GATES OF EDEN

Scene One—
in the near permanently
beige light

which hovers
around the rectory
at year's end,

a man is sitting
in glum hard soles
at the kitchen table,

hooked like a sliver
over coffee
cups and notebooks—

fretting over
the sermon's climax,

worried
about his credibility,

mumbling to himself
that it's absolute heresy

how
Bringing It All Back Home 
is probably his favorite

album of Dylan's—
but almost entirely
because of the acoustic side.

NO TIME FOR A NOVEL

Felt like every day, for a while

we relied on

cheap, plentiful wooden reminders:

one plus one is equal to two,

fair and foul 

can cancel each other.

But when the hard times hit, 

the orders we got 

were to ration the abstract and

restrict the rational.

Belts grew tighter, skins thinner

ashy and redder 

in the cold, and all the poor devils' 

kids had to use

dry bony sticks 

to do their simple math with instead.

Only problem was: 

stick-plus-stick wasn't always 

two sticks; once or twice, it
was fire.

SINGLE DIGITS

I feel, in this freezing
wind, my oneness—
drawn and haphazardly
pushed around,

scribbled, spit,
scratch-tallied, and
X-ed out—as if this
ponderous, senile planet

is struggling
to teach a piss-ant sky
how to do basic
math with me. And he

(the smarmy idiot)
keeps making
a blustery show
of his trying—but really

doesn't understand—nor does he
see, if the whole world gets it
already, why he should also
have to be bothered.

SMELLS LIKE TEEN SPIRIT

At first, there's these
four pretty
poor and unpopular
schoolboys—

formerly sick
with measles
and colic, they stutter
and stammer a lot.

Uncoordinated skippers,
petrified out-loud readers,
domestic animal killers, closeted
floral painting-lovers—

each taking turns of equal duration
hating and resenting and resisting
just how similar he is
to the others.

*

After a few repetitions, they're now
four anxious and fiercely
nationalistic countries—
all running with equal swiftness

toward the mountain of glory
and its crater of oblivion—
but all four
packing so incredibly

close to its precarious rim
as to prevent any
of the others
from daring to jump in, shouting:

Germany! Italy!
Russia! Japan!
Germany! Italy!
Russia! Japan!

and so on,
systematically, but with
no endgame planned.
Until—that first weary note

of dissatisfaction kicks in,
puts a pretty
constipated-looking
human face on everything.

Then suddenly,
it's more like:
Hello, hello, hello, hello—
everyone's cool

just letting it play-out,
even going so far as
to label the whole
scene—a denial.

BACKSPACE ODE

At last—
can you imagine
how anything
halfway decently enduring
ever got written

before this
latest, au courant, up-to-
the-minute
master creator
was given

his benevolent druthers, his
capricious dominion—
to whoosh back
and obliterate all offenders
to the missive

with quick
cataclysmic bolts
of sterilizing lightning
waggled from the
merest tip of his

fat itchy
pink and bald trigger pinky—

two, three—wait,
half

a dozen times now, at
least?

MINISTRY OF WINTER

At the mercy of such pristine majesty,
everything manmade simplifies,
like some haphazard fraction.

No terrific, mottled Appaloosas—only the innocent
infinity of their barnyards
everywhere; simultaneous lengths of all

time and roads compacted,
creaking, and anonymously on display.
Even at the bracing

smokewhite of daybreak,
all seems equally
dazzling and incidental,

slowed to a dead pause on the brink
of immeasurable sleep. But in this breach,
what unsought but remarkable

freedom exists: every tightfisted
and usual path
having just been—humanely erased.

FOREST

Once, I felt these shallow aspirations
dislocating my body

from tomorrow, breathed deep and
supposed I needed to

get somewhere new.
But instead of changing my address,

my tack was—to continue
to stay in the exact same place,

not moving, rarely talking
(and only then in a kind of raspy whisper),

never sitting, but always
standing-up in front

of a desk all day
with my arms held out.

And sure enough,
after a while, everything I could see

out my window on the street
began to look complete-

ly wrong to me—except, I guess,
for the trees.