COURAGE

As a young lion, he loved to follow mountains
of instructions to the letter,

but absolutely hated
being told what to do.

Now, he wakes up howling about how—
every day is leg day

and scowls in his sleep,
mumbling—each drawer's the bottom one.

But this, we're all very quick to assure him,
simply prefigures

a thing
that's much bigger,

like a crumble
of rangy yellow—in an emerald city.

CLEARING

Happening alone
at dusk upon
a hollow,

illumined
by this mangy
inter-generational grove

of flameyellow trees
which rings
its ragged perimeter, I see

in an instant,
the impossible mystery
of my own continuity—

that thought
which still remains abstract,
once in a picture

is crystal—precious as it is
pathetic,
solemn, but breezily irreligious:

like these, I die
to watch my way of life
survive;

and life-after-death
snaps
to sheer certainty,

as long as there's
no future outside
of—today.

REGIMES

Every morning now—kingly skeleton mouths
grin out from camouflaged

graveyards—and pluck, as if from
these hot capillaries passing by, oddly

exuberant dissonant chords;
raising and reanimating giddy phantoms

inside me, of spooky gossamer agents
I can never put my finger on—

some terrible, witlessly merry pulse
and its catchy unutterable melody line.

I only know it's something
along the lines of—how death must start

as a ponderous mountain of potential pleasure
whose sheer gravity causes it

to implode
the longer and harder we try to conserve it.

Maybe that's why—what I've been
hankering for all these mornings

has been the taste of
hunger itself. And maybe that's why

I've never been able
to bring myself to sit and watch

the sand in my hourglass
gracefully run out,

without growing so sick
and tired of waiting—that I

positively have to—get up
and go running.

LEARNING HOW TO BE COOL

Kate, if one day
you no longer recognize me,

it'll be
'cause I've grown so chill

as to look
almost standoffishly blue

and translucent,
from praying

'til I'm pale
that all those other

dudes my head grow—not
dimmer, just

more shallow
in their criticism;

and if I'm no longer plucking
the million-pound

moon from its heaven
to drop it

all-sly in your
shoe as a present (or even

fishing it out
from my casual place

sprawled on a manmade
suburban lake,

where I smoke candy
cigarettes and chug

Gatorade),
it'll be

'cause you
had said—that's okay,

you didn't
really want it—and I finally

remembered
to listen.

LITTLE TROUBLE

Beheld by the mirthful 

eye of the mind,

the autumn breeze 

always seems 

to be laughing

at these certain small

disheveled lessors

it periodically sees—fevered

and glistening, fit to 

sneeze—flurrying back

to work

again sweeping 

newly strewn crumbs 

of dirt and scratchy 

bits of leaves 

out from the thusly- 

tickled elbows 

of concrete curbs 

underneath

the smirking 

windowfaces

of bloated

obsolescent

brownstones—as if 

somehow, those!

were the motes

that caused all the itching.

AT LEAST

The morose interstellar
wind's soundless call

shall not ever
seem to be

for poetry—and yet
sheer poetry

shall forever be
the unwavering answer—wherever,

out in the remotest
cold tendril of the galaxy,

even the most
strategically positioned of leaves

on some vast shivering silverbright
alien tree

is somehow at once, both
so casually

and so boldly
jettisoned in consequence,

tumbling
and turning,

flashing
for the last

time, all its color—
as involuntarily

yet irrevocably
as each one

of seven-or-so billion
tiny rainbows

which repeatedly
flair up,

spin out,
then plunge down around

a palish blue
dew drop—at least thirty two

times per second,
each second.

SCARECROW

Looks like—
a suit of clothes
has been out

walking around town
empty again,
because

this guy's
been stuck back at
home the whole time—

skinny, straw-
brittle, ravenous
as a stick black

autumn bird
who's just been enticed
by an excruciating new rumor

on the power line—that
inside a very few
certain

crabby apples, there exists
something better—called
a cashew.