the inverse 

of Time—a thing called Endurance,

which soldiers on quiet 

and selfless in the dark,

soothing each jagged corner

with its golden balm of tolerance

and gluing the fractures

back together in more resilient combinations.

But Endurance also bears its own signature,

an ultimatum—that any product 

born of such a reconciliation

shall never again posit the desire 

to be flawless; nor can it ever again 

aspire to resemble 

the same design

for which it was 

formerly celebrated—since it knows

the only vessels strong enough 

to withstand ongoing ravages, 

are those which bear the most proudly 

the thick cracks 

and fissures

of each former surrender.

CLEANSING OF THE TEMPLE

I pledge my allegiance to
metaphor

and so freely touch to cross
my heart

when I swear—
that my only religion

is art
and its functional

intersection with commerce.
I don't desire

the tearing
down of churches; much better

to use them—for
killer

loft apartments, un-
conventional live music

venues, free
parking, electrical infrastructure

and elemental
protection for local farmers

markets' continued operation
in winter.

DETAILS, DETAILS

Incredulously, life's stupid
little particulars

refuse to refine; legions of cells
don't distill themselves,

reduce to savory sauces, fine
wine, concentrated

juices. Instead,
they mindlessly multiply,

calcify and pile-
up incessantly.

But what's kind of nice is—
those hard white ugly stubborn knots,

where all events
get fused to your biased

remembrances of them,
eventually combine

to make
a spine—

a sturdy column
of rocks and mortar,

whose steady bands
of nervy pipes then start

to shunt fluids,
and, over time,

grow—winding thickly
through all that is you,

to support and to nourish
and eventually—

to animate,
reshaping into the finest

art—everything
which first shaped it.

MISE EN SCÉNE

Street after street, on increasingly
swollen porches,
glowing clusters

of figures
jockey
for position—beckon you

with incongruously
mock-mirthful
grins,

not to admit them
as harmless aspects
of experience,

but to lie-
down your own
wintry substance entirely—

to die and come
back again—exactly
as them.

LOOKIT, A DOGGIE

Old wisest friend,

although daily

we saunter together 

down these shabby cotton-

brown sidewalks, past 

the most

woebegone of stroller-

bound children,

I still can't 

help but laugh a bit,

since you never quite 

seem to realize

it's you—who invariably 

precipitates, in each one of 

these little novices,

the earth-shattering realization 

of that certain 

prelapsarian premise—

that man,

with the sheer pacifying 

power of words 

alone, can 

control his 

whole universe.

COURAGE

As a young lion, he loved to follow mountains
of instructions to the letter,

but absolutely hated
being told what to do.

Now, he wakes up howling about how—
every day is leg day

and scowls in his sleep,
mumbling—each drawer's the bottom one.

But this, we're all very quick to assure him,
simply prefigures

a thing
that's much bigger,

like a crumble
of rangy yellow—in an emerald city.

CLEARING

Happening alone
at dusk upon
a hollow,

illumined
by this mangy
inter-generational grove

of flameyellow trees
which rings
its ragged perimeter, I see

in an instant,
the impossible mystery
of my own continuity—

that thought
which still remains abstract,
once in a picture

is crystal—precious as it is
pathetic,
solemn, but breezily irreligious:

like these, I die
to watch my way of life
survive;

and life-after-death
snaps
to sheer certainty,

as long as there's
no future outside
of—today.

REGIMES

Every morning now—kingly skeleton mouths
grin out from camouflaged

graveyards—and pluck, as if from
these hot capillaries passing by, oddly

exuberant dissonant chords;
raising and reanimating giddy phantoms

inside me, of spooky gossamer agents
I can never put my finger on—

some terrible, witlessly merry pulse
and its catchy unutterable melody line.

I only know it's something
along the lines of—how death must start

as a ponderous mountain of potential pleasure
whose sheer gravity causes it

to implode
the longer and harder we try to conserve it.

Maybe that's why—what I've been
hankering for all these mornings

has been the taste of
hunger itself. And maybe that's why

I've never been able
to bring myself to sit and watch

the sand in my hourglass
gracefully run out,

without growing so sick
and tired of waiting—that I

positively have to—get up
and go running.

LEARNING HOW TO BE COOL

Kate, if one day
you no longer recognize me,

it'll be
'cause I've grown so chill

as to look
almost standoffishly blue

and translucent,
from praying

'til I'm pale
that all those other

dudes my head grow—not
dimmer, just

more shallow
in their criticism;

and if I'm no longer plucking
the million-pound

moon from its heaven
to drop it

all-sly in your
shoe as a present (or even

fishing it out
from my casual place

sprawled on a manmade
suburban lake,

where I smoke candy
cigarettes and chug

Gatorade),
it'll be

'cause you
had said—that's okay,

you didn't
really want it—and I finally

remembered
to listen.

LITTLE TROUBLE

Beheld by the mirthful 

eye of the mind,

the autumn breeze 

always seems 

to be laughing

at these certain small

disheveled lessors

it periodically sees—fevered

and glistening, fit to 

sneeze—flurrying back

to work

again sweeping 

newly strewn crumbs 

of dirt and scratchy 

bits of leaves 

out from the thusly- 

tickled elbows 

of concrete curbs 

underneath

the smirking 

windowfaces

of bloated

obsolescent

brownstones—as if 

somehow, those!

were the motes

that caused all the itching.

AT LEAST

The morose interstellar
wind's soundless call

shall not ever
seem to be

for poetry—and yet
sheer poetry

shall forever be
the unwavering answer—wherever,

out in the remotest
cold tendril of the galaxy,

even the most
strategically positioned of leaves

on some vast shivering silverbright
alien tree

is somehow at once, both
so casually

and so boldly
jettisoned in consequence,

tumbling
and turning,

flashing
for the last

time, all its color—
as involuntarily

yet irrevocably
as each one

of seven-or-so billion
tiny rainbows

which repeatedly
flair up,

spin out,
then plunge down around

a palish blue
dew drop—at least thirty two

times per second,
each second.

SCARECROW

Looks like—
a suit of clothes
has been out

walking around town
empty again,
because

this guy's
been stuck back at
home the whole time—

skinny, straw-
brittle, ravenous
as a stick black

autumn bird
who's just been enticed
by an excruciating new rumor

on the power line—that
inside a very few
certain

crabby apples, there exists
something better—called
a cashew.

NO MORE SYNONYMS

There are so many zeros
in a million

that sometimes, you just long to say

and do nothing,

to let those last gold glowing 

tokens fall 

with their familiar little rings—until, at last 

you have 

absolutely none 

of everything. Then you'd feel 

clean, you'd feel 

in control, 

feel free,

since

the fortunes 

you would care about now

could only be as small as

your thoughts made them out to be.

But still 

always, there's the gleam

of subconscious

knowing underneath—wordless

and silent, 

impoverished

and unspoken—such close pairs as these

mean far 

from the 

same thing.

WRETCH LIKE ME

So deep in thick wilderness,

I feared I could no longer 

make out the old song;

but it was then, 

with the melody missing 

and absolutely no sound, 

that I finally heard 

the words crystal clearly—

I once was lost, 

but now 

I'm 

just a 

bit curious;

was blind, 

but now, 

I guess 

I can kind 

of understand.

RE-ELECT MAYOR GOLDIE WILSON

Is there a single brave soul out there?
a weary nation of individuals
wonders, who's like us? A man

who's far less smarmy
than a hero, but less like a crook
than a witless bystander?

A woman, who's willing to work overtime
at keeping her integrity nearest to zero,
so as not to call unnecessary
and ballistic attention to it?

That hardened-but-immaterial
sheep of the herd who goes first,
who strives boldly to improve
the whole world only subtly,

through ecumenical promotion
of the most empathetic self-interests
and nonchalant nods to the most
figure-flattering of scruples?

Deliver us, lord,
the private prayers shall go
sailing ever upward,
one we can trust—who's not afraid

of switching off the lights
when leaving the room,
even just for a minute,

but who still insists on sleeping
next to a jittery little Chinese
box fan every night, for the comforting
ambient drone of its motor.

SUPER NATURAL

This is how the wind blows most 

October afternoons, now

that you're old enough 

to really be properly 

scared of all of those creeping

things of this world 

which are neither 

scarce nor sacred, those shades

that cast nauseatingly 

typical shadows, 

those mundane wraiths

which are so 

overworked and

underfed they've grown stupid—

a thousand thousand thousand 

insistent iterations 

of the same unimportant

brown autumn leaf 

that go scuttling past your sneakers

like failed and abandoned 

kites in stilted currents;

the drowsy zombie

bumble bees 

tickling your hair like bats

rising blind from their cells 

in hell,

not to riot, but quietly

squeak of prosaic dangers

(not enough cash-flow, too much 

fat in your diet, et cetera);

and finally, from endless porches, 

the sallow leer 

of prototypical

jack o' lanterns penetrating, 

making you feel
hollow inside, 

guilty—for all the time 

you spend thinking 

about the immaterial 

words of dead poets, 

instead of trying
to picture—all your disgruntled still-

living
relatives' faces.

WHAT'S THE BIG IDEA

When you were little,
you never gazed

longingly off
in the distance—you only stared

at what was right
in front of you. Until,

eventually, you realized
literally everything

you could see
was really

made of something
smaller—loose locks,

wormy stocks,
and rusty pitted

barrels. But
now, even peering at

classic books
feels

claustrophobic—
all those panicky letters

bumping into
one another,

stampedes of words
collapsing

into shapes
made by the same mouth

and its
small monotonous voice.

And you're right
to feel nervous

because—
the one original

thought
you've got

left is:
what if

the Apocalypse
has already happened,

It just wasn't
a huge deal?

All those insignificant things—
tiny habits,

mute gestures,
the cute words in those books—

just took over
casually,

gradually, when
the colossal individuals

who made them
stopped looking.

PLANS FOR AFTER GRADUATION

Most of the time
you'll wake up in the morning
drained and literally not
having dreamed

about anything,
every last trace of that once-
liquid-leaden uncreated
conscience of your

race having been siphoned,
cooled, and compacted to sustain
and buttress the the inexhaustible structure
of something preexisting.

You'll actually eulogize catching colds
and having those good old hunger
pangs all the time, bereft now
of any terror you could name

that hasn't yet been played
out in simulation, over and over
again. Yes, and I'm guessing
you'll still have never read

The Divine Comedy—but,
at any given time, you're likely
to have seen all three Jurassic 
Parks on TNT fairly recently.

THE LAST BREAKFAST

After waking, blinking
lightning

yawning
thunder,

probably urinating
several

sturdy rain-
showers, he proceeded—

as ever
with gentle gratitude

to the light
of the father

for all
things presently

made soft-
ly visible—

to cradle
and raise

a steaming white
cup

piously
up,

tilting
to baptize

the agonized
waiting

and withered
congregation

of his
guts.

WAYS AND MEANS

High above imposing Gothic
triangular six-way
intersections everywhere,

laughing nets of
silver pigeons flutter
and break

apart, whenever—there
down below, another
haunted man goes

tickling the infrastructure
of the whole universe,
by praying

in earnest
to his
own ghost—for wealth.

WORKS CITED

In a debate, both parties
do their best
to mean

the things
they say; it's just that
the definitions

are always
gradually changing.
For instance,

everyone's confident
in insisting—
the most shameful thing

a human can do
is choose
to love something

it's impossible
to get rich abusing—but
the humanity bit

tends to get a little
stuck between
their dictionaries' pages,

last seen—marooned
someplace
weirdly perfect

between
mundane—and eminently
despicable.

DOWN AND OUT

Once, in purest poverty, I tried
to compose a poem with no design—

but words, those little mottled black-
and-white vagabond things,

each one starving
despite being swollen near to bursting

with unkillable sound, and all of them
greasy and threadbare,

sheathed in rumpled suits of their
hand-me-down significance—

they all kept on creeping
and scrambling back into the construction

with a desperation so relentless, so
astoundingly unbreakable

that I lost my will to kill them at all
and collapsed instead on a strategy

of control—with ambitions presently
only to spin such thick patterns

of this slack spongy population,
that any discerning reader

should figure—the craftsmanship here
transcends the material.

COGITO ERGO

You probably can't trust that you're 

fully awake yet, when—alone in this 

packed city rumbling, all the pinstriped

and pastel parcels containing 

cake donuts—and the steaming rain-

spattered lids on white take-it-

to-go coffee cups 

streaming past you in the hands its

carefully waterproofed commuters—

only make comfort

to you feel so frivolous, so

momentary—so fake.

THEORY OF VERY SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Could anything in the universe
really be this coincidental?
Whether it call itself—

gravity or grace,
science or poetry;
if it wasn't unnatural,

if it didn't sound insane,
if it wasn't superficial,
If I wasn't predisposed

so regularly
to claim
in public, to know

better, I'd say
it's more properly—
the sun

who gets up
and charges
out to play

every day—
upon the celestial,
capricious, and tortuously sophisticated

topography—of every
one of your
three hundred

and sixty
five or six
possible faces.

DISAPPOINTING DREAM

Breathless and dark, I wait smack
in the middle of a deranged plain

for the cool glowing words
of this mysterious angel

who has landed close-by and pale
in the tinder, my only real company for

centuries, here under night's growing
translucent veil of slow suffocating

cloudsmoke—until finally, tolled off, one by
one, like very old dense iron church bells,

she intones the words—Son, hey, you got,
like, a lighter I could borrow?

RHYTHM'S STILL THE INSTRUMENT

Why do you reek
of muses and luck, super-

stitions and such impalpable portents
as which fickle

way the wind blows?
Were you unwittingly raised to believe

in special inevitable
angels, who hover invisibly over

every timid little
spear of grass that's out there,

cooing and gesticulating
grandly—encouraging the poor thing to grow?

I must say, it seems
as much, by the way I could see you

swaying a little
in the veritable breeze you were making

as you prayed
in the same frenzy once again

last night, for fresh
fruit—instead of giving thanks

for the chance to labor
again tomorrow.

THE MESSAGE IS THE MEDIUM

Behold the perenially prodigious artist

and his

unassailable

arsenal of marvelous masterpieces—

uncountable 

catalogs 

of masterfully 

casual 

agreements—to always remain

in the business 

of making 

these

teency little

individually insignificant 

changes—

to his

workaday one and 

only canvas.

ARS POETICA

All the distracted
ladies on Bluetooth
while jogging unruly

dogs down these
streets, each
blithe kid biking

past you while hurling some
buoyant profanity,
every last hollow-

cheeked old man
yowling something
about Sports on each cozy

neighborhood bar's
crazy multiplicity
of flatscreens—for years they all

seem to mean
practically
nothing to you. Until the

great day when,
upon find yourself
tired of trying

to deliver
such respectful and
meticulous translations,

you first hit upon
the beautiful gimmick—
of heedlessly cramming

every word they say, wholesale
into your own
preexisting melody.

TACIT

In the soft-pedal
piano of early morning
fog, just after

your car
pulled off, I saw
for a second—I could perceive

the gradually growing
space

between us
without the need to
understand it.

Like some
newborn child

whose presence is
his art,

I just stood
where I was, bereft

but content
to be a wordless

poem for you—
composed
of the same intertwined

billions of bands
of vibrating light
and matter as you were.

But soon
the tremulous idea
broke—it was dull

but loud as the throat-
clearing thunder—

and it dissipated that spell
in a flash,

and all the old
words and cold
symbols began raining,

until I was thoroughly
soaked

with the same
gray and dismal sentence,
which read—

I'll never be able to
show you anything

you haven't seen for your-
self already. 

LIGHTEN UP

This is a sunny autumn poem
in which

some dusty-ish
finches are happily thrashing

and chirping away
in curbsides

of old
gutterwater.

How many? What color?
I no longer

feel compelled to remember.
For no images

presented here
are facts; they're merely

encouraging interpretations.

Whatever

they conjure, these words
aren't the truth;

they're just it's swift little
messengers.

And I—I am just
a word too,

however useful
and inspiring to you—as some

swift little vagabond
birds were.

COMPACT

If everything is made of starlight,
what makes certain
things so heavy?

If everything we
know is starlight, how could
there be so many

words to learn? Speaking
of which—if everything we
do is starlight, how come

there's bad guys, and sometimes
even good ones, who fail
to state their cases right?

And further—if everything
we say is starlight,
who's to say we're still

the people we claimed (and they
assumed) we were
before we went to

bed last night? Then again—
if everything we imagine
is starlight,

nothing wrong—since
everything's alright. Do you not
agree?

IMAGINARY

The older I get, the more I find 

our arguments 

are far less

controversial 

than our actions are. So,

Slowly—surely 

I've been working 

more concretely 

on my invincibility—

by watching slideshows 

where pictures of me 

dawn and dissolve 

in grateful 

time to

mechanical funeral 

home music—

and by lying (supine)

down each day 

in one additional translucent 

grain at a time

of warm wet sand—

for just one 

grim and ponderously fictional

milli-

second longer.

INTUITIVE EATING

Haulting to stare down into
another yellowish
one-third full
bowl of hasty food—

you'll grudgingly consider,
per instructions—
I'm probably not 
appreciating this stuff enough; 

until that slow fury of routine
hunger—which never fails to
rise up and flare hot again
into each dissatisfied cheek,

immolating any trace of this higher desire
before such an exemplary
sentence can even be completed—

reliably bullies you
instead into exonerating
the conciliatory impulse—to finish

something
by completely
destroying it.

DEATH SENTENCE

Let this abject failure to imagine
my last words
serve as proof

of that which they
should have been—
remember to let

your kids
have pets

and hang
posters—and those

frivolous
glow in the dark

stars in their
bedrooms.

EKPHRASTIC HAIKU WITH QUIT-SMOKING-AID FOR MAGRITTE AFTER BATMAN

This is not a pipe

you could use—but it is the

one you need right now.

COMPETING STRING THEORIES

1.

Performing any
disciplined action

for any
amount of time (note—waking

up in the morning
doesn't count

unless you're doing it—to
spite the alternative)

has been shown to
strengthen the self-

control muscles,
mostly

by sapping
the ego.


2.

Sitting and thinking—perhaps
time doesn't pass

if nobody 
measures it—still doesn't

give you
what you actually want,

still won't make it run
backwards.

In order to do that,
you have to

impoverish
chaos; you have

to wash
dishes.


4.

As years pass, the strings
pull taut

but get
longer in the process.

Things get
streamlined, yet

simultaneously
more complicated. For

instance,
now, the old saying

actually goes
more like—

Damned
if you do.

Damned if
you don't.

Or
if some

cop—
or the

doctor—
says so.


5.

Man is
garbage. His

ideas
are the recycling bin.

What is
Justice? But the crusty old

ruins of
Revenge—with just enough

of the
blood power-washed off.

DAWN OF MAN

Stranger stumbling around downtown

somewhere, I see your glum reflection

just before it peers up at that glass tower,

wondering, incredibly—how can I best

fit my spirit to that structure? 

And then I catch it again afterwards, 

extending skyward—and somehow growing

just a little straighter, before sauntering

off in some subtle but unmistakable 

new sympathy for—sheer geometry.

LUNATIC MODE

For years now, I've been 

trying like 

hell to figure out

why my lips and the 

tips of my fingers and 

toes—are always 

going numb and tingling

with cold.

Turns out, I've been frozen 

for years now in the same lunatic mode

of trying to make
my whole day into a poem;

rich with its evocoative mix
of sensual rituals,
featuring loads of repetition and

paying too much attention,

each step heralding some auspicious 

new place.

In each hand,

a uniquely

unbearable perspective grasped. And

every last 

breath, a wild incantation. But goddamn—

how perfect-

ly pitifully translated 

here 

at the 

end of every evening, into mere 

words 

at my own overwhelmingly dull— 

and yet still unspeakable—

peril.

STATUTORY

When the going is tough, and I lack
a potent narrative;

I'm quick to imagine I'm really
Superman

and Lois
Lane's only secret

out of
wedlock kid—the incidental-

yet-perfect genetic mix
between

an unstoppable man—and his
victim.

ALL-BUSINESS

We are latterly what
you could
call partners, administering favors
from the same

bed, but always carefully
operating
separate computers.

In a fairly equitable 

division 

of labor—you give me 

all your money,

and I fold it 

back into perfect paper 

cranes for you.

You add the gas bill 

to the cable 

subtracting the electrical, before taking

the fastest available

expressways out of town—

while I focus 

on the grunt work 

of napping 

so diligently each afternoon, 

as fail-safe way 

of continually reaffirming

that, deep down, you 

have your own

agonies—those certain

bracing and non-

transferable hurts, which

I should never 

even dare dream 

of being able 

to do anything remotely

capable—to heal.

INVOLUNTARY

High up specks of little

birds' wings'

reflexive beating

softly, efficiently 

trips some ancient 

circuit in me, 

repeating—like it or not, 

some invisible 

force is

always working;

an invincible 

nurse—who may 

not care, but whose duty 

it is nonetheless,

to wipe all our 

tears whenever we 

fall—if not 

our sorry 

incontinent

assholes later on.

PLAY IT OFF

Morning, to-go
cups full

of brown, 

beige or virgin-white 

coffee clutched 

tight like new (and right

where those

old) stuffed 

animals (used to go)—passive-aggressively 

awake now, 

although 

that's what 

we're going for.

*

Quitting time, dying like 

hell to cash-

out, to grab hold of what-

ever coins we can and 

explode like heretical 

scrolls full 

of incendiary common-sense 

knowledge from some blustery

infernal old monastery—still compulsively

smoking a little, but making it look

as if 

that's 

what we're going for.

*

At night, feels like even to sleep 

is to chance 

cheating, to risk being called-

out by Tomorrow

for attempting 

to sweep-in last
minute for the fast and 

cheap lottery 

ticket dream—so completely and so utterly
broke, although to be

fair—that's

what we're 

going for.

POEM 2

Grim lines 

form some 

gaunt parade—

a slim
but determined

celebration

in public—
of having

had this

sparsely
attended 

thought today.

CHOSEN

Get up 

and wipe 

your bloody 

nose upon

the following

all-absorbing 

truth—

you were

literally

born to be 

proof—

such luck 

was always

incredibly 

risky.

ABSTRACTION

This whole poem is just
a dumb little

song
for all the long shadows

gradually colonizing city
street corners;

whether dilations
of mirth

or gloom, of exuberant
sky-

scrapers or contentious
nursing homes,

of empty luxury hi-
rises, or

garbage-
crammed and abandoned

mail boxes—it doesn't
matter, so

long as
today and ever

after,
they continue

to afford us
that unconscious-

but very
conspicuous space

in which—not
to think

but simply
reiterate

all of our prior
versions of things,

to bravely, if even
for a

minute,
barely contemplate

the sheer
density

and
the thickness

of every saved
draft waiting

weightless—back
at home.

KILL YOUR IDYLLS

     I love not Man the less, but Nature more. 

     -Lord Byron


This mute potted

plant, that 

handsome

flat rock—help to keep

living here

from feeling

oppressive. 

But—a city,

an entire 

army

of each?

Well, we'll

see—

FAUSTIAN BARGAIN

It seems now, however rare
and however useful,
that certain words cost

a lot more than you
ever imagined. 

And to be sure: a good very many 

you received in
exchange were extremely
beautiful—luscious as pure 

cream, juicy as heavy
redolent fruit, and cut

precise as rare
gems, and inlaid in intricate,
particular patterns;

but precious
as they were, fatiguing to find
and even more formidable

to use (so secretly, 

so palpably inopportune—

that even post-hoc impressions 

of the ulterior labor of their 

assembly seemed
tacitly to serve
as appreciable features)

can you still say 

that it was worth it—when
not one, let alone 

the garlanded strands of hundreds
you've been hawking

alone out here
for years now, has ever 

earned you one red
cent, or turned a single 

head—blond
again?

NEXT THING YOU KNOW

If every moment's

such

a precious 

possession, 

then—

how the fuck do they

always manage

to change-
up all the

billboards—

when you're not 

paying attention?

*

Your desiccated liver pills
expired last month.

In another hundred 

years, your bones'll be chalk.

The prospect of protective containers is starting
to look like a marketing gimmick.

But if life is not a gift, then it must
be just—a bargain.

GUMBALL MACHINE

You can't help but
always eye-up

all the most
preposterous words,

juicy and
jumbled

in sensational
colors

expressing
exotic-

yet-
familiar flavors,

piled to full-
on bursting

in that lustrous
transparent

globe
over

there near the
exit door.

*

So as
usual,

you—quickly

procure yourself
a couple,

and each

dribbles
down

out of

order,
and they're

hard

and too
sweet

in your

mouth,
and the

whole plan

was
dumb.

DAILY PRACTICE

I started out
by

counting
the minutes

then
the hours

and now, the days
it seems

that I can
go

without
saying—

a single
original thing.

TRUMAN SHOW

Around noon,
as if through
a wilderness

I peer into
the Burger
King's windows—

where,
despite the ridiculous
mutated
shit you can get there,

fellows?

gals?

tykes (with those
crowns
on)?

perch—
greedy over
incomplex hamburgers.

Ketchup-red
ketchup

blotches
offwhite napkins,
pools (like

you'd think
it would) on unfurled
rectangles

of tissued wax-
paper, as I
compulsorily

imagine the sound
and the little
tactile satisfaction of its crinkle.

Have I fallen
asleep,

am I
being lampooned?

Nothing
could ever

be this simple.
I mean,

even
the tops

of their buns
are that

kind
of

cartoon-
shiny.

CHESS LESSONS

1.

Hang on—is this
a contest

to be won,
or a problem

that needs
solving? Wait—look

at how! All the words
you need

are here, each piece pre-
invented.


2.

This is not
black and white.

Ham and eggs
are black and white,

things—are black
and white, not this.

This
is something different.

Unless,
maybe you've just been

terribly impatient—with
the time it's been taking

the light
to get here.


3.

Your best defense has been
to grow

old, gradually
having come to depend

on a tremendous field
of specialists

to whom
you're worth more alive

than dead. Even
Better yet—despite this,

you still get
to keep

such secrets
beneath

your kingly cap: even
the baristas,

for instance—to think,
they'll never know

your pauper
origins,

your real
last name.

HASHTAG APHORISM

     "Everyone is in the best seat."
     -John Cage

Everything is state of
the art in this
twenty-

first
century stadium
of information—where even

the inexperienced
are
privileged

to know—
what
really goes

into
a bratwurst—
when they

bark for
one—
court-side.

AUGUST (HAIKU)

That buzzing noise! was

the sound—of wet flies fucking

in your garbage can.

WILL TO POWER

On a dust-
caked sidewalk across
the street

from a brave kinetic
hive of construction, I pause
to watch

the secret
saffron-
haired foreman—plunked

down and clutching
his own dare-
devilishly

yellow
Tonka truck,
with which he endeavors

to govern
by example,
masterfully affecting

with each
tacit demonstration,
positively massive

amounts
of sheer dumb
change

upon the landscape.
In my imagination, I briefly
become free

to simulate
halting this tutor
to ask a few questions—

but realistically,
I'm in such an awful
big hurry

to carry-
out a
prior commitment—

walking
and shouldering this
seething and senile

envy back
home,
where it

feels
the most
comfortable.

DECENT POEM

Okay is

fifty-

one percent. 

Fine is (technically)

failing. 

Dandy is  

your doctor 

calling

to say you're 

alright 

despite 

a couple  

ailments. 

Pretty is 

almost

never exact, 

so it 

can be 

handy to 

remember—profane   

historically  

referred

to a thing 

that had 

recently 

become 

very

popular.

TIDBIT

The soft word—
meal

feathered
down from the

lips of this
penitent

stranger attending us
makes me feel—

not satisfied, but
focused—

gently tuned
to make a more

sonorous chord
with the

few philosophical
orbs of murmuring

light beyond our table
by the nourishing

signals I'm gently
lapping-

up off
of such

a clean
noun.

PIN PRICK

Even before starting, 

it feels faintly 

painful

and exhausting—the terrible

long shot 

that anything 

is ever really 

like anything 

else. But—

whatever.

So this poem has 

no magic

pebbles in it. No

majestic power

animals or extremely  

hot peppers. So what? 

Maybe that's 

just it. 

Maybe that's 

the whole premise—

maybe it's

last night 

or this 

morning, and we're at

the train stop, we're

on the internet, 

etc.

when—

the same thing happens.

I mean, the very 

exact same stupid 

old numb inane pin 

prick of a thing as usual—only 

this time, 

it feels 

just a little 

new.

Which isn't 

to say (don't worry)

there's really anything 

you're supposed to feel

or do about it

afterwards.

I'm mostly just trying 

to distract you

while I 

give you this 

little—

inoculation.

HEURISTICS

Because of a word
and its associated
number I heard,

my only real
concern when camera-
shopping is the megapixel.

*

Because of some cartoon
character's
casual expression,

honeydew
is 
the money-melon.

*

Because of a book
mom read
when we were six,

gluttony is a concern—
and chocolate's a
legitimate trigger. And

ever since
that movie my brother
made us all

watch once, Ancient
Egypt is forever
conflated with godless deep space.

*

I still want to show you the way I love you,
only these days, I don't
know how—guess

I never even noticed
all those
shortcuts I was taking

whenever I chose
to just—write you a song.
(But because of

a pact that we
made back in
college, we can never break-

up ever again anyway, so maybe
it doesn't matter?—how often
I hurt you.)

*

Because of—fuck,
I don't even
know

what—quick-and-
dirty has
lately become

some
sort of
virtue.

LATE DEVELOPMENTS

1.

I feel like
things used
to happen—in time.

Now, they
happen in
spite of it.

And things used to pass
between us

in space. 

Now 

things exist—

in its name. 

2.

I feel like it's 

fairly exotic

to talk

clever to you 

in tight 

and cropped

sorts of back

and forth

comments on the Internet. 

*

But I also feel like it's now

fairly logical

to intuit—that the opposite 

of distance isn't 

closeness, it's

height.

3.

I feel like—
the real

first rule 
of Fight Club 

should be—
wait stop right there you're fucking talking to nobody.

4.

I feel 

like you're always

already okay

with me

anticipating all the main speaking points.

*

But I also feel

like you

and I have

so much in 

common that it's

hardly necessary

to talk any-

more.

5.

I feel like
things used

to happen—
to me.
Now,

they all occur
inside,

and I'm
not sure whether
that's easier

or better,
but I'm positive

that 

nothing could 

be both.