POEM FOR ANY JUNE 30

On the slippery lip of another spectacular
downtown plaza
fountain, misty,
wrecked with calcium—

wet, spindly finches
and fat,
grimy pigeons
with bulging chests and distended necks

preen and quaver—
but never flinch,
because they
and cannot bring themselves

to resent
these important men
who insist on
crisscrossing them—

sanguine
in their heavy,
requisite blazers,
gesturing and cogitating,

with only
their impeccable
sunglasses—to keep them
cool.

CONCURRENCE

Under the commodious shade
of a poplar, the wind
purring

indiscriminate through its
summer carapace
of leaves,

thought I could see, in broad daylight—Orion?
and The Big Dipper?
faithfully

sketched in the furtive
freckles of a tiger
lily.

The blossom, common among its
sisters, was a pure grimace
of confession—

unblinking, staring straight and 

conscientiously skyward,
it delivered,

maternally—yet very matter-of-factly 

(like an old, matronly
administrator would):

well, how did you think all these

different things around here
discovered

the one place where they all fit together? 

Whether we choose to admit it 

or not makes no difference;

the fact is we're always, 

always, always, always—

living in a neighborhood.

PERFECT SPHERE

Listen carefully—
whenever people say:
it's a slippery slope,
they're not really thinking.

Because obviously,
we've all been stuck
to this surface
for a while now.

And there aren't any
gradations, either.

There isn't any
center. and there

certainly never was
any middleground.

There was ever only
occasional
floozy curves
and maybe a few
interesting indentations

simultaneously vying
for our inter-
mittent attention.

And, of course,
there were
things—

even now,
things
are still real,

and we would do well
to continue to attend
to each of them

because
they (the things)
need us
in order to exist—

But personally, I no longer
think I prefer
one to another;

I don't go after things, either.
Not anymore.
I only move casually toward them

(even the things
that are invisible—like the way
ocean waves still waggle
at the moon
in broad daylight)

content to relate to them
a little
and let them carry me
where they will.

That way,
no one thing
will feel totally hopeless;

instead, it's like there's a little
barely serviceable
hope—everywhere I go.

FULCRUM POINT

Every morning, or maybe

even more often, for the last dozen 

years—it's 

been like this. But I'm not 

crazy; he is.

Hey Dan, it's 

me, he says; 

your humble ubiquitous 

plastic black 

men's pocket comb. 

Why not write

a nice little image poem 

about me 

in a profoundly 

casual tone? Can you believe it?

I mean—he's not exactly

one in a million; 

it's more like 

literally (probably) one 

of ten billion clones

which lurk 

like hideous spiders

inside every junk drawer 

and travel bag 

in the world, 

which hover, all

dead and distorted,

inside all of those 

weird alien blue 

jars the barbershops use,

and which sulk 

forgotten in bathroom cabinets 

(you know, those deceptive, 

untrustworthy kinds, 

on the other side of the mirror?)

Forget it, I've always
told him, it's way too difficult

to even so much as squeeze you in
to whatever
thing I'm working on; face it,

you're full of dead skin 

and hair fuzz, and not at all 

moral, like the good old 

soap is—or virtuous 

like the upstanding toothbrush.

But it must be 

his response, that inevitable bristle 

of silence, which, lately 

is forcing me to admit

that what he really represents is

one of the most workable 

means to an end 

that exists 

in my entire universe,

And that, pretty much all the time, 

I totally find 

that damn mind-

numbing 

ubiquity of his, more than 

slightly—reassuring. 

DEDICATION

There—in the place
where the freshest light
goes streaking

through still-
living oak trees'
spangled branches

and gleams
on polished stratagems
of pink marble—

where the quick ripple
of bright flags' far-off waving
corresponds neatly

with the faint sounds
of chains and ropes pinging
off slick poles of brushed aluminum—

where the plain pretty
alternation
of gullies and ridges

made by erstwhile
busy gophers
under wrought-iron fences,

the ones
far away from those
shabbier plots

in the
shadier knolls,
where the lawnmowers

can't go,
and from which crowds
of red and white lilies

reach nearly horizontally
on their thick spindly stalks,
greedy for sun—

that is the place
where I know I
shall come

to believe in
life after death;
that is—

to finally believe
in their life. After mine
is done.

CABLE MAN!

Just as things
are looking their blackest,
domestically-

speaking, a huge-booted
superhero—
called Javier,

originally from
Seattle or somewhere—
breezes in

to assail the grim scene
with alacrity, charm

and the trademark civility 

you'd expect 

of his beneficent 

alien technocrat guild.

At once, he rolls 

his uniformed sleeves,

thrusts his hips

and cocks his
already quite tilted
and overloaded

utility belt
just a little
bit more

(this alone doesn't
fix anything, of course,
but it helps

you feel
as if you're
being taken care of).

Truthfully, he rarely uses
a single
cabalistic implement

from inside the thing
(his mere presence
ordinarily quells the emergency).

Truth is, that belt
isn't even
very pretty,

but damn it,
it's part
of the outfit—so he wears it.

COMMON CROW POEM

Through endless fields of fire-
blue ozone, weightless but

oppressively cloudless, she alone
goes slowly wheeling,

dragging a ragged black cloak on
secret invisible breezes—

breezes which she seems to carry
and keep underneath her,

even in this stilted dead
center of summer; while two

opportunistic eyeballs,
sharp pebbles of obsidian,

scan the heather
which rustles and sighs

beneath a few drooping deciduous
mid-western treetops.

She—the one uniquely
American scavenger,

she never rests—but neither
does she work.

She doesn't pray,
but she does not hunt;

when she spies
a good meal, she laughs

and she coughs,
both at once—

making known
to all of us down below,

the peculiar nature of this
shared paradox—

the grim intransigence
of our own good luck.

LOGICIAN GENERAL'S WARNING

Caution—occasional words 

may swell 

and veil 

those facts which 

first 

propelled them. 

And none 

have been experimentally 

tested 

and proven 

to describe 

the distinct 

absence 

of a miracle.

And in fact, 

any answers uttered

in excess 

of yes 

or no—

could be 

asking 

for trouble.

MNEMONIC

You don't have to know what it means,
or even
how to make it.

Just think of poetry—as
something
which,

one day
you suddenly
happen

to wake up
and find yourself
in the middle

of having been
more or less doing
for decades already.

Actually—less
like speaking

and more
like
singing—that is,

singing in your sleep:
without that syntactic
net of guarantees—

in rhythms
with no history

and in tunes
without fates,

and on an instrument
felicitous
only, perhaps

here and there, to
an embittered
old sphinx

or occasional
impenetrable
Delphic oracle;

and each
as valuable only
as much it can be

unattended,
and of course,
apropos

of no intention
you could name,
not even—and maybe

especially—
upon waking.

CULTIVATED

Listen; once you finally get tired
of looking-

up the word misery 
in the rhyming dictionary,

I have a better idea
to help ease the tension

between longing to seem
vaguely similar

while also appearing so
strikingly individual.

All you have to do from
now on, is always make

sure to carry your very
correctness with you—

as if it were a cherished
trinket on some

shimmering necklace.
Futility!—they'll whisper

whenever they see you
out at parties;

such a costly and un-
touchable point of view!

OMNIA VINCIT AMOR

The way I figure it, the conquerors
had it backwards—true love
has never

made anything happen,
it utterly refuses
to conquer.

Love does not
do work, it only
takes credit.

It's the jealous frozen
lusty moon;
not the incandescent
sun that lights it.

Love doesn't permit things
or divulge its long-term plans;

in practice, the real thing
is more like a temporary, willful,
and difficult withholding

of apathy,
of prejudice,
of revenge.

Only, love is
lazier than that—

it's never cleared
a forest
of formidable oak trees;

it's more like the little breeze
that likes to go out gossiping
in the grass of empty meadows,

it's never held a job, never
plugged in a vacuum  never turned
anyone's car into a Subaru.

That's because—love isn't industrious,
Love is the bliss-
fully indiscriminate consumer.

It's never satisfied; it can't
be filled up.

And even though
we can feel it sometimes sloshing
around inside of us—it's all

diet coke and zebra cakes
and chocolate milk
and jolly ranchers:

it takes up some space, but it's worth less
than it cost, and it
just makes us hungrier.

TAKE YOUR TIME

For a huge minute, the
sweet,

red rain-
dappled cheeks

of a June
strawberry—they don't

exactly
move, but they do

still manage
to let it speak clearly:

Please—
feel free

to invent!
any and

whichever
dance steps you'd

like;
the music

won't be
changing.

FACE VALUE

This poem
is not out to get you.

These words—and their
uncertain-

looking
arrangement—

weren't devised
to trick you.

The spaces are here
to slow you

down.
The syntax, the rhythm;

they're to help
shore you up. Because

the fact is that—yes,
it's brutally true:

The World
doesn't owe you

a living. Nobody
out there

much cares
what you want.

Everyone who dies
stays dead,

and nothing
that's not alive

is capable
of even comprehending

your existence.
But the good news is:

you—yes
you, with your cute little

quirks, with all of your
weird anxieties,

lazy reveries, vain
fantasies;

your chronic overgeneralizing,
sickeningly perfection-

istic tendencies, and often
completely crippling paranoid delusions—

you
are not just some part

of a metaphor
you didn't make.

Never forget: if everyone else gets
to constitute

The World,
than so do you.

And you
know what?

That makes
The World

part of
your metaphor, too.

And that means—
as its maker,

as a dreamer, even
as The World's Least

Published,
most indolent poet—you

do not
owe it

one single
thing, either.

PARABLE

In ragged fields
foregrounding latticed
electricity pylons,

honey bee drones
flit industriously
between rusty sunflowers,

sweet clover, snap-
dragons, wild
foxglove, and marigolds;

hardly noticing anything pretty
about their workplace scenery—
they are too busy

hauling the sticky,
messy effluvia, spiriting away
all they can hold

off to the dank
furtive folds
of their own incommodious comb—

to vomit and then re-consume,
spit and fan, again and again,
compressing into waxen tombs

one spartan
cube at a time—
of something

they weren't designed
to understand—nuggets of food
fit for old gods.

TOMB OF THE EMPEROR

A lot
of our thoughts
are so
tiny—and they each

individually
weigh next
to nothing;
but the

thing is:
when they come,
they come
in droves.

Initially,
they're taken
so lightly—
they drift around

like flurries;
we don't
expect them
to stick.

And so, we simply
throw any
old coat
of shabby insensitivity

on top of
the depreciated
cores of our
feelings

before
venturing out—
inevitably
sinking, lost

and deep
in the vast
and inarguable
mythologies we created—

stark naked
by the time they
finally
locate our corpses;

though mercifully—
we're
covered in
thick snow,

right up
to our ponderous and
erstwhile
enterprising crowns.

AMERICAN HUNGER

On Fridays, we feel lazy
and dynamic at the same time

like the spiders
scuttling outside
in blue garden shade,

flurries of legs, myriad
prism-eyed,

constructing,
per some strange
outer-space compulsion,

such wondrously
pacific works of gossamer lattice—

the more effortlessly
luxuriant,
the better

to stick
and hang and suck the tortured

blood of
other, only slightly
less-industrious pests.

EXPO

Hi, my name is

Mr. Write— 

Objective: 

live like a child

who's scared 

to die. Skill-sets include:

bleaching the stains of hope 

from the bones of reality, 

churning the truth 

into honesty and faith,

praising everything 

that is and happens 

just for being and 

for happening.

Fun fact about me: I've never read 

an entire newspaper.

Former employment:

a symptom of someone 

else's fever, desperate 

for answers

when there so plainly

weren't any. 

Where I see 

myself in five years: as objectively

as you might 

see another.

In ten:

speaking to the dead 

on behalf 

of the dumb. 

You cannot possibly 

underpay me.

ARCADIA, USA

Rejected old words—like cripple 
and faggot—are going
around biting their decrepit old lips

now that God
has been fully transmogrified
into Goodness.

And all the old superlatives—
father, son, and holy
spirit—have been recycled,

re-imagined—
as mother, as sister, as
paramour.

And the mind itself
has become a sixth
sense organ

that feels around empathically
for any obscurity
fermenting in the dark intestines

of the living. And no one bothers
to light that darkness
artificially anymore,

since they all understand:
it's a temporary fix—
the darkness always returns.

But during the nights,
the air isn't sweltering or thick.
The air is cool and clear

because the music
which fills it
is simple.

And in the daytime,
the sky is always a perfect
no-signal A/V monitor screen-kind

of blue, as if
to suggest—it's no longer here
to entertain them.

OUTBURST

Somehow, each morning 

through gunmetal 

clouds of my own

not-yet-knowing

which rage 

like mad over 

the tops of

of my shoulders, 

the clean 

hot electric

light 

of a thought 

will flash its effulgent 

and pliant pith 

setting

something deep in me 

rumbling sympathetically—

until eventually 

raining down 

hectic drivel 

in wet 

jazzy patterns—

when my mouth tries 

to mention it.

NOTES TOWARD A SUPREME MODESTY

A man
of fiction's not a man
of action.

He's been pinned
to his own
cross for so long—that

motivation
starts to look like a wine
soaked sponge.

He's so dizzy
that the colors
of the sky above have become roiled,

until the spectrum
for him, is one
of low grays.

Now, the goal of all desire
is—to let it be
enough

that some
balmier weather
is here—and that

the weather itself
is mere—
and that

fallen angels
are none-
theless

still regarded
by most of us
as angels.

And may they
forgive us, he beseeches,
such unintelligent trespasses

as—the repeated
seeking of
the truth

in the last place
you'd ever find it—
love.

LAST DAY

At precisely twelve o'clock—there's a rush,
a sudden
sunblinding gushing

and a couple of
intrepid but
grubby and ill-equipped grownups must

once again go wading—
in undulant rivers of shimmering
children.

CENTER OF GRAVITY

Dreamt I picked up a lone,
cool, round stone
from a rocky, bone-
white beach up
north somewhere—

held it firm
in my leathery palm,
felt its heft,
made it warm—

for a moment,
it was special. It was mine.
I had selected it
to the exclusion of its brothers
for some
very important reason.

Then, I waded out a bit,
and I dropped it
with a plunk in the
shallow, translucent tide,

and, before it had even finished
settling to the slate gray bottom,
I already could no longer
tell it apart
from an unfazed million others.

And, feeling neither
sad nor dis-
contented about this,
I shrugged (the tiny, imperceptible
shrug of a titan)
and moved on

down the strand. It was
such a mild feeling. Not strange;
smooth, but not boring—it just felt
easy to forget
and just let
go of having
inconsequentially changed
everything forever.