TIDINGS

The worst thing in the world
is the feeling
of having treated you

correctly. As in:
exactly
how I needed to—

mirror of my moods,

arrows for my bow,

(to have
and to hold,

then
pull back—and let go).

Now,
I can't tell you

what it is
you still mean to me,

because I no longer
want you

to know.

MENTAL JOGGING

If the secret
answer to every riddle
is time,

I'd take a pass
on action,
and just as soon sit and wait

around
for the
gift of pure vision—I'd coolly 

bear that slow, inevitable
oxidation of
bones and fickle muscle tissue

while imagination swirls
and rises, flooding past
un-grasped,

while shredded crowds of hours
rush down, dissolve, and leech out
the bottom of the noumenal

world like raindrops
soaking through parched clumps
of graveyard dirt—I'd willingly bear it

for the time to sit
and write a poem, or not to,
but whose

last perfect line
typed
on the page when I do

will typically go—
"as always, I remained pretty
noncommittal."

PORTRAIT POSE

More unsure than 

ever in the shifting 

orange-ish evening light—

and framed by drifting 

chalk moon sky and glistening 

gritty parking lot—I totter

and resort, like a 

jerk, to the only 

game I'm sure I can master:

to gaze yet again 

upon her cagily—

as if she were ever

a piece of my 

chintzy property, as if 

she could still yet be

some practicable 

magic eye poster—now 

and then, a person 

emerging; but more often 

popping—pure 

personality. 

IDIOT PROOF

I believe
I understand everything

now, in its
raw elemental simplicity.

I've seen
the ocean—it really is

quite wide,
sometimes

churning,
salty, and bluegray;

And I know—
within each

one tiny seed!
is contained

the second apple
tree—

seriously
pretty

redundant,
isn't it?

THE LAST MOMENTS OF SOCRATES

A flat calm—both
floors
and buoys

like a dead
sea—but fuck
such sheer

dullness of uni-
formity—
no catches,

I guess: everyone
must die
his own death

(one
entrance, many
exits) and

anything left
behind—
wasn't yours.

DUH

Money is
no object;

money—
is the subject.

INDEMNITY POEM

Leave it
to the white-
haired philosophers out there—

to hold out hope
for some ennobling soul

to come
flittering
along on wings of gold—

and lightly
reimburse the body.

God damn his finicky
black guts—the true poet
must

simply despise his
entire anatomy.

Cramped and manacled
by hunger and
weakness and lust, he must

make his living thus:
he works

with fiendish purpose
to correct one
deformity—such that, dependably, another

one—will
go funny.