PEACE ACCORDS

Someone
who comes from somewhere
else just declared—

the emperor
isn't
divine anymore. Yet,

his dumb
little three-
letter name is still stuck

on the back
of every shattered citizen's
creased and useless currency—

which
is just as well, since god
is a lot

like a piece of paper
money—if you think he's really there,
he's there;

if you think
he's not—he isn't.
But good luck

not-believing
in even
the tiniest thing—

in the overstuffed
and crumbling
dominion

hence-
forth to be
known as—Everyone Else Does.

INTOLERANCE

After a while, I can't resist. So,

sheepish, I slink 

over, lift the cloche 

of reality, 

anxious to behold 

"pure theory."

Glancing around quick

I pick-

up this formidable word,

give it 

a squeeze, guiltily 

I feel its heft, 

inspect 

its girth—and find, 

with dumb-

founded fingers, that it isn't

the iron-

hard and heavy

thing I'd always 

imagined. 

It's just this thin 

and rutted alligator 

skin, conserving (having 

come this 

far, I pierce it 

with a pinky finger) 

some crumbly in-

consequential fuzz

wrapping, in turn—nothing 

but a tender 

and pitiable 

lack of imagination. 

INVOCATION

Dizzying—to look to horizons
and watch the brightest
eye itself gazing,

enthralled across
the still-
bald treetops—down

to alight
upon billions of
desperate mentalities

where, deeply inside
the seed of each, a private spark
might be awakened

to leap and catch
fire, realizing a billion 
different guises—each new shape

of licking flame, a tendril,
a nascent
arm extending,

as if in the purest
gesture of giving—offering-
up to the others

somehow—different pieces
of the same
one light.

HALLOWS

Night, wet
hoary moss
and mold grow blueblack

silent—fatally
covering the old;

morning, thick
with sun-
blanched mist—the stuff

new souls
are made of.

TAKES ONE TO KNOW ONE

Darling
you're so

ego-
centric, it ought to be

a breeze
not to think—
of all

the fat slimy
stone-
blind and
goal-haunted insects

writhing away—
underneath
your

perfect spring day.

OMEN

Clot-like, the old day's
overripe fire
spreads across
the deep pink water;

faraway, the oozing clouds
look lavender (though this
is quite impossible)—isn't there something?
You're supposed to remember.

Ghostly music
plays off
somewhere—a fantasy theme
blurred at each note's edges

by the increasing-
ly slow movement
of time—isn't there?
Something you're supposed to remember.

A lone seagull, high up crescent
of wheeling silver,
stabs in sharp relief against
the conjured scene

might be willfully mis-
taken to be
a dove—if not
for the distinct lack

of olive leaf—
might even
be taken
to be a raven—if not

for the
mostly just irritating
screeches it delivers:
Isn't there something you're supposed to remember?

SUPER MARIO

Those borderless flowing Saturday
mornings, slowly drowning
my capacity to imagine

a faraway
world where eggs
and milk are hard to get.

Touch another star, why don't they?
Like he can;
just

shut up
and eat that
fire flower, or whatever.

Again and again, I bust my head
against bricks, see if
I can

snort up the dust, call it
a balanced
breakfast.

KISS YOUR ASS GOODBYE

As usual, there goes your
sallow face

in a dirty
shop window; not just

a reflection—the sum
total

of all the
things you don't know.

You'd think
that understanding

would look a little different
from its

absence—but it
doesn't.

You stop. For a
second, both of you

stop. This is
no stranger—not even

a vague shadow.
This is your twin;

this is your exact double.
Except—that rift

(which you feel beginning
to pulsate now

as a physical thing;
wavering

but thick,
cold and impenetrable,

like the tight knot of muscle
between your stomach

and your lungs) you sense
isn't mutual.

Some gaps
are real; certain lacks

are both
solid and unbridgeable.

You could
bring him water—but you couldn't

make him take it.
You could never

make your
right hand do

the things his
left one is doing.

BESTIARY

Good
morning, good
morning—how are we

doing? This
morning, the part
of god

will be performed
by
that starling—

iridescent, gold-
flecked,
under the cognac-

yellow spotlight
of sun
that's been tenderly shaving

down last night's
stubble of
show showers—watch him

flutter
down now, to begin
our production

from first-position—on top
of the back-
alley line transformer

to peck a bit
at a glistening
peach pit in the wet gutter.

PROBABLY

Even though it 

doesn't exist, there is still

this certain word

whose terrible weight is immeasurable—

it sits there on the page, like the derelict 

tufts of half-fermented leaves 

and stray cigarette 

packs, obscuring every storm drain,

it looks from far away 

like a languid ribbon of rising smoke—pretty

but useless 

in a windless sky, 

it sounds

like the unsought hysteric 

tack of hard rain 

against every midnight-blue windowsill,

not the sound 

of any one specific music—but rather, 

of all music put together's

bleary echo.

FURLOUGH POEM

Almost contemptible,
if not so
preposterous—how that

gray squirrel (rival
mammal) wire
tail thrumming,

turning dizzy figure
eight
patterns in the park—routinely makes me

feel so green-
eyed in-
sufficient!

not for
working so much
less hard that he does

for liberties—like
work breaks,
monster lunches;

for not
more often capitalizing
on such

easy and abundant day-to-
day opportunities—to abuse
more legal stimulants.

GNOSIS

The galloping heart

is a crazy horse—it'll

have to be put down.

REUNITED

At last—
it is evening.

And Cause and Effect,
wearied

from the rat-
race

of counteracting all day, can
finally go strolling

together,
hand-in-hand—agreeably talking

shit
about everything.

Even the splashiest
sunsets

don't impress them—like:
why can't

the dumb 
clouds come 

in creamy peach colors 
all the time?

BLUE FLAME

The odd rumor, delivered
in enjambed and
tremulous whispers,
maintains the suspicion

that Poetry survives—
in those wild haunted
fields, beyond
the great walls

of Ordinary Language—subsists
on raw honey, loose
grubs and dry
beetle shells—and occasionally

pays visits there
to barter for medicine—
after long nights spent
coaxing and trapping a few

wandering souls
in a fragile
old milk bottle—for use
as currency.

SOMEHOW

Every night,

real as you like—an impossibly

round chunk of

white rock goes on hanging

completely uncontested

in the edgeless sky—

invisibly

bound, but free

of charge—

and clear

(for now)

of advertisements.

RITE OF SPRING

How is it, Chicago—the sheer resonant beauty
sponsored by your early
April afternoons

must always be composed of
so many smaller and
unbeautiful pieces?

Or had we better ask
the trash-mad seagulls?—
boomeranging hard just now

about the bloated clouds,
seemingly hitting
all the wrong keys at once—as if charged

yet again this season
with the inglorious task—of
just making sure

this wheezy old organ
still works.

YIELD

Even the scrawny

disenfranchised 

flocks careening past

all seem to slow-up 

and cease their incessant 

honking for a moment—

acceding to this

puerile April

her quiet, cool quiescence

as a quite 

unhinged and lion-

headed 

March keeps 

raving 

in her girlish face.

PARISH

Sometimes I wish I was
a whole congregation;
then I'd have much
better excuses—like

this pied blue profusion
of fat waxy pigeons, messily
ranging the neighborhood:

one minute riding
high upon the majestic
voice of the April wind,

the next low-bowed, pecking
and scratching at every
crack in the asphalt
for a tidbit of breakfast—

never potent,
not concentrated enough
to wonder

whether anything
at all
is going to turn out fine;

knowing nothing
of god—only of vanishing
opportunity.

SUSPICIOUS

Around
noon, these stiller

days, I
see you lying

dubious
on the ground—

my nearest
enemy,

my dear
equanimous shadow.

Silent, ponderous, you
invite me:

sit right down, stretch out
the immediate

until it becomes
the indefinite.

Every breath, unspeakably
useless,

all alarms—
pure sound.

All my love—now
sticky,

contracts down
into—pity and attachment.

Every move
I no longer make

is practice;
every itch

I refuse to
scratch is

a preparation—
for death.

TEXTBOOK

Already, we
are past,

we
are history;

we are
legend—we are chronicle.

All those hours—like petals
falling slow-
ly faster

out
and down-
ward from the center

of the mellow
flower of the day

into a big
cool bowl of
stainless silver;

like the dismantled scrambled
letters of each of our
first and last names

whispered one at a
time from the tip
of some lonesome precipice

down toward the roiled chest
of the greatest single ancient
ocean on the planet—which,

today, scholars all
call—Nothing Special.

PATIENCE (SOLITAIRE)

One single
sweet little
Vidalia onion—
nestled in its crimson bowl

keeps begging me to
write a
poem about it—so I guess
here I go.

Chilly gray light from the kitchen
window drapes it,
makes its dirty skin
look clean and perfect,

makes it it look pale and
textured and whole,

makes it look useful—
like the habitable
surface of an alien planet;

the bowl itself, glass
and fluted, and its
muddled shadow stains the patterned woodgrain
table it sits on;

Cheesy "Clair de Lune" is playing
in another room—and I feel so bitter-
sweet pink blue and yellow inside,

so dumb
mute, mild, and midday-sadly
content to be alone

standing here
barefoot (with cold toes)
in the middle of all this

realizing
it's raining again,
sniffing

the faint smell,
and wondering—
what's all this

pretense
of an
onion for?

FEELINGS

Sometimes, it's like I can
hear myself hearing
myself talking, and

all of a
sudden, I get this weird
hunch—prefab

and
storebought—words
are just shirts

and pants
for my thoughts—which, in
turn, must just

be so many
torsos fingers toes
arms legs crotches and butts—

all bumpy
and wrinkled and ashy
and ugly and what-

not—and not one of them
autonomous; each one
nothing but

a nervous
quivering slave, a soft
fleshy pink

robot—pressed tough
and eternally
into the electrically

controlled
neuro-muscular
service of—guess what?