CAREFUL

Listen, don't make a sound—
there's a starved silver beautiful

wolf who's been pacing
and snarling outside the moon-

lit window of this poem
like some lunatic wraith. He’ll never

pass under this warm drowsy
doorframe though—not even

close, I can
promise you that, dear—and neither

will I, no, and
neither can you.

DEGREES OF DIFFICULTY

If you want to know the difference
between poetry and prose,
you've simply got to spend

the better half of an afternoon
skating over the silver-plated
park playing ice hockey—then,

return home and, as the frosted rose
sky fades to puce through the
block windows—just you try

resuming that same game
down in your semi-finished
basement—in stiff socks.

SLANT-RHYMING QUATRAINS

Seemingly unable to speak
the right mantra, to see
the edge of sky inside
for the top of the ceiling;

yet there must still be
some silent intelligence—
drooling and rummaging
around the hackneyed

and shopworn attic shelves
inside me, about which these
cleaner and more articulate
selves—can say nothing.

EMBLEM POEM FOR WHICH YOU HAD TO BE THERE

It's too late, I've already decided
I'm not going to write this
poem about it. I'm telling you:

it was nothing. A paltry commodity,
hardly suitable as an article
of deep contemplation—just something

ubiquitous, easy to miss
as a mustard seed buried
in halfway-decent soil—like one

of six dozen flathead screws
holding great grandma's baby
grand piano together—

like one little pretty pink
earlobe of a seashell,
on one of those endless glossy

Thomas Kincade shores
on which there's millions;
even now, I can't even explain

how it managed to worm its
way into this sentence. There was
no reason to keep it—it wasn't

a memento, there's nothing in it
which suggested my favorite
corporate logo in its shape,

no connection to some
old girlfriend's
light-thirsty birthstone,

no talisman of those
couch-surfing, "No School
Special" good old days.

It's just something
I almost stumbled over
earlier this morning while walking,

head down, furiously toeing
the slick razor's edge of the
overly-urbanized avenue,

trying to picture
my hypothetical reaction
to sudden loss

of cabin pressure, and
rather too aggressively
trying

to get the hell out of
my own
way a little faster.

COPENHAGEN INTERPRETATION

Could there ever be
a singular idea
that peers securely from behind
two or more sets of eyes—at one time?

Is it "like" something
to be one wisp, one arbitrary gleaming
velocity arrow—in a silverwhite cloud
of arctic herring?

Do the stars
have inner lives?

I wonder—those silent nuclear processes
going on inside them

just seem so much bigger
and more
difficult than ours.

THE ONE THING I CAN NEVER FIND INSIDE

Oh sweet and
brilliantly

soft brush of eagle's

wings, oh warm,
light

breath of dawn, please!

back-off my
neck, I'm trying

to sleep.

HOW CAN I EVEN GO ON?

Please help me, I think
I must be suffering
from Man's Disease—

I keep saying "God knows"
when all I really mean
is that I don't,

and I can't seem
to express any of that
supposedly unbounded love for

immediate family; they're perpetually
having to settle—for this small
soundless fealty.