PRETTY BIG LEAP

The trick is 

to run

and jump off the cliff—

not at the end
of careful deliberation—
but to start with.

It’s cold air’s bracing lack
of any guarantees 

mixed with the bright light

of improvised deeds 

which grows wings—

while they’re stunted
and suppressed by pre-
determination’s flop sweat
and the perpetual shade
of the well-
played victim.

And let's not 

forget: even when you’re
airborne, any 

post hoc rationale

or vindication
clips them.

HOW TO CONDUCT YOURSELF

Don't ponder. Often,

there is one way

to get through a thing.

Even
the electrons—ficklest 

changelings in creation,

born of (and

ever since, borne

along hither 

by) energy’s most ecstatic 

and spontaneous 

eruption—

will retire their 

erratic ping- 

ponging and laughter

to flow 

in soundless single file

down the insulated wire.

ONE IN A BILLION

     —after W.S. Merwin


On the last day of the world,

I would not want to know it.

Because maybe not realizing
how lucky you've been

is what burnishes one stupid 

little pebble on the beach—that is: 

only walking over your life 

day after day without bending down

to put it in your pocket
allows you to own it.

CONTINGENCIES

Ridiculous
how practical a surfeit 

of color is—

how fall’s glamour 

will strategically go

tripping on its own largess—

how a blanket

of gold leaves super-

sedes its inconvenience

and tends to do much 

more than beguile 

or interrupt us; 

it also 

just so happens

to shrewdly obstruct

our view of a future

wherein 

frivolous gluts

might no longer 

clog our minds’

gutters, trapping memory

and insulating

whatever loud

homunculi reside there

from the functional

knowledge and

intractable glory

of their own 

untimely deaths.

PROMETHEUS REWOUND

O, sucks 

to life’s vicious, quick,

steel-trap one-wayness! No,

I’m being
serious, though: how much

I would give

to be able 

to de-regret this

or cotton-off to that—

to take my self 

kindly by the sleeve

and lead him back 

past temptation to the 

crib—heck, or even 

to the womb again—

or at least, with the deft 

expertise

of a mother

wiping the spittle
from her
dribbling child’s chin, 

relax the world’s 

hinges from his neck 

to pre-impinge it

and release the stopped 

oxygen 

back into his brain 

to regain some sense 

of consciousness—then 

slowly un-remind him.

IN PRAISE OF HESITATION

          In modern wit, all printed trash is
          set off with numerous breaks and dashes.

               -Jonathan Swift, On Poetry: A Rhapsody


With all apologies
to Swift, here in post-
modern wit,

nothing’s rushed
to print that wasn’t
trash already—

besides which,
to equivocate
a bit in one’s thought—

or pause for a small 

pensive breath 

now and then—or

slam the brakes 

to swerve in an
orthogonal direction—

these 

are the best real-life 

CAPTCHAs we’ve got

to suggest—if not
prove—to the bots
that we’re human.

In addition: great
feeling takes
time, doesn’t it—

lest rhyme
should crash into
prim inane rhyme,

or rhythm get
tripped up by its 
gallivanting tongue?

I—for one—am siding
with Dickinson
on this one:

when I choose to
enjamb you with a
battery of dashes,

I am not
haphazardly
losing the plot,

springing some
contrivance, or even
just stalling—I am

half-drawing
drama's fresh 

stilettos from my cache—

and half-calling 

“time-out” and
lowering the sunglasses

to meet your eyes 

with mine—and assure you

I'm alive. 

DIET OF WORMS

Near November 

in the playground, now

surrendered to its rust,

grim crows
are the only 

ones dining out

on the wriggling
results of a low-
pressure front—

harbingers
somehow, of both
the status quo

and its heretofore 

heretical opposite: 

the tough reforms to come.

THESE AREN'T THE MAGES YOU'RE LOOKING FOR

          The job of the artist is always 

          to deepen the mystery.
               -Francis Bacon


As inevitably as Shakespeare
showed in london
with his pitch

not to take it easy, but

to take the language pro—

so now, the role of every

subsequent poet

is surely not 

to stand up
and unscrew the sun

just to examine 
and explain how it works,
but to strip prose

of its church clothes
and send it off hunting in
bewilderment’s woods—

not to tell it 

like it is, but

to fling birds at bushes
and see what child-
ish sentiment sticks—

to honor the message,
yes, (especially
in public), but

in private, to
fetishize the muffled
mouth of art 

as hooked earth-

worms worship

before the tongues of fish,

which chant ever on 

to their hearts

(as they must) 

in their rude, rusted 

pidgin: this rough, 

confused English. 

THE FIRST WORLD PROBLEM

Taxes, groceries, maintenance

of appliances;

most nights, having to
close your eyes
and consciously will minutes
and seconds to pass

They say
it could be so much
worse than that—

that it’s more like a limp handshake
or stiff kiss than a curse
to have so many painless
choices, it hurts.

They say that, after all,
you’re so much better off

than a medieval subsistence farmer
toiling in the rows. 

And as far
as you know, that’s
more or less true—but

even so: back then, boiling 

in the summer
sun or blaspheming at
the frozen ground,

at least one 

found—six days

out of seven—one knew

what one was supposed 

to do.

POEM FOR THE TIME BEING

Late October
afternoon light—so gauzy

and washed-out—
that it feels like we might

be inside
an aquarium

in god’s
chic apartment—only, we aren’t

the attractions; 

we are pure décor. 

It’s this elusive 

and brilliant-

ly delicate interim—
this hyper-exotic, temperamental 

meanwhile—

that’s the star.

FACE FIRST

To "please deliver us 

from fiction's 

necessary evil"

is a tricky slope 

down a bald

cliff face of "seems." 

And to declare yourself

"a nonbeliever"

is tantamount
to saying that you
don’t need sleep.

From one second
to the next, both 

feel oddly

doable—but, 

speaking of fact-

based: sooner 

or later,

every living
body slips and falls
into a dream.

LIBER NOVUS DIAGNOSIS

your results 

have just come back 

from the lab.

Just as random

charged particles
colliding in a blackbox

neither describe 

nor resolve the plot 

of anxiety,

what we’re dealing with here

is not 

nostalgia,

since nostalgia 

is a feeling
that requires a spot

in space and/or
time to which you’d want
to go back. No,

the problem you’ve got,
is worse, 

I'm afraid—and 

a whole lot less

sophisticated 

than that: it's

your past—not as 

want ad, or concussed,

or collectible,

but irrevocably
scalded and
cauterized shut. Think of it as

an Imaginal mic drop.
But to be 

more upfront: 

what you caught
is called 

mythlessness. Period. Full stop.

SEMASIOLOGICAL DIGEST

And in the beginning
wasn’t the word,

since before the word

was the letter.

It must’ve been like
a rehearsal

for rehearsal;

picture: graphemes

begetting

phonemes

begetting

morphemes

begetting

pairs of each other—

like the clean
and the base,

and the bass

and the treble,

and the troubled

and the saved,

and the pained
and the clever—

all of which, 

despite being cousins,

first mimed 

kissing, 

then loving, 

then marriage—

then, buying land 

for a farmyard and settling.

They soon mouthed
giving birth, 

and finally, toiling 

to separate 

substance
from purport—or

the wheat of the precious

little bit that matters

from the chaff of all 

that doesn’t.

WHY LIFE SUCKS

You were not expecting
a scientific
answer to this, I know—

but lately, 

it seems to take
so damn much energy

just to ask the right question,

that the mass of every well-

intentioned 

(not to 

mention simple 

blithe) inquiry

tends to collapse
in on itself and
form a small black hole.

And of course, 

once you get enough 

of those little 

fuckers all 

up in your

system, woe betide you—

because the galaxies
of every good
intention and conviction

which were floating
in the synaptic
gaps between your neurons,

alas, can’t
outweigh, outrace,
or outlast

the density 

of cynical 

disbelief—nor 

the suction 

of such deep 

suspicion.

LEARNING HOW TO LOOK BACK

You are told 

that, after many years

of rehearsal, 

you'll see better— 

depth will come 

in clearer, and even

small things 

will grow bigger. So 

day and night, 

you stare, until 

your learn

to pull the trigger

and shoot 

a bullet, for example,

straight through the heart 

of a louse.

Only now, there’s all 

the shrapnel—ah, the shrapnel 

is a nightmare;

you miss more 

little flecks of her

than your dead-

eye now knows 

how to count.

OCTOBER EMPYREAN

If what the say about heaven
is accepted

on faith as
what waits at the end

of the path, then:

every face 

reps an abstract expression,

and what used to pass

for pumpkins 

don’t now sit deflated—

reverse-skinned

by psychopaths, 

garish smiles
childishly gashed—

in their new patch

made of concrete

at the top
of Valhalla’s steps.

THE REDUNDANT COMING

Forget about the center—really
it’s the edges now
which cannot hold.

The slaughter rule
has gone
out the window,

and the refs grow
less bold
than a chessboard pawn,

while the worst
of us don’t even
sneak around anymore.

We all see them
showboat and 

weave around the lines,

scoring touchdown
after touchdown
while the clock winds down;

It’s easier than running
for office unopposed.
But the silence

from the crowd isn’t
stunned; it’s just
bored, because

a circus that truly
goes “maximus”
is meaningless, and

even pure diversion

will fail to meet its
stated goal when

all the world’s
a grudge match, but
nothing’s out of bounds.

THE VOID SPEAKS

Many have said
what they seek
is peace—

as if it were 

an exotic insect, bird

of paradise, or one-day bloom.

Time and again,
I’ve seen man
and woman

scour the streets or comb the web

for what they presume to have 

lost in the womb.

I’ve watched one
after another splatter paint
over blankness,

whistle past
hiatuses, build bridges
over chasms, and

march forth in its name
like some half-
mad lepidopterist, net in hand,

and ignorant 

to the boobytrapped-

pit-as-prerequisite trope—

to the fact that it’s more than
good etiquette, it’s
foundational—it’s the most

one can do
(if one does
what one can)

to carve 

out a little fallow
space in the middle

of life's hazards and transactions 

which may give that capricious, 

fleeting, alien peace 

a chance—

by which I really only 

mean: a decent place—to land.

WORK SONG

Certainty 

prevails—only 

not the sort you wanted.

For God 

is not the manager,

the foreman—or even

the carpenter. 

No,

God
is the hammer—

and a hammer

just pounds nails.

EVEN STILL

There is nothing in this world

so patient

as our longing—

the way it curls

up like a question

mark and waits,

purring phrases 

in quotations which sprawl across 

the pillowcase

and conspire with 

our deference 

to keep us awake and explaining

again at the tail

end of another

long and tiring day.