THE SLIDING SCALE

Heaven's
sake, I would like
to have said

to my old
friend the raven,
before he took off
for the upper
peninsula—

these forehead demarcations
are growing
both

keener—and somehow
ever
ghostlier, don't
you think? Its as if

the farther apart
a hard-hammered wish seems
to have been beaten
from its antecedent,

the finer and neater
are the filaments needed
to connect them,

and that's all;
until

the distance
between—

the ridiculous despair
which haunts
a dislocated

brain such as
this one—and its
favorite

quiet spot
at the neighborhood
coffee shop

is never
very great.

LOOSE

Whenever—and to the absolute
extent that it
can

the sun's speedy
dissipated
light will touch everything;

not only
is that
the truth—it lands nice

and flat—upon what
the truth
is.

STRAW BAN ARGUMENT

Everybody—

better stop crying! The polar

ice caps are melting.

VULGAR DISPLAY OF POWER

Small consolation
for the dark
horses—born of a billion

furnaces' hysterical burning

and after taking
so many
strange alternative

years to finally arrive here,

the tardy afternoon
light can still
plausibly appear to fall

so cold—

and impersonal—
against the back neighbors'
brick wall.

SEPTEMBER (HAIKU)

Idyllic diamonds

realigned
in savage grids

right beneath our
cleats.

REALISM IS THE DIVIDEND

The Real, in these hands—
divided by several
floozy ideals

from that intangible
pink and cream
palace of somewhere—

always yields
(in black
and white ciphers)

the same petite quotient
and its
hideous remainder

which seems
to keep on
divising forever

and repeating
the equation, like the
purr of a mantra:

words
over
the sounds of those words 

might
help you to live a less 
frangible life.

Thus, I become
emperor
of leftover numbers;

here,
I have complete
and unlimited power—

to stand back
and let—the next thing
occur.

THEORY OF HISTORY

Think about it:

even the lonely executioner—who,

with all his

might, must press—and split

some kid in half;

then sift around the slag

until he finds

the soft white music,

the subcutaneous stuff, the

timeless kind;

then, taking his guileless

knife by its handle,

cleanly trim and toss it—

must sometimes find,

washing his face and hands

a long half an hour later,

he cannot keep his lips

from whistling—

having

instinctively

picked-up from somewhere,

some moribund self-

indulgent tune.