WHITE KNIGHT SYNDROME

In this modern
day, things don't
fall apart, they

hang
together
mercilessly;

and gradually, ritual
becomes
the battleground.

Dead
and putrefactive words
on a sacrificial page

are now, each
day,
left out—bloody charity

for this demon,
this fierce,
infernal dragon—a serpent

whose alluring and
hypnotic, slithering name
isn't Duty, but

Consistency.
And every night he
crawls out,

and stretches
himself out
into this

ruthlessly straight and
infinitely
long line—which I,

in lieu of
railing against,
must go on

toeing—
just to pass
the time.

MERCURY FALLING

It's disappointing, you say, to see
religion decomposing

into mere art;
into words—into music.

And even music, you're afraid,
is decomposing

into math,
which nothing

but space
(and what is space? for that

matter—but coagulated
time?)

I'm sorry to say, but
your only hope is that

God might exist
in the walk I just took.

Pieces of him
might well be swimming,

in the tap water
I just drank from the jam jar.

Or, he might be sitting, sweaty with a
bed sheet over his head and cascading

down over his body,
and two holes where the eyes go

all alone in real-deal heaven—
his mischievous little imagination

tricking him into thinking
some friends are coming over.

JUST DESSERTS

What is the relationship
between suffering

and its causes?

Between the hanged man
with his stiff prick

and the angel of Death,
who has no dick?

God is
on stand-by—

just a trifling
convenience—

but justice
seems a little too snazzy

of a trick.

I think
the real link is—

as soon as you
claim to be

innocent, you're
not anymore.

And the sentence
may already exist,

(after all—our
days were numbered

to begin with)

but the prison's walls
are ours to realize.

Which restriction
will it be?—unconditional

love, or absolute
freedom.

But who
am I kidding? We can't even

answer
our mouths are so full

of chocolate
syrup—or wait, is that

blood?

SWEET TALK

Periodically, I like to stand aghast
at the prodigious depths
of my own

shallowness—
gaping
up at the height

of sky,
which ripples—like a kite
with the wind of all

our
collective longing—
to realize

that it's
much closer by
than I often surmise;

and that
mine
is such a cold sort of compassion.

For the lean fact is—
sharp teeth
just want to bite things,

and nothing they find
can ever be foreign
or bitter;

because there's
only thing
that's really off-putting,

only one thing
that's truly
alien—

and that's
the idea—
of true meaning.

AIN'T AFRAID OF NO GHOSTS

If it were really
so easy, don't you think

a child could
annihilate
every last trace

of their tormented woe—and
supernatural angst

with a single,
unhaunted
look on its face—

decontaminating
the whole place,

not with a ray gun,
but with a simple,
piteous gaze?

You wouldn't need
to call the police

or one of those
crackpot ghost hunters
to come racing out

to haphazardly abolish
the calamities
of the goddamned

and reinstate
a clean iteration of the landscape.

But as it stands,
it's not as straightforward—or as
cinematic as that.

There are rules.
For instance:

1) nothing
which didn't happen
can ever happen

genuinely again. And—
2) no one can

make an everlasting decision
alone. It's only
all of those now living

together—who can
do that; and

more importantly,
2A) it's actually
all of us

now living
together—who have to.

NO SITUATIONS BUT IN FEELINGS

For example,
I don't even need
to leave.

All I need is to describe the
leaving—
and seeing

the way
lead light is cast
down from any old streetlamp,

flaying
my evening
shadow
into several pieces

on the damp, cold, gritty
concrete as I
pass under-
neath

to understand—I must not be
the one

who reflects back
on any of that

when he's safe
and warm at home.

PARABOLIC

At the end

of the line, there aren't any lines.

at the edge of every 

demarcation on the graph, 

such a delineation 

does not exist 

and the once obdurate

frontier, as if curdled by fear 

of its own fixity 

will curve back 

on itself, like looking for comfort 

in some less ostentatious past

like the tail of some 

'fraidy cat.

Returning 

from your journey—you too, 

will likely find

there never was 

any such trip;

your life has not been 

some straightforward expedition, 

and it's not because

you didn't arrive anywhere 

(no one does that)—

but because

the very first step
mattered

so much more 

than every other step 

which proceeded it—that is, 

each step 

took you farther than the next—

and in turn, 

even that very first step

was always 

fated to be

much less significant 

to the picture

than 

the stopping.

WE HAVE LIFT OFF

Rust and rot, scum-
puddles and birdshit—

these things
never seem redundant. It's only

your humanity
that gets boring.

Whenever you
have no idea what to do—

move out
into a bustling street and

spread your wings
when that special,

end-of-the-day breeze is blowing,
and feel—

nothing happening
(as usual)

and just try to hang on
to the feeling

of not disliking yourself for it
anymore.

SELF-HELP

Tense and fiercely
ignorant once,

and small—
like a miserable little koan

packed tight
in its obstinate hard shell;

eventually
I opened up

so much—I was like
a haiku

in reverse;
found myself getting

dumber—
blathering,

trying
to fill space.

Wondering—which was
the sliver

that was
worth something?

CHANGES

Treasury mounds—
dry fortunes of wood
chips and oak leaves
and cinders,

over which the drowsy worker
bees meander
and the hungry gray
squirrel scurries—

lie spread beneath
the palace of
the queenly robin
surveying her autumn province,

unhurried, perched on
a bony throne of
limbs—a sturdy,
open hand to hold her;

a sticky bare head, her majestic
crown—the trilling entirety of westerly
wind: now a royal
byzantium-colored cloak.

EPITAPH AS EPIGRAM

I may have been
born not paying
attention to nuance,

but I've since
learned my lesson—so I vow
to die listening,

even if it's
to the wrong thing.
Poor old fucker,

my future
grandkids'll mumble, turning
slow

from the headstone—
at his age,
should've known better:

RAWR
is not
what the tiger was saying;

RAWR—is just
what it
sounded like.

CREATIVITY'S GRAVEYARD

Stuck here, and still
you're fierce-
ly clinging to the
first idea—

I mean: the last
day idea—

by the skin
of your ugly, yellow,
tombstone-marble-shaped...
List, list, O, list!

lost, lost, so lost
in this Walt Disney stick
figure cemetery—crossbones
like the crossroads

betraying the crooked
way you grew up;

now, that old intersection
of creation and annihilation
is gridlocked for good reason.

the conjunction
which joins
and polices them

is no longer OR

(OR has gone
rotten, withered
away now, melted and sunk
into the silty sand—what
a nightmare!)

but AND.

AND—as in:
fact AND fiction;

make AND break.

So that's
how this works. Damn,
if only

you knew
that sooner, you could've

been gentler
to—and also, certainly would've

saved—all
your baby teeth.

ANTIPHON

With a creaky organ wheeze
these evenings—those old
buildings go
sighing

out though their stained
glass noses—
hoping to be inhaled
and infect the ones

walking past—
who certainly feel glum
as rusticated
brick in late afternoon sun,

who won't seem
to wake up,
but who refuse
to go back to sleep either.

But it's useless; mere sight
is anathema
when their mouths
remain shut

and their noses
and ears
are plugged up, have
grown used

to being forewarned
or soothed
by Nick Drake or
Daniel Johnston

instead
of Martin Luther.

A LITTLE SELF-FLAGELLATION MUSIC

Evening is falling
messy and in-
distinctly throughout

the universe
now,

and according-
ly, Enie Kleine Nachtmusik 
is playing—

tiny floating membranes
and vibrating strings, all
twinkling

imperceptibly, all
transitioning
hastily

from Allegro
to Andante—but

not me.
I refuse
to move

that way.
I am not so rude
as the instruments

which, day
to day, comprise me—

I am so patient
they call me
Doctor Adagio—

that's how slow-
and pre-
cisely

I choose
to do—
everything.

SQUIRREL

Post-rain October afternoon—
filled to bursting
with sharp green-
golden leaves and shimmering water,

you are so great and benign
to let him
dare try—to perforate
and prick

and drain you
wrinkled and dry—to steal away

your rusty treasures and
sweetest elixirs

for that dim dearth
of winter, when his throat
is parched,

and his
imagination dehydrated—and his little wife
and kids are starving.

CATCH AND RELEASE POEM

Exhilarating to hold
so momentarily
close on a string, beautiful

yet unfeeling—
another gleaming,
streamlined, well-muscled

teardrop configuration
of dovetailing scales goes
limp—inevitably slipping, quick

and slimy, through your under-
apprenticed fingers—and at once
is instinctually swimming mechanically

out toward imagination's deep and
freezing sea. But
it still appears just as legitimate

and perfect and precise
when you see it become
a sharp speck, a miniature part

of the grand and silent
bluesilver painting known as
Seascape w/ Horizon

as it did when you
first held it up
and counted, savoring

all its uncannily self-
similar parts. And sure,
it probably would've been

more nourishing
to cook and consume every
morsel, but—still, ad-

mittedly, is aw-
fully wholesome—just to look at, crude
and in the distance.

NO MATTER WHAT

Whenever opportunity knocks, it's
complexity who enters;

inertia who seizes, and it's me
who never fails

to wonder—
whether real immunity (the kind

of liberty worth persuing) follows
from a life which is really

one long and unfailingly arrow-
straight hall—made

of white
enamel-painted brick, with

not a single curve
or junction—and with

absolutely no windows, doors or
access vents?

Whether complete freedom,
however counterfactually,

necessitates a perfect
prison—pure exemption

from decision? Whether I prefer
complete immersion

in a perfectly incontrovertible space,
where only the actual is possible?

Or—if what I really crave
are the built-in excuses,

if what I really need
is a little more room

to wobble? An escape hatch
behind a loose

brick in the wall,
a secret trap

door in the floor?—and further,
whether

the very circuitous truth
of my wondering

hasn't, in fact, already
dissolved the whole problem.

SPECTRA

Sometimes, the notes all
the big guys
play are too high,

and I feel as though I
can never hope
to hear them;

but there are others—which
I'm also not professional
enough to hear, but

which sound so low
that only the littlest hairs on my
body must feel them.

So what—if
I'm not large,
I contain no multitudes?

If I don't dare
disturb the universe
because the future is determined?

If I don't feel all that
insignificant, either
at the train

station, or
beside the white chickens,
or wherever.

I don't care. I swear
I never thought—love
would last forever.

I'm stubbornly stuck
in the middle
of every endless spectrum.

When I die, I'm sure I
I won't fly
up, but—

if I'm
lucky—into
some other people.

IDEAL MACHINE

This is it: the privilege
which lurks in the
margins of blind formality,

the slavish, but the easy
habits of morning—

yanking tight the same
manila shoe laces,
walking the dog

and picking up
her shit, smoking charily
by rented open windows,

boiling water
for more tea and the
eggs about to expire, and small-

talking your way through
the big proposal—

This is your life's
perfect, incognizant
self-writing poem;

blurry on the surface
and superficially metaphoric,

but underneath, really
quite specific—
over time, less like

a rainbow, and more like
all its composite
rain drops,

less like a momentary
spike in adrenaline,
and more like

the inane itch
of some days-old fury slowly
scabbing over.

This is the freest kind
of mechanism
you can hope for:

to be handcuffed
by so much repetition,

but turned-
on—by all the patterns.

POLLYANNA

Due to circumstances beyond our control,
we never truly
believe

what we're told.
Have we all been
putting on a decent performance,

or just being performed?
Does the answer
to whether we're somebody's

expensive,
walnut-
carved marionettes

or a kid's simple handpuppets
made of old
knee socks

solely depend—
on whether
you'd rather

be pushed
or pulled
into admitting?—that

even if
all the lines have been scripted,
it's still up to us

with how much
aplomb—
we'll perform them.

ELBOW ROOM

I choose
to believe,

for every hard problem,

there exists
a soft answer—

a balm, a sleeve
to salve
this raw funnybone,

my own
small brittle locus
of universe.

Every now
and again, I like to kick

my own ass, so that no one else
has to—

nap
with my clothes on,

so that it doesn't count
as napping—

insist
on a few

things, even though
I don't know how to;

like:

One—no value is intrinsic.

Two—any cage I feel fine in
is not a prison.

Two,
two and a half,

two and three
quarters—all our goodbyes are,

in an increasingly
finer and

finer
sense—gradual.

VIEW FULL POEMS FREE ONLINE

Some truths feel valuable 

even though 

they're trivial;

others, we're compelled 

to communicate 

even though they're unhelpful. 

To write—there are no words

 somehow feels, 

to these 

impossibly well-organized  

Turing machine-souls,

like both.

It's a perfect poem, and

a full-proof

device. It tends to work 

its rational Good

by nature 

of it's own outlandish falsehood. Or,

when it doesn't work—even better; 

that just means

it's working—

perfectly.