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.