FOR EMILY

To the poet, is possibility 

really so much fairer 

a house in which to dwell 

than prose?

The abstract made tangible 

seems a double-edged sword—

to be liberated, at length,

is to find yourself unmoored 

in a closet-

sized hell

where defining

spells confinement

and the devil presiding grows

bored of the details—but never 

the impregnable strength 

of your rhyming. 

LITTLE CLOUD

Baggy soul, 

vague stray sailing past

in the sky—

how strange it will be

to know one day

why you rain;

how frightening 

to comprehend your 

delirious lightning. 

If these memories won't go, 

wash their pain—

immolate me, 

then shade 

as the winds fly the ashes 

that remain.

FANTASY

If I was a billionaire

with the means 

to travel everywhere, 

and I found nothing anywhere—

would I not still

have succeeded? 

Would I not always be lauded 

and remembered 

for allowing 

here and there

to finally coincide?

* 

How about this 

for a fantasy?—

You play the intergalactically

famous conductor 

of the Quantum 

Mechanical Choir and its

Relativity Orchestra, 

and I'll be 

the one-man crowd 

of dark matter

who does not 

applaud—but still pushes 

for an encore.

*

Once again, our

experts are astounded

to find—

the what 

and the how 

are at odds with each other;

the more sincere

we sound

when elucidating one

the more desperate 

we become 

to convince one another.

ELLIPSES

Summer's end 

in the park:

the open mouths 

of now-

exasperated May flowers

still asking—

what good is shape 

to the artist

without color?

Could the length 

of life matter 

more than the impact? 

* 

Given the tendency 

I have to keep 

cropping up 

in sentences,

I have begun 

to suspect 

I can 

out-quip

my own death.

*

For every toss 

that just feels wrong, 

there comes 

a semi-

righteous turn—

a neutron 

drips radiation, 

converts 

to a proton; 

you squirm 

in your dreams, 

as if trying 

to escape them, 

but always

relate them 

in first-

person narration.

ACCEPTANCE SPEECH

After all the thick music 

and the bleak 

diary entries,

after Nobel prizes 

and analyses 

are accepted—

isn't a poem just 

a little machine:

a firework 

which displays

(in the flair of its plume)

one frame 

of a dream? 

Is it not a we

divided by me—

a body on a page

stalked offstage 

by a concept?

Or, shall we make it

even easier to defend 

and claim it's 

more like a novel 

with everything 

but the intensest feelings 

wrung out of it—

until all that's left 

is a curious pulp 

that molds

in our grip 

to the shape 

of deep silence?

INQUEST

It's been said 

that the soul 

is shaped by its seclusion,

its desire for

tight junctures, its fetish 

for their rigor—

as such, it has commanded  

you too

to be stiff;

it has bid you to insist 

on silence 

in the library 

and coerced you to stick 

to reading classics 

of the literature.

But the truth is, 

this is a bit 

of a misapprehension; 

for whenever you 

look, what you see inside 

is edgeless, 

smooth, 

transparent, 

indivisible—and so, 

the best way 

to truly comprehend it

might be to dirty it, 

rough it up, 

abuse it, call it 

stupid now and then.

Only then, 

when it reddens, 

swells up, and 

begins to accuse you,

may you circuitously 

measure it—

pretending 

all the while, of course,

to keep your soul

at arm's length

and pay it 

no attention.

IF THAN

If there is a place 

where "here" and "there" 

collide, 

what other words 

might have syllables 

in common? 

*

if something is lost 

and then I find it, 

which type of drama

would you now say

is your favorite? 

* 

If the myriad white 

and yellow blossoms,

 

once opened, 

all act as parasols, 

does that mean 

all effort 

is cumulative?

*

if "what" and "how" are two 

dependent variables, 

how do we know 

whether anything 

has 

escaped?

*

if everyone out here 

is "sitting in traffic," 

then there's no such thing as traffic, 

and so—no one 

really is?