CRISS CROSS APPLE SAUCE

Rhythm is
the gist of it—I'm growing

up, and growing old, and
dying every minute.

In my pursuit
of freedom,

I am like an autumn apple falling—

to lush grass
in the cool evening:

with a blush, I will
ripen to my own destruction—

toward a gravitational certainty
which takes root and blossoms

into repetition,
reinforcement, and insulation—finally

toward abstraction. Until
I am no longer

like an autumn
apple falling;

now I am more like
the pattern

of an autumn apple falling—

repetition after repetition
leaving me soft and mealy,

leading, inevitably,
to falling

again in silly,
desperate love with

the routine—

by which
my point of view gets (hopefully)

smeared-out all over the
place—without me.

ODE, SORT OF

Whenever there are places
to be, when there's traffic,
when the car

needs gas—
I hope
you still notice,

safely ensconced
deep in the strip
of decorative boxwood

which flanks greasy street curb—
the assertive old
starling,

with a distantly recognizable
version of
the milky way galaxy

swirling
across her iridescent,
midnight back—who keeps

assuredly cheeping;
not like
she's trying to

remind you
of anything—like she's
trying to get you to remember

something
sweetly indistinct
about your own future—lyrics

to a tune
that you haven't started
humming yet.

INCORRUPTIBLE ACTUALITY

These measly fractions of
of our lives—
the crumbs
we horde, shivering

and the theoretical
models of its atoms
which we first have

to sketch,
then believe-in, then
remember—

they're such a small
part of it;
it's like we're all

staring—long and hard
at the world's
most precise

and sincere
and dazzlingly
beautiful mural,

one-eyed,
through a skinny
corroded length of pipe,

to witness one simple,
unsentimental
tile at a time.

This big picture—
if we could see it
mounted there,

against the far wall
made of pure
white lightspeed—is titled:

The Future is Only the Past Remembered

and the docent's little inscription
beside it
probably reads
something like:

The artist's intention here—was never 
to win the war.
It was always, only, and ever 
to stop it.

SMALL SIGHS MATTER

Dear passanger—it's never
the huge stuff
that makes

or breaks-up
and maneuvers the future;

never the big breaths,
that contract the land and
push the oceans,

that ruffle
or flatter the world's flags.

It's always the small ones—
the indissoluble:

the quiet sighs,
the delicate whispers—

the invisible stirring of
cool blue wind;

it's always
the intangible,

vague,
and unobservable
streaming of elementary particles

which, over time,
exert pressure—which ripple

and grow
and sweep and compound
to change

the flow
of the ever-
cascading universe.

No form,
no semblance
of formal

organizations;
only the ripples

themselves:
the movement
alone

dictates
the pattern.

There were never
and won't ever be any

things.
There is only
and always—agitation.

Things
don't matter—it's just you

(and millions of
billions of others
just like you)

who's out there—
imbuing alterations

with which-
ever emblems
you choose.

SENTIENCE DREAM OF THE PRIME NUMBER SERIES

At the end of the universe,

there sits

a huge mountain—

quiescent,

impassible,
made

of pure time;
it cannot be climbed.

But luckily, you,
though savagely beautiful,

are not corporeal. You
are no agent;

you certainly
know nothing

of the terrestrial, and your goals
are not so provincial.

You (alone, perhaps)
are perfect-

ly imperturbable;
you are

the
limitless truth—

manifesting
itself as

a brilliantly silvery
rippling butterfly.

And you travel
to infinity

to visit its high,
inconceivable peaks

spectacularly
regularly, simply

to polish
and sharpen the tips

of your
wings on them.

DECLINE

Summer was a warm and
generous, if

somewhat of a two-
bit painter—until

it started taking those
pills of moonlight

and stiff droughts
of good sleeping weather.

Now, it has taken
to calling itself

Autumn—
to smoking constantly, and

behaving a lot
more recklessly; with fulsome

abandon, it
darkens every corner

and highlights
every singe and freckle. Albeit

brilliantly, it smudges light
sources, messily

blurs all the edges,
and dismisses its subjects with waved

hands, insisting that—
no, it doesn't really care

one way or the other
what color

your energy is. The only
question now

is—which color is it
turning?

THE POEM OF TOMORROW

In the future, I hope I will say—
do not waste

your time on me right now.
I believe

in too many
plain and definite things,

such as whiteness
and eclipses

Japan
and snow,

grace,
second chances,

green apples
and thermodynamics—

but luckily, also
that no one

is one way
all of the time,

that most things
don't work (are reassuringly frustrating),

that there's no ideas
but in things, but

there's no things
but in experiences;

so please,
just walk away.

Come back
and read instead

the poem
I write tomorrow;

it'll have plenty
of holes and controversy

and demurrals.
Tomorrow's poem

will be full of suspicion,
mistrust

and indecision, but—unfortunately,
I've got nothing

but answers on
offer today.

BRIGHT SIDE

Not so much a rush, more a dull
slow wave of indulgence

gradually rises and over-
takes me as I walk by

to recognize
that they—the ones

who eagerly stole away,
faceless and clandestine—they,

the ones who took the time
to practice designing

these stark gang signs
well in advance,

pre-sketched on these
hard packs of Newport cigarettes

which liter the dark and far
corner of the yard

under the familiar lumbering
shadow of their gradeschool—they

are certainly
the takers—of much more

care than they're currently
equipped to realize.

THEORY OF EVERYTHING

I don't know about
you, but I'm getting pretty
sick and tired

of knowing
what everything around
every corner is for—

There used to be dangers,
so we used to be braver;
life itself

was sacramental, so everyone
was, by nature,
religious.

Now, we've figured out—divinity
was just eternity's jazzy but
frivolous costume.

And what's more,
the entire universe is just
a habit;

the sun
is an inconclusive nuclear
bomb,

the moon is really
made of
language,

Tuesday's
parent was Monday, and on
and on.

And it turns out,
we've been looking
in all the wrong places

for everything—that is,

the grand and inter-
dimensional unifying force—

was never meant
to be found
scientifically;

it can only get
teased out of
tradition.

YOURS TRULY

I am scared—there.
What does
that tell you?

I'd much rather describe
the intricate
formal pleasure
of a single mauve rose

and its dovetailing petals—
talk circles
around the arcs of strange birds,
the slowdance

of two impassioned seasons,
the secret things I've heard
treetops whisper—

Seriously, I'd prefer
helping you picture
nature when she's undressed

and lamenting the rented
rocks we live on,
and predicting how the universe

will eventually run
out of the ardent fusion of love
and ice-over—

I would even sooner hang
confident rhymes
on what came before the big bang,

work my way up to runaway inflation,
tackle the president,
sweat about the atmosphere one day
blowing away—

I would rather take on
the responsibilities
of god

than face
the one thing
even he'd
be most afraid of.

What does that tell you?
About the way
poetry works—what does that say?
About the work
I am doing.

GETTING WARMER

Life begins. Crisis
comes. Death
follows. This

is how
history
happens to you—a spiderweb

viewed
from the wrong angle
is nothing special;

the universe is a lattice
of all possibilities—
but it's not like

most of them are open to you.
Invisible consequences
still linger,

the distance home
increases, and
no moment

will ever be harder
than the moment before
the next one gets here.

You can't be too careful.
But—once you realize
you don't have that option,

consequences sharpen
and belief in significance
gets closer and easier.

Once you're free
to walk away,
differentiation is compulsory.

The world—this one,
the one
we all live in

must be real.
Not because
we all live here.

Because—death
happens
someplace else,

and nothing
makes distinction clearer than
leaving it behind.

ADVENT

Can you see it?
It's only September, and
outside, all life
is already uncomplicating,

is feeling the
centripetal pull
of invisible
clock hands whirring,

reeling—
irresistible,
as a
black hole's center.

Can you hear it?
The imperative
of the thin air: carry 
your coherence with you, 

I dare you! Everything
unceremoniously
stretched and bent,
squeezed and rent—

and us too,
stripped of our former, worse or
better selves,
and of all of those strangers' concepts.

Can you feel it?
Never mind reason, never
mind force. Never mind
vengeance—never mind love.

After all, how powerful
could love be,
really—without any
of its objects?

A general feeling, a ubiquitous
expression,
vast and true
as the universe itself,

love just exists
unbounded, immaculate,
perfectly
useless.

MEGALOPOLITAN

The collective
looks seasick,
the whole place

has gone clammy—
but still,
each stubborn, woozy,

and translucent
individual—keeps
gratuitously steering,

rudderless and rudely,
with no map
or compass—toward

one of several million
disparate
back-alley addresses—each one

squinting ineffectually
through a fog
of rank patriotism

and exclaiming—but see? 
all the rats
are still here,

so—the ship 
can't be
sinking.

A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES

Were all the causes
exactly the same?
Are all solutions, then,
basically interchangeable?

Maybe on the curved underside
of the world's unreachable roof,
of detached imperturbable blue,
marbled though with high
stratus cloud brushstrokes,

time doesn't
fly, it holds still—frozen, quiet,
but without any
of those adjectives.

Down below, in assiduous
city streets, though,
so many noisy ideas,

so many guesses
concerning tempo,
history, chronology, space

hang from each building,
lamppost, and tree—and they
interlock and sway,
stretch and compete,

like the tangled
invisible morass
of beautiful but stubborn-
ly deliberate spiderwebs—that

each day as I
pass, underneath,
I can never go three feet
without having

to brush them away
from my face.

TWINS

This isn't rocket science; when we
aren't being wise, we're peaceful.

Sometimes, we meet,
then part, then meet

again, and part some more—
like the garrulous wavecrests

of a teeming prismatic
but otherwise taciturn sea.

At times, we speak
easy and casual across the distance,

confident as passing clouds polluting
the blue sky with matter-

of-fact revelations, with ideas
which are edge-less and vague

and so pure-
ly aesthetic, they meekly fall away.

Other times, we're sitting still
or standing

quietly
side-by-side—no blasphemy

without faith—as we each become
the dream of the other

and so can no longer possibly
treat each other like meat,

not merely indulging
the prodigal silence,

but candidly, equitably
splitting it—50/50.

HOW COME

There are things
I believe in—
at breakfast,

for example—
eggs and bacon,
forks and knives,
butter and toast.

And of course,
there are things
which I don't—

pure villainy,
death and
reincarnation, animal
souls, karma and ghosts.

And then, there are
all of those
runnier things in between,

the sticky stuff
which I believe in,
but only just
a little—

hypothetical
barnyard animals, filthy
and greedy

strip mining operations,
wheat—conceptualized
as an amber wave.

But even if I could
glue it all together,

and even if I understood
why I was trying doing that,

I'd still never know—
what I was making,

how long
it would take me,

what
it was for.

PR MAN

In this case,
the right words
are few,

must be
sharp and
clean as jewelry—

and chosen
just as carefully
as those polished

affectations are
to rare but naturally-
occurring minerals.

I am a conjurer.
You
are the conjured.

Poof—I exhaust,
then revive
my audience;

I gas them
so I can be the one
to fix them up again.

I am the menace
and the protector
of the menaced.

In every case, the
right words
are few,

and the pure thoughts
are two:
First, this place

where they are
is actually
the lounge;

it's only
the waiting room,
and I

am the warm-up act.
Second: the big star
behind the next door

doesn't give a flat
fuck about them
at all.

TWO BIRDS, ONE STONE

The mission is no longer
to put them all dreamily to sleep
with these ghostly subversions—
charcoal and smoke

and cedar-infused air,
smudged outlines
of ash across cave walls,
and burnt little matchsticks—

and then, to artfully wake them
back up again, listening carefully,
taking down notes
as they blather on about something

concerning the old story,
about visions of floodwaters
and rainbows and
halos of light in the still-dark morning—

and then, simply to
polish the symbols they've engenderd
and shine those bright fictions
right back at them.

Actually, this is still part of it, but
the mission itself
is now considerably larger. The mission
is to forget—and yet to remember

the whole world
(and all possible alternatives)
forever hanging there,
crooked and careless

in the improvident
cold of outer space;
and then, to convince ourselves
that we're actually right

where we're supposed to be—
that when great complexity
is lost, even more
simplicity is gained—

that the mission was never—play to win,
but rather:
play to not lose;  live
to fight another day."

I SAW HER STANDING THERE

No no no
no, now—it's
too late for that;
I'm far too

preoccupied—or maybe
uncertain—
to ask a stone muse like that
to wobble

and dance
with me. Trust me, I
may look sharp
and cunning,

but without somebody's
capable hand down there
guiding the handle, I'm all flash
and dangerous.

Tonight, I've got her
underwear's elastic
strapped tight
to my head

but still, she seems
unimpressed. Guess it's
too little,
probably far too little

and probably too late
for a little magic
like that;

The fact is—
I should have been
thinking
with my private parts

way back,
when she was
just seventeen,

when she knew
what I mean—when
all this didn't

seem pathetic—
when I still
had a chance.

A CADENCE

Ever since you first cracked
the lid,

arrayed your babyish
hands around the keys—

smooth and cool
and white and bonelike—

grasped that it was easy to play
pentatonic Lutheran tunes

in that hopeful
acolyte mode—it seems like

you've been
nothing but desperate

to leave—to run around chasing
the high of sharps and flats,

to bear the weight
of a considerably more labored

and much lonelier strain
of music

than: row, row, row your boat—let's
change the subject.

But listen: where are you now
other than stranded?

What have you been doing
but killing yourself for decades

trying the avoid
the place where you came from?

And which refrain
really sounds more cowardly now:

the one in which you
always stay

and only play
the notes that make you happy? Or—

the ballad of you
haunted and afraid

but dutifully going back home
to C Major?