I SIT, AND MEANWHILE BACK

Take care: it's getting harder
and harder—
to be

somebody
out here. Despite blue
suburban skies,

there's a furious-
mad but
directionless wind

that keeps blowing
and blowing on the street—
and no one

else can see it.
It's yours
alone, and it's

blowing
you
nowhere.

And even their
greatest metaphors
seem

to hold
no sway anymore;
most things just are.

Or—more
precisely, you know it
when they aren't.

For instance, all those
Penny Lanes 
you remember,

dazzling uncountable
miles of them—
in all sizes,

far flung,
shade and sun-
spangled—

might be
stopping-up your
ears and eyes;

but
not a single one of them
will ever exist

the way you
really need it to—
as pavement.

As asphalt and rebar
and paint
and concrete

underneath
your sore and
intransigent feet.

MIDNIGHT BLUES

You don't know

a lot, 

but you think 

it's safe to assume 

that

all things 

are desperate—

to open up 

and show you

what they've got. 

You suspect—

there are 

all kinds of feelings 

you haven't met 

the words for yet.

Last night, 

you could

see the shiny 

milkwhite 

quarter moon,

ringed 

with tiny

forever stars

and cradling 

the ghost 

of 

the full moon 

in its spindly arms

and felt 

willing to bet—

someone 

or something 

was 

trying to forget 

everything 

that has 

ever happened,

and yet, in the process—

inadvertently 

thinking of something 

really big

that hasn't yet.

HORROR FLASH FICTION

Consider—
one by one, the objects around you
are all disappearing;

fading, receding, being turned
slowly into
pure ideas—not abstractions, exactly;

more like—lists. Lists
of things. Things contained in
better and better photographs.

Photographs which are, themselves,
slowly dissolving. Slowly being siphoned
away from their cameras—

because, after all, cameras
are objects, and all
the objects are disappearing.

But what if? these photographs
were slowly becoming
more aware? Aware

of their limitations.
And slowly getting obsessed. Obsessed
with their own fidelity. Obsessed

with becoming
as pure and honest
as a thing can get: that is—less

and less
real, yet more
and more accurate, and ultimately

so adherent to the truth
as to no longer exist. And what if,
speaking of truth,

none of this
is hypothetical. What if
it's actually already happening? And

little by little—the pictures are coming
closer and closer to
the facts.

IN THEORY

Any time I start
to think
I might be done

arguing
back
and forth again

with a few dumbbells
and overly-reflective dinner plates
and those cursory screens,

and everything I can imagine
seems to exist
at right angles

to something else
which I hoped it was supposed
to be fluently representing—

any time
I'm ready
to just give in

and believe, already—
just so I don't
have to take responsibility

for knowing;
that's when I realize—
I could probably always,

in theory, at least,
go for
a nice cup of coffee,

and that
sometimes, that isn't a symbol
for anything;

sometimes, it's
just
the thing.

MISDIRECTION

Hope for the future.
Childlike and
inscrutable wonder.

Breathy,
pungent breezes,
redolent, despite their freshness,

of ancient,
archetypal
mysteries. Ever since—

tired
yet proud of it,
wide but still waifish,

the enchantress
came walking
through the morning

piss and gloom,
slowing to huddle
inside this

fiberglass bus stop,
clutching a dozen
deep crimson roses—

with which
to blind the
mind's eye

perfectly—from
the lime-
green Crocs.

CONTRAPUNTAL

In the midday
wind, roadside litter crescendoing,
fluttering

like so many
white
and pink and gray

devil-may-
care songbirds,
giddy with their freedom;

making those fraught,
jagged,
haphazard loops

of hotly competing
amateur soloists—
and mocking, necessarily,

their huge hostage rows
of passengers
sitting

hunched over
gunmetal steering
wheels,

whispering
over and over—some
very precise

lunch orders
to help them remember
they're

not being paid—
to compose any
questions.

DAILY HABIT

How can you ever begin
to tell them—why it is you
have to write this?

Explain the nearly visible idea,
translucent
like a wraith-like raven,

like a razory, bag-of-bones bird
always nibbling,
always needling away

at the sharp peripheral
corner of your mind—relentlessly

pecking at your temple
while you try
to sleep at night

and always perched
upon your shoulder
and cawing—in that distinctive

scrape-smoldering
caw of his—any time you're awake,
as if he's saying

something about—
diving deeper.

Something about
some divinely comic inspiration

spelled out in quivering
motes of dust

in the stretched afternoon
light of a yellow happy tapioca sun—

the same one that warms
and lulls and will
one day, kill everyone.

Something—about holding
your breath for four
or five years (yes, you begin to imagine,

you could do that), just to hold
for one posthumous moment

in your cheeks and your toes,
in your bowels and your knees;

that sensation of
orgasmic relief—fierce spiraling rockets
splitting the ozone,

fireworks so white-
hot that they're
soothing—slingshotting

out from behind the wide
whites of your eyes

and smacking
against the back of your skull—
which, incidentally

goes a lot
farther back
than you ever thought—

at the exact,
ecstatic second—
when you just can't

seem to
stand it anymore.

YOU GUYS!

Not everything that's
reasonable 

is easy to grab

onto.

Not everything that's

simple

is also
reasonable. 

Lots of things exist 

everywhere you look—

but still, 

when you discuss them,

they sounds like 

dumb in-jokes,

spoken in some

weird fictional language 

between identical 

twin brothers. 

For instance—think 

of all those axioms 

of geometry
you learned in high school

which can never
be proven;

without a little 

blind faith, then,

wouldn't all 

of our buildings fall?

Or, for instance—

there's really 

no arguing
with the assertion—

that

every person living

inside every
one of those buildings—

could be expressed as:

a million of them—

divided by 

a million others.

ARCHENEMY

You can see it
even now,

in relief against
the bleak and colorless

light of dry day—not so much
the slack and ruinous

drowsy cotton
cloud of an idea—but

the actual word;
a fierce but impotent emblem,

with its alluring snakes
of composite ciphers,

emblazoned (in all-caps)
across a slab

of cool pink
tombstone marble:

SLEEP—the silent
and ultimate temptation;

the one that has
no need

to negotiate.
It only has

to wait—
curled and tightly quiet

in every bleak and undusted
corner of your life

for luster
to fade,

for your resolve
to falter,

for the inevitable moment—
you start to ask yourself whether

you might
not rather—sacrifice time

in the name
of some space.

TEMPORARILY EMBARRASSED MILLIONAIRE

Fine then—
keep your
goddamned

quarter,
man—I'm
not embarrassed

for having
previously-existed.
Fact is,

I've probably been
here so long,
I might've started

the whole world turning; I could
be the
Prime Mover!—I really

don't remember.
But don't you
dare call me

obscure, either,
Mister—I vastly prefer
undiscovered;

besides which,
all these
words are only

temporary anyway.
But kiss
my ass—I'm not

being vulgar;
my thoughts are far
from ugly, lonely,

or impoverished.
Nope, they're
more like:

bunches—
of still-
immature,

multi-
million
dollar

mother-
fucking
bonds.

FIRE US

Matchstick, matchstick—
one of
two dozen,

torn from your
bed—still
choosing to succor,

paraffin
wax and powdered-
glass-headed,

callously
struck—but
brilliantly bruising:

potassium
chlorate, red
phosphorus, sulfur!

Teach us—how you
sustain-
yet-relinquish;

help us!—we can't
keep this
madness

up—for
too much
longer either.

WHERE THE KNOWING IS NOT SATISFIED, A HUNGER FOR MORE QUESTIONS

It's Monday again,
so you think

and you chew
as slowly as possible

a new,
cartoon-
red apple

to help dissemble
your true

motivations awhile—those of
knowing,

in the sense of:
absorbing,

destroying,
reconstituting,
and exploiting

pure form and matter

at the causal behest of some
mysterious alleged

form of all forms,

and with the casual
grace of that

penultimate
tool of all tools, your spindly

spare hand,
with the dominant one,
meanwhile, off somewhere

googling
absent-mindedly—
for conciliatory

cat memes about Mondays.

I'M YOUR REASON

I like it here, and
I'm not leaving.

Inside, I'm just so
spacious and

complex and immaculate,
a great work of art

that hasn't been realized
yet—and you know it.

You know I'm pure
and formless matter—actually

nothing, but
potentially—everything.

Face it: all that
productive thinking

never created
anything, anyway. I mean,

poetry never
baked you a cake.

Then again—a pastry chef
never built any bridges, either.

Then again—no bridge
has ever required

any man or woman
to cross it.

But never mind, it
doesn't matter. I know

you think
you know

too much—and that soon
I'll come leaking out,

the way innocuous oxygen
rushes to fill an invisible vacuum.

Bet you never thought
your head could

get so full of
other people's ideas, did you?

APOLLO: ATMOSPHERES AND SOUNDTRACKS

It's like—when you
wake and you

walk out the front door alone
and the

morning's all mudsilver,

silent
beads of dew on greenblue

hostas in the wet dirt

spring to mind
visions of

faraway planets

whose hot
remotest jungles

and freezing
cold untrammeled beaches

are airless, soundless vistas

where
you can't smoke cigarettes

and
music won't exist

and which
you'd practically have to be

dying—to visit.

SONATA FOR A RECORDER

It's been
out now

for hours
in the clamoring wind

and
formidable rain—

bumbling,
sponge-wet,

wind-wracked, and
scraping against

the raw, fetid
basin-bottom

of its brain;
wondering—how!

aren't those scraggly
little lambasted

lilac flowers
as disconsolate?

Why? aren't those
spindly stalks

of tulips—more
afraid!

STRETCH OF THE IMAGINATION

I met a nice guy once
or twice

in a mirror,
and each time, he

silently reminded me—
how we

can usually see
all kinds of things

a whole lot more easily
than we can ever

repeat them
back to anyone else listening.

It sounds funny, doesn't it?—
to cause a child,

to create 
a fire—

when neither one of those
was our invention.

Now, the only contraption
I can devise

to cleverly wheel myself
out of this alive

is this whirling, spitfire
torture rack sort of

thing—where words
are constantly

stretching
and shifting their meanings, but the

things in the world
keep on staying stubbornly,

stiffly,
exactly the same.

From there, it's a no-brainer
that I can never

successfully transform what's here
into what's

there anymore,
and it also

pretty neatly explains
how come,

even though
I might have used to think so,

an acorn—
in real life

never turns
into an actual,

physical—stalk of
that corn.

ORRERY

     We sacrifice the intellect to God. 
     -Ignatius Loyola 

Enlightenment,
secular
humanism, freedom

of religion—nothing.
Even now, I can feel
that gossamer,

itchy something
irritating—
the stubborn,

stiff, outer
corners
of my existence;

feel it
tugging
at the very end

just as I
still can sense
that it

did
at the
beginning—

feel it, even
as I'm speaking,
pulling me

awful tight
and thick
and uncomfortably

constricted—
here
in the middle.

THE UPWARD SPIRAL

Almost makes you feel 

sick now

to keep doing 

slightly elevated
versions
of the same old things

that used 

to excite you.

You get vertigo

and make some puny excuse

and have to leave the room

after grappling

with the exasperating 

sensation—of trying to keep

your eyes 

on the only thing inside
that's still, while 

all that cartoon
scenery around you
keeps moving.

You can now suppose—
with your eyes closed

that freedom 

isn't a thing

or even a place—
it's just

the most frictionless
motion you can make,

and that
chasing after

ideals—means

you'll always be

running

around in a circle—

but

it's still considered

progress

as long as
you find yourself

never running

into parallel
predicaments.

DIALECTIC

Right about now—with
your hands numb
and mouth full

of triple
thick, quick-
melting coffee bean ice cream—

is when
you start to feel
not so great

about
all of those so-
called resolutions

you made
almost
half a year ago—

is when
your face
first flushes to realize

that you can't really
stomach
any more promises—

is when
you start to regret
having turned yourself

into a total
glutton
for punishment

instead of
becoming one
for permission.

Right about now,
hell feels
like combining

acute stressors
and old
coping mechanisms

and then
still wondering—

how come
I

won't calm down—
and can't

wake
up? at the same time.

DAWNING

It's possible—you're
someone
really special

without
even trying, without
even knowing.

It's possible—that
when
you're asleep,

your quivering, secreted
eyes just keep
seeing things;

that the faintest outlines
of webbed
veins and capillaries

threading throughout
your paper-
thin lids

might become
the same
giant super-clusters

which weave together
vast regions
of deep space—

and that, one day,
you'll get to see
your great-

great-great-
great
grandchildren

finally
coming to visit.
It's possible—

that this
little phenomenon
is quite common,

while simultaneously—
extremely far
from normal.

STARVING IS THE ARTWORK

So I'm walking past a
vacant lot
and feeling

overgrown; feeling
wet and ravenous
for aesthetics—when

many sticky-
headed
robins,

who'd been
darting,
hideous and

obsessed
through the
wet grass,

all seem to pause
for a cold split
second to chortle out to me—

how cool it
can be!
just to feel

hungry.
But—necessarily,
we mean

cool
in the warm sense.
Cool: as-in

genuine. Cool:
as-in
sincere. As-in—can't you

see and
hear it? how rich
and productive?

How
ardent and pleasant
and satisfying it is—

just to watch us hunting
this canvas of
weeds and

black mud—
for those
fat,

for those
blind,
for those

slow
lazy
worms.

CHORUS FOR LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA

I know
it takes
too long

for the
cool part
to come. I know

it feels scary
and protracted. But
trust me, some-

body's
got to
do it—because I think,

invariably, it's like:
each little voice,
(pretty but meek)

is sort of predestined
to meet and marry
and mimic

a specific partner—
and this melding
keeps happening

over and again
until eventually,
we no longer

know whether
the whole group
is singing

one guy's idea,
or whether
each person

just happens
to be singing the same
inevitable vocal line.

One thing's
for sure, though—
revolutions

are never personal.
There's no solo singers—
and they're never over

in under four
minutes (including
intros and outros).

These sorts of refrains
are less popular
than they are

outright contagious.
Outrage is cheap.
Breathing free is costly;

they're infectious—but
like poliovirus,
not like some

catchy-enough
cough of a
pop song.