PSST

The poem you want
is over there—
off to your right. It's
the way
the coffee sits
so still
in your cup,
so calm
on the roiled table,
so black and
so warm-
looking
next to the white high-gloss
cover of this
wretched little book.
Doesn't it? Um,
I mean—
isn't it?

THE SOLUTION

Some say—
the best defense
is to make ourselves
used to this,

with words as old
and gentle
as rain—

softly spoken,
and spoken regularly, to soak
and dilute the potency
of their poetry.

For example—
How catastrophic could
a symbol be?
those increasingly

less-frightened
people go
mumbling, almost inaudibly.

Others know—
the best offense
is probably
not to talk at all,

instead letting
giant billboard signs
do all the proclaiming.

I Just Want To Be Ordinary,
the boldest of those
signs might read,

meaning—

not perceived
as part

of the problem.

WHAT'S THE FUTURE GOT TO DO WITH ME?

Walking around
any big bomb-
gray city
is

a great way
to re-
assure oneself—that

at least
God's creation

is both

way
too
lumbering-huge

and
far too
unsure of itself

to ever really be changed all that quickly.

Still,
considering such

a gross
timescale,

one then
imagines

He—
would have
vastly preferred

dealing with
trees—
to all these

unstable motherfucking

megatons

of people.

IT'S YOU

Fight it, if you like.
It's still going to happen.

It's not
that it's meaningless. Meaningless—

you could do
easily. Unfortunately,

it's you—
staring down another faultless

surface every morning,
watching it

defy you, with that indomitable
prestige, called

The Way Things Are,
to improve somehow upon

its chaste perfection
with your prejudiced

and hypothetical burdens,
to somehow

trade places
with an uninjured rectangle.

It's you—
you

verses art.
But—just the thought of that

and it's like you've
already set to the task.

No greater pressure.
How can you lose?

Perhaps only ever
by endeavoring not to.

OLD MOON IN THE NEW MOON'S ARMS

Whenever you see
me—bumbling
down the street, I

assure you,
I'm only about half as
distracted

as I look.
It's actually just almost
exactly the

opposite.
It's just that—most
evenings, I

already feel myself—such
a concentrated
poor husk of bulk,

a prematurely
frightened and terrible
old widower;

all those blithe ideas
from before
I knew her—now ringing

as ponder-
ously many, as difficult
to imagine

hurling into motion, and alas
as equally
cold, dull, and relentless

as every last
bell that has tolled
since after.

SPHINX RIDDLE DO-OVER

I walk for miles in darkness, but down
familiar roads, disappearing often

not into space, but curious silence.
There are no red letter dates, nor any peculiar

atrocities there—just many, many
coincidences, reams of exemplary scenes

from one epic master-movie, created
a long time ago by those huge faceless proto-

human shades—and then cut-copy-pasted
over generations and reduced, so ruthless and hard

as to to fit on a white three-by-five index card
which I carry creased neatly inside an otherwise

empty wallet. Presently, I'll unfold it and
reanimate the words one-by-one, each as

perfect as your growing discontent is. I'll watch
as you hear them gradually disappearing,

and those snippets which you couldn't seem to
make-out or understand will be my grim masochistic

pleasure never to forget. One last hint—I am
pretty famous as a pretender. My stage-name is:

let me think about it for a
minute and get back to you.

BEGINNING TO LOOK A LOT LIKE CHRISTMAS

By early afternoon,
late evening
invades downtown—

hungrily
spinning dollops
of unseasonable light

into long, candied filaments,
which flicker their
semaphore lectures

across the grim, dis-
concerted faces
which improvise this cab stand—

just like
so many twenty-
five cent candles did

back
in that dingy
crimson church vestibule,

back when
poor grandma, and then
grandpa, quickly departed—

as if
our precious dead

are here
with us still, ever so

faintly,
but insistently

criticizing the living.