ACCUMULATION

With each passing week
of winter, it gets harder
to live with, harder to
live without

waking before seven
to find once again
the primly
coated neighborhood—

white
branches and cable wires,
all the status-
symbol and the beater cars

equalized.
As if
everything that was
last night has been

killed. And then raised up
one level of attainment—
younger,
but more wizened;

lighter, but increasingly
solid as carbon;
faster and looser, yet
ever more devoted

to its rigid discipline:
evincing a razor-
sharp purpose
in this imprecision.

FOR GLORY

Some day I'll have to be
braver than this. I'll have to learn
to work even harder.
Some day, it'll
fall on me
to found the new religion—

the one in which
I, in my
solemn maturity, permit things
to matter

as means
and not simply as
ends in themselves—
to admit

Sunday service is the reason
one slim brittle
widow keeps enduring
the weekly twisting of her hair
into such ruthless and
impeccable flowers.

ROUTINE HURTS

A year or two ago, I unplugged 

even the radio; all those small 

pleasures of yesterday

now a thousand routine hurts—

like a mild allergy, another aunt 

dead, a trick hip—impossible to forget

yet

simple enough 

to live with.

A quiet life is one 

in which the joyous things 

are the moments that ask for nothing—

they don't even remind: 

If I had cared more, 

would I have fared even worse? 

This is called grace. This silence 

is a mercy—

anything's possible 

is an incantation rattled-off by 

astrologists any mystics. 

If anything, 

the reverse: 

obviously, this is not 

where I hoped 

I'd be—but it works. 

 

THE INDIVIDUAL

At the back
of the store, in a
frosty glass case,

steelheads—laid
tail to head
to tail, in

edifying sequence—
each face
aghast-

yet-serene;
each frame,
a proud silver tear-

shaped muscle,
streaked pink and
flecked green.

Moving closer,
my own face, super-
imposes on

the transparent window—
the individual,
floundering

for freedom,
always striving
for greater and more personal

modes of expression—
while these simple iterations
of the same animal

glisten eternal
under the florescents,
proud and stoic

as monuments.
When I die, I think
I will leave behind

a distinct lack;
no more reflection,
no way to preserve

or to sample
exactly who or
what this was

that once
would stop in a store
like this to wonder

which of us, person
or fish, has had
the worse luck?

TRUANT

Coherent yet bewildering:

these abiding vast gradations

of January browns and grays—

gentler than even 

the persons
passing through them,

those deep black shadows 

rushing 

down to trains—

softer than 

the shoulders, lipsticks,

wingtips on the frosted platform;

truer 

than their ruffled motions; steeper

than their reasons.

ONCOLOGIC

Exponentially more
and more,
certain cells of ours have
one track minds.

If only you and I
could synchronize
our efforts like that.

Who could deny
the passion synthesized—
the heat and the sparks,

the gravity and attention
generated by
blind automaticity—

the power
exerted by
even the smallest secret alliances,

however inconsequential,
however innocent,
however soft
and wet the Judas kiss—

when multiplied
by the number
of our constituency who are innocent
and divided by a lifetime.

LESSON ONE

After X begets Y,
which is, over time
consumed by Z,

nobody ever thinks
to suspect W—
let alone A B and C.

As you're about to see, this world
will be filled with monuments
to those three.

It's only afterwards,
when everything outside of
the circle
has been eliminated,

when you are finally
not anyone—even less
than the bits
which you've been

broken into—that
some disembodied sense
will realize it
already knew

how to recite
the complete Shakespeare
from memory.

MERCURIAL

If you were just
a massless photon
barreling
toward the Earth

from across the hopeless
absolute darkness
of frozen
interplanetary space,

your entire experience—first,
of being
lost and alone;

and then
finding me, staying,
learning to say
I love you—

would be completely
instantaneous.

However,
if this thought experiment
were to be
perfectly inverted,

where I was the one
moving now

away through
those mazes
of countless infinities

at the absolute
limit of light-speed—

from your point
of view,

I would be telling you
always.

MOVING IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION

Overall, I'd say it's been a rough
month, trying to play it all
capricious and moonwalk
back from the grim obliteration of
another winter solstice.

But research suggests, if we're
galvanized by anything
it's pattern recognition amid
the novelty of challenges.

Last month, we had resolved
to be stoic
and static as the adamant ice;

but once we had the chance
to thaw out a little bit
we got desperate, felt

heavy as the rain pelting
the surface of the Earth
as it spins and revolves
and brightens all at once.

But I, for one, don't care at all
how the planet looks
from the outside;
I long to stand still

here and now, as a puddle
of meltwater on the ground,
feeling around
for the gradual tilt.

SELF-CARE

So certain days, you don't get up early
and leave
the apartment building,

exit to the street, glutted
with frozen-over slush,
and breathe
the exhaust of the blue garbage trucks

as you walk past the windows
of the buttoned-up
businesses on the block, hardly believing

the truth of expression
in that stretched-out and stained
reflection brooding back.

Some days, you stay in
instead. You make coffee
and sit by the living
room window, trying to contemplate
the steam,

like a dissipating dream, repeating
little snippets of last
night's conversation, make-believing
you're smoking like the old days.

You swear—the harder you try
to keep sill, remain calm, take care
of your heart, and all that—
the more anxious and steadily self-
obsessed you get.

You try to insist, you don't see
any damn poetry out there
anyway; at the moment,

just a silhouette
of a mysterious guy
in profile, driving briskly by,

and vaping
like mad in a shiny, black Audi.

ABSTRACT TRAJECTORY

Following intensive
bombardment—

from infancy
to decency—

to impotence
to infamy—

the shape of this life
is so beautifully

irregular
and complex in its structure

that metaphor itself
has lost

not only
its allure, but all power

of fluidity; see it
lumber as it cools

to a stubborn boulder
of sheer dumb perplexity.

Simile's design
turns out to be

even worse
than powerless, since

by now there is
just nothing

else like it in the
visible universe.

THUNDERSNOW

Suddenly, clouds 

like bleak hands overhead, 

clenching and blowing on 

seismic saxophones,

knitting a million prickling holes 

in my fingers, toes, jawbone.

Mad crowds disperse

abruptly as bombs 

which are bursting in soundless 

outer space. 

I turn around, no memory now
of where I thought I was going.

THE REJECT PILE

Tasteful poems
are obviously not these
trifling, day-to-day

things you've been writing;
at most, they're the
once-a-week, Sunday-

best variety—
forged from the clearest
crystalline nouns

each one mined slavishly
from a dark
participial tunnel

and adorned
with the finest
custom adjectival inlays

which gleam
with a rare heavenly
adverbial filigree—

all of which
are then delicately suspended
along precision-length chains

of dangling
prepositional phrases
like beads

along the latticed length
of a flawlessly perfect
symbolical circle.

These are priceless
Tiffany necklaces we're
talking about here—not your

church basement
crates full
of plastic topaz rosaries.

CONFIRMATION BIAS

     Everyone believes himself, a priori, perfectly 

     free... But a posteriori, through experience, 

     he finds to his astonishment that he is not free, 

     but subjected to necessity, that in spite of all his 

     resolutions and reflections he does not change 

     his conduct, and that from the beginning of his 

     life to the end of it, he must carry out the very

     character which he himself condemns...

          —Schopenhauer

          *

Good news—
you might think
in passive time

with the rhythm
of a drab lackadaisical

hammock swinging:

I have wasted my life. 

But you might
not have

chose to.
And that
thought might

have just changed it
from deep

in the center
on out—one vowel,

one lonely syllable
at a time.

          *

This just in—
sexy new pictures

of the cosmic
microwave

background radiation

have proven
to the stunned providers:

the complete emptiness

you were feeling
is both

a complete system—
a sign unto itself—

and
no longer counts

as a pre-existing condition.

THE VANITY

It's no contest—every morning, light
fills this room much better
than I do,

makes even the cold tile
patterns look more
familiar

than that copy of me who
slowly enters, avarice
still numbed;

who always woozily refuses
to be the container,
even as

he grows larger, sharper-
cornered, and more
vacant—until,

slightly confused, he'll start to pull
back a little from
the mirror.

Still, he usually does not look
quite as shocked as I
think he ought to.

NONVIOLENT PERSISTENCE

Does anyone know
the names
of these strangers—

who make
the most unique and
uncontainable music

huddled in the bleak
zigzags of twigs
by the gate

which rims
the drab park perimeter—
who sing

as if nothing at all
was amiss in the
frozen fog

that keeps
this feverless winter
coma going strong?

I can only determine
they're often referred
to as sparrows—

but to that crass
collective slang word
they never turn to answer;

nor does it sound
nearly specific
enough to accommodate

each one's
individually
persnickety song.

BAD GASH

January sky, empty sky,
gray-as-dead-eyes
sky, formaldehyde skin or mouth-wide-
open sky—

how do you remain so
agape all the time?
So exposed, so susceptible.
How could I too

resist healing over, welcome
supersaturation
with flying impostors? The sheer
tolerance, the lack

of pressure feels impossible.
I make a poor
open sore—after a while, I grow
uncomfortable speechless,

impatient crying out
only in waves,
not of nervousness,
joy, or pain—but of luminous

electromagnetic radiation—
obscured light
and useful rain.

THE RIGHT WAY

I hear you say—
the sky today
in every direction

is a loveless dreaming-
eye gray

and the winds are blowing
cold rain.

How can I ever be lonely?
I know

when you wake
and you go
from the window

you will not take any of that
away from me.

BLINK OF AN EYE

Even in total darkness, 

we still know
the weight 

of that shadow—

that fact of the matter,
always prevailing,

that something invisible 

in the room is driving 

even that which it 

manages to suspend.

We do not understand, exactly,
but it feels like 

we're onto something big 

when we say so.

Uttering "I see" 

makes eternity fit—

chops it into more
ponderable intervals;

but still, we can't help but intuit 

that an "is"

with its eyes closed
must function differently

than an "is"
which was always eyeless
to begin with.

BEFORE LANGUAGE THERE WERE NO EXPLANATIONS

Somehow, our building
blocks themselves
never run out.

The electrons don't
get dirty
careening around;
up and down

quarks don't get scars.
The bosons and photons
don't have memories
or future plans or prior
conditions or ages.

And yet
here we are—afraid of
that experience

which cannot be touched
or counted or
accounted for—
more often than not

believing in
something very similar.
Before the end
we'll practically declare we knew

it was there:
we knew
everything we felt
must be true

because of the meaningful way
we looked all our lives

without ever seeing
one thing
that meant anything.

IMPROMPTU

If you have ever
walked south
by southeast down
a diagonal avenue

and come to a sudden
ramshackle clearing
in the freezing brightness
of a 10 a.m. January

and seen—above the few bare
sycamores there, the triangular
rim of bedraggled building cornices,
and the boarded-up fountain lying
dormant in the center—

dazzling dozens
of undulating pigeons, all
graywhite and frenzied
and swooping in clusters,

all flecked iridescent
with the high-angled light
and perfectly synchronized
in their ad hoc pantomime;

then you might
have understood
for a fraction of a second

at once, both
the thrill
that must lie beyond a word
like spontaneity 

and the rarity
(bordering on magical)—
anywhere on earth,

let alone the universe—
of such a thing as
a single
unified gesture.

STING

Slowly and carefully
year by year,

I have set up
the perfect perimeter—

refined the edges,
groomed the green deputies,

built and maintained all the 

special equipment:

mirror shades, Thermoses, 

caution tape, toothpicks.

Any minute,
I'll catch the man

I'm afraid of

becoming

(a look-alike, they tell me,
fiendishly clever)

and cuff him 

for talking funny, acting a bit off,

or getting the least little anything 

wrong.

JUMP THE SHARK

So here we are—
our post popular series
of big-
budget nightmares

has been greenlit
for another season.
Which is good
since I'm still trapped here

under that avalanche
of my own first
draft pages
of the narrative—

hogtied and lips blue,
praying
to be rescued
by you, same as ever—only,

this year,
in order to bolster ratings
and dash
all expectations,

I'm guessing—
in a much more spectacular,
reckless, and
improbable fashion.

IN THE DETAILS

It seems no matter

what the situation—

waiting rooms, dinners out, 

hikes through the forest—

there's always
the most punctilious
devil on my shoulder;

life-and-death talons 

clenching sensitive skin,

bright red wingtips, 

bidding: Change you direction 

again! Let's go faster!

or tweeting
out to his legion
of followers 

(as if I no longer counted
myself among them):

Is it over yet? so help me, 

god—

this is boring.

SAME BOAT

O the simple rules
obeyed by ocean waves.

O the difficulties
complexity faces

trying in vain
to mimic those movements—

the smooth morning rolls
and the afternoon sighing;

the silent fortitude
ordained by the moonlight

and the painless breaking
away overnight

of form 

from its inevitable function.

So this then is the crest
and the pinnacle:

the refusal of flow
to relinquish its own edges,

to register the pressure,
the largess of all of the others

who have broken, 

long before this—

our fathomless, vast 

unwillingness to depend.

A POET

is hardly an author 

the way a maker 

of forests is— 

 

a black squirrel, spitting acorns, 

a brown finch,

shedding seeds. 

 

Then again, in a nutshell:

it's a relative cinch, 

 

to grow something complex 

as an oak tree 

 

from a blueprint 

or sketch— 

 

but it's hell 

collapsing it back 

to the acorn again. 

HERE'S WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING

Perhaps
it actually
isn't that abstract—

you look out
and see your own
ignorance

rippling
through anyplace
you don't exist.

The edges
between you
and it

glint—so sharp
and sheer
they could cut anything

living
logical
or symbolic

to shreds
so subtle as to be
impossible

to grasp at all
meaningfully as—back
from the dead.