To Be (Cont.)

Ontology is

housework

every day,

the dishes!

At Liberty

Captaining my car

past sea 

of sleep to work this morning

I blared Bach

to keep awake and maybe 

stoke a little ardor.  Arriving humming (I think

it worked), I docked and wandered out and

there

were fatbreasted robins everywhere–

hither and thither-

ing out on the lawn (as if I wasn't 

there 

at all) and winging 

improvisational songs that 

blew my 

cabin memory of

that 

carefully made cantata 

clean out of the water.

First Logical Elegy

How kind!

of dirt

to keep

its mouth shut—

neatly

settling what words

cannot.

The forgiveness

heaped

upon the dead—

is not

the kind

I want.

DAS MAN

Seems
like nothing

today
is going
your way. For

example—this morning,
some orange-
vested

toughs came along
and

stole
all the

trash off
the highway

embankments 

before you 

could notice

how perfect
it looked in fast-
forward from your

hatchback. And then,
later—at
breakfast, you
distinctly

asked for
stratus clouds

with your
deluxe crisp-
wind-and-tall-
sky combo 

platter; but of
course—someone
screwed-

up
again and gave 

you—cirrus.

ER Re: Bret

Sorry to say—

you'll probably never

be a saint;

because

you're always doing

no harm first—and death

is not your enemy—

but then again—

urgency

doesn't always visit

such ready rooms

and luckily

there are still

two ways to be

a hero—

the first is

suddenly—

and the

other—

is once.

Spring et al.

Looking

back in summer, I

don't want to say

I saw

the April sun dazzle

anything too gradually;

or remember

dimly hearing

birds sweettalk buds

from the blank

woods one-by-one;

or note

how I nosed

distant fertile

potential in the cold

wind swirling brown

and dried

Pennysavers on the Dan Ryan—

no, I want my

affirmations

to start small

at home

in upstart indoor basil gardens,

and I'd like my

spring just

flung at me one day;

fully-

automatic

and all—

of a sudden.

April Fools Day

Feeling suitably empty

and slight as a hungry

sparrow this morning, I leaned

and slurped a spare cup of

coffee at the open kitchen window looking

hard out at the crisp April sky

With a windy 

phenomenlogical

cry, I felt it

try to yolk me back

to my I 

as it practically begged 

some skinny poet in me to describe 

with decadence its somewhat 

more imaginative features

Suddenly, its tender ships of of tangled 

clouds were like myriad-masters drifting slowly 

through some lusty blue yonder or another;

and its flagrant flocks of brassy geese got 

recast as heedless v's cutting swatches

of spacetime ripples through endless 

low-hanging ponds or whatever and 

frightening all the scant small fidgety 

robins, who, worst of all, started darting 

and hopping in swing-time in almost 

no time like Charlie Parker or--

But then, 

I remembered 

that I thought I 

saw it said in a 

book or some such

that I read that I ought 

to just sit for as long

as I could and concentrate, 

single-mindedly, on the 

pointlessness of empty 

space, and the emptiness 

of sky, and all that 

sort of nothing stuff

for as long as I possibly 

mindfully could; 

so I shut 

the window, closed 

my eyes, and 

thought I would try it,

so I breathed in,

and I sighed,

and again,

and on

it went,

and I

kept on

trying 

until the 

only 

sound I 

heard 

outside 

was 

the only 

thing 

that could 

possibly 

share my 

shiny 

single-mind:

One stubborn motherfucking woodpecker.