WAYS AND MEANS

High above imposing Gothic
triangular six-way
intersections everywhere,

laughing nets of
silver pigeons flutter
and break

apart, whenever—there
down below, another
haunted man goes

tickling the infrastructure
of the whole universe,
by praying

in earnest
to his
own ghost—for wealth.

WORKS CITED

In a debate, both parties
do their best
to mean

the things
they say; it's just that
the definitions

are always
gradually changing.
For instance,

everyone's confident
in insisting—
the most shameful thing

a human can do
is choose
to love something

it's impossible
to get rich abusing—but
the humanity bit

tends to get a little
stuck between
their dictionaries' pages,

last seen—marooned
someplace
weirdly perfect

between
mundane—and eminently
despicable.

DOWN AND OUT

Once, in purest poverty, I tried
to compose a poem with no design—

but words, those little mottled black-
and-white vagabond things,

each one starving
despite being swollen near to bursting

with unkillable sound, and all of them
greasy and threadbare,

sheathed in rumpled suits of their
hand-me-down significance—

they all kept on creeping
and scrambling back into the construction

with a desperation so relentless, so
astoundingly unbreakable

that I lost my will to kill them at all
and collapsed instead on a strategy

of control—with ambitions presently
only to spin such thick patterns

of this slack spongy population,
that any discerning reader

should figure—the craftsmanship here
transcends the material.

COGITO ERGO

You probably can't trust that you're 

fully awake yet, when—alone in this 

packed city rumbling, all the pinstriped

and pastel parcels containing 

cake donuts—and the steaming rain-

spattered lids on white take-it-

to-go coffee cups 

streaming past you in the hands its

carefully waterproofed commuters—

only make comfort

to you feel so frivolous, so

momentary—so fake.

THEORY OF VERY SPECIAL RELATIVITY

Could anything in the universe
really be this coincidental?
Whether it call itself—

gravity or grace,
science or poetry;
if it wasn't unnatural,

if it didn't sound insane,
if it wasn't superficial,
If I wasn't predisposed

so regularly
to claim
in public, to know

better, I'd say
it's more properly—
the sun

who gets up
and charges
out to play

every day—
upon the celestial,
capricious, and tortuously sophisticated

topography—of every
one of your
three hundred

and sixty
five or six
possible faces.

DISAPPOINTING DREAM

Breathless and dark, I wait smack
in the middle of a deranged plain

for the cool glowing words
of this mysterious angel

who has landed close-by and pale
in the tinder, my only real company for

centuries, here under night's growing
translucent veil of slow suffocating

cloudsmoke—until finally, tolled off, one by
one, like very old dense iron church bells,

she intones the words—Son, hey, you got,
like, a lighter I could borrow?

RHYTHM'S STILL THE INSTRUMENT

Why do you reek
of muses and luck, super-

stitions and such impalpable portents
as which fickle

way the wind blows?
Were you unwittingly raised to believe

in special inevitable
angels, who hover invisibly over

every timid little
spear of grass that's out there,

cooing and gesticulating
grandly—encouraging the poor thing to grow?

I must say, it seems
as much, by the way I could see you

swaying a little
in the veritable breeze you were making

as you prayed
in the same frenzy once again

last night, for fresh
fruit—instead of giving thanks

for the chance to labor
again tomorrow.