Poems
Unpublished
Work that hasn't appeared anywhere yet. New poems land here as they are finished.
76 poems
01A Fragile Love Poem
We live in a precinct of love but who says love should last forever? Where is it declared or written, apart from lyrics of foolish love songs or cloying verse? As love dissolves into time, the trick is to retain the ardor, the passion. The heart needs airand exercise to pursue its boundless purposes and survive its tranquil storms, to span itsvast distances. And just as the glorious, pale moon, with its jolly face, turns the tides, missing you fiercely is my constant state of being, the ceaseless thrum in my exposed veins. A charlatan in red, it’s certain that the heart seizes its prey and never surrenders while we ultimately vanish without a trace.
02A Poet's Lament
On the sharp edge of time, on the arc of the curve, we’ll hold our breath and count to 10. At least until doom comes calling.Courting us. Ever vulnerable to the verbal switchblade, the cold, white steel serrating the lines, deckle-edged like a postage stamp—cue the right margin—we’ll create a visual tornado. Craftinga chapbook or compiling a tome isn’t going to land us on the cover of The New Yorker or The Paris Review (the “The” must beimportant!) or Rolling Stone or anywhere else unless we are the next Mary Oliver or Ellen Bass or Ada Limón. (Spoiler alert: we aren’t.) Fame is an unreasonable expectation, a metaphysical pipedream. Masochism is the order of the day. Plying sounds, syllables and inflections without consequence, often a mere spittle of words, we foray into the absurd. Searching for vital signs of imagination. Checking our internal metre, like watching a fareclick up in a taxi. Forging headlong into the ether with foggy headlights. Feeling the Satanic breath whooshing on the napes of our necks. A mug’s game, like sending out darts laden with meaning. Daring us to hubris. Mocking us. Deluding ourselves. Inviting constant rejection. Instead, they (the ubiquitous “they”) should be grateful for our (unpaid) work. At least sometimes.
03A Random Wander with Purpose
An ant wandered by carrying a sesame seed, a crumb of some sort anyway. (I didn’t inquire.)It may have dropped from my bagel, meaning we both enjoyed it to some extent although I didn’t knowingly share it with the ant or anyone else for that matter. I had no one to share it with, even if I felt generous. (I didn’t.) The ant scuttled to its anthill like the second hand of a recently-wound watch, seemingly with purpose. Its mission accomplished, minestill in progress—a search for spiritual sustenance which I never seem to find.
04A Study in Saturn
Only love stems the effluxion of time. A canopy of passion shelters us in the breeze as I summon a recitative, a muezzin’s call to prayer, just as we used to listen to Leonard Cohen songs by candlelight, wax drooping over straw Chianti baskets. We were in a sanctuary of care, making up for soon-to-be-lost time. Now a grizzled man in a green wool toque, hunched over from life, I snatch the first frozen breaths of the fall. Under a no-frills moon, fallen elms, whitened birch, ice-dappled grapevine leaves of scarlet and gold line our path. Without warning, trinity bands of crystal ice and dust join forces around our fingers, daring us to dare and dream. Sadly, we don’t know what we don’t know. And despite our best efforts at self-sabotage, our own troubled orb turns on its axis while Saturn’s rings are disappearing faster than we can judge or comprehend, the rank betrayal of a friend. Still longing for connection in a spatial vacuum, Saturn’s rings will no longer exist, say, a hundred million years from now. Give or take. In the meantime, we’re lost in a variable nebula, trying to nab a clear view of their current orbitwhile we still have the chance, as children once clutched at the elusive brass ring on an old-fashioned carousel. The cosmos doesn’t stop and wait for us, and there’s no place for idolatry or hero-worship. Peering through the haze is the best we can do. As King Alfred mused, lo, these hundreds of centuries ago, fate is inexorable. We might heed his admonition.
05Abstract Love #9
Respecting no boundaries, a whirlwind fractures our silence, crackling like lake ice under foot. Fraught and high on danger, we scatter our love-residue with perilous repetition. Dreams abound in double shadows, whispers of light bathed in doubt, our chagrin easily caught by a forcible hand, just shy of a blind alley but white as a spirit. Taking yes for an answer, there are no phantoms here, only mortals clinging to the wreckage of time, the pealing cathedral bells offering their rhythmic backdrop. We collect staggered breaths, soft as angora, under streetlamps. The leaners fill the air with idle chitchat. Each dice-roll yields spectral life-odds, the random loss of chance appearing as spent ashes. Catching a glimpse of thigh above a skirt hem, I am caught thieving in the dark, a snake on hot coals, sizzling. Tackling a runaway cloud, escaping feral winds, heralding a fateful quietude, we jack the chains of sin over an old-fashioned transom. But what to do when the rain begins to fall? Surely pray for the reassuring dawn. It holds the key. Although faith is nothing but spectral superstition, celestial chicanery, it still comes with no tariff.
06Abstract Love #4
Even bereft of hope, an abstract painting ends when it’s finished,That last splash waiting its turn as subdued colors dissolve into rain, a carousel in a verdant forest, I’ll always carry you in my heart,a transverse of love, my gaze transfixed as you were always too beautiful to capture head-on. Turns out I was a stand-by until the real thing came along, a romantic rounding error. Bear in mind that nothing says a perfect love will always last forever.
07Abstract Love #7
I couldn’t tell from the outside anyway, as it was hard to penetrate the defenses you erected, especially after the fall. There was fate, inescapable and profound, hanging around like an existential moth, not wasting a breath on niceties. At back, there was the inevitable scope of time, its unfailing vector pointing directly at your heart. Ah, your heart, that taut vibration between chaos and order, a quivering filament in an incandescent light, a jangled nerve center. Swirling in a timeless eddy, snagged in a web of frenzied encounters, your heart still found no regrets. The sleep-induced moralizing is at an end, no longer needed. Upstream, redfish reflect the rhythm in quartertones, just as cataracts occlude my vision. This is where I left you, and we deserve better. Twinning the span leaves only ashen residue, grey detritus. Forged in agonized verse, my contorted words are juxtaposed for no reason. Questions may have no answers except as a cluster-fuck of spatial void, a torrent of nothingness, a spittle of syllables. But this is my answer. And my offer. Always.
08Abstract Love #11
I find my lodestar just as a foreboding moon appears, reproving me for being late to the lunar afterparty.Sad, as the moon is a harbinger of sweetness, but to unmask the harlequin is to court disaster. More thanmere jest, a litany of unexposed truths pervades my darkening space. Love is nowhere to be found, begging the question, is it really love at all or onlysomething that I’ve heard love called? Longing? Lust? (Any sentiment will do.) Fooling no one, soft white shadows presage the deathof time while the magic of living consumes all my energy.It’s surely worth believing in a guardian spirit (or evenin a garden gnome) as ghouls seem to thrive effortlessly in the dusk. Maybe it’s my misperception but lucky them.I can only decry the Fates who lured me here, without artifice or design, leaving me mired in a red-hot blue funk—a shroud of no mirth.
09Always Something in the Way
At around 11:11 a.m., the pelicans and ospreydive and then dive again, mostly without success. It’s a life, I guess, playing the strings of timefor want of something better to do. Anything. As sheets of sleet descend, fearing a returnto the void, whether I have a thought to addis a different question. At the water’s edge,devoid of theology and attitude, the last pregnant droplet is ready to fall, the outcomeas invisible as it is inevitable. Blinking awaytears, I catch you changing our clock battery, but encountering the same predicament as those of the drab plumage, the stubbornerosion of time.
10Angle of Incidence
We need no copilot for this heady venture, no one held to ransom. A celestial kaleidoscope pivots and the stones tumble in their chambers, giving life to colors in sharp animation. Without warning, we foray into an arbor, picking our way along a broken trail. Zero gravity abounds, holding us steady against a ravaging wind. It should keep, steady-fast, always the lover, never the loved, facing a god whose meaning can only be felt. Verdant boughs protect our sanctity but it’s a misplaced belief in an unknown, a hollow gesture calling us to blind worship. If our purpose isn’t to love each other and ourselves, there is nothing to do but gauge the angle of incidence between the heart and the heavens, at least if we can harness the power of our own capricious sextant and peer far, far into the majestic void.
11As If
… you can tell the difference between a crocodile and an alligator, although one of them looks like a distant aunt of mine. Maybe it’s nothing but the shadow dance of a fragile life—skeletal veins, brown-paper thin and crumbly to the touch. Many’s the time I wish I were blessedwith a lack of self reflection, living happily benighted, as I suspect life would be simpler. Still, I’m a victim of my own circumstances,awaiting a second chance but hovering close to the dead zone. As if differentcolored eyes skew your perceptions, like looking through a construction site grille on a random walk-by. As if starlings changed their direction all of a moment, and the earth tilted on its axis two degrees morethan usual, invoking a momentary lapse of faith, like turning diamond crystalsinto sand grains. As if the Faroe Islands’ whirlwinds could thwart my ardor, or as if a slice of red velvet cake or grasshopper pie could recast the moonto resemble Mars. As if a chance encounter could cause acorns to fallin the spring. Forgive me if I fail to sigh at a fallen elm or poor willow, just know that I count our passing time as a steady descent, spiraling into oblivion but never basking in the inevitable. And if your love weren’t spellbinding enough, it snared me whole, without a backward glanceand punched me right in the gut.
12Atwirl around the Moon
Atwirl around the moon, the light flicked onto our naked shoulders. A soft light, a sweet light, it beckoned us, swathed in pale yellow, beyond the beyond. Atwirl around the moon, we’ve kept our peace, our part of the bargain, even putting our future behind us irretrievably and without reproach.Atilt at the sun, no one is any the wiser for our sins, our transgressions. And, really, why should it matter? They’re harmless, our sins, forged from Vulcan steel and cats’ fur, but let’s be real. Purloined by unseen hands, you were wrested from me for no good reason except that the moon was jack-full, and you were caught in its predictable orbit, its lunar transparency. Leaving me with the celestial undertow, the cosmic detritus, I joust with meteorites, and still only see the dark side. I’m unlikely to recover, but it was you all right, you, seen only in my rented dream, a chronic condition of my jangled heart.
13Awaiting the Moonglow
It’s well past time to snub the admonishments and portentous warnings, those graffitied on construction hoardings and tenement walls. Just as treacherous shoals entice the unwary, I catch a grizzled version of myself in a shaded pool, taking sustenance when offered. Life’s perverse narrative whooshes by, seemingly devoid of meaning yet ultimately fatal. Muddling tea leaves and consulting the I Ching but coming up empty, I cue the celestial chorus and hear the natterers disturbing each other on nearby tree trunks. In sync with life’s cadences, its rollicking airs and rhythmic jives, I may yet live another day. Chancing inward to recast my transgressionsI catch only the vestiges of dusky shadows but ever-await the luminous moonglow radiating from your wise, grey eyes.
14Breathlessly Waiting
As it’s you and me now, we should have thought about this already instead of relying on the noblesse oblige of saints and miscreants. Anyway, it’s better for us in the abstract, certainly not for the faintof heart, always to be wracked with survivor guilt,like deploying your cutlery Neanderthal-style.It’s a steep trajectory of uproar but we’re not peopleto stumble or crawl, as it’s well beyond time for chagrin or embarrassment. Life is always richer with some cowpunk streaming and a clean, not dirtyvodka martini in hand. Lemon peel, please. Fuck the olives. And the olive brine.Howl. Then howl some more.
15Chain of Circumstances
Crossing hidden barriers or solving tough crosswords with you in bed, it’s all of a singular moment. How many more might there have been, how many nights of possessed desire? Who was to say? We never worried about paying the celestial Loan Shark for our innocent, blue transgressions. Sheltered by our gleaming moon and bolstered by unsung songs of our own creation, we found our yesteryear. Sharing secrets outside our usual ambit, we left the knowable world behind, the roving lights sparkling justbeyond our reach. Being together made scant difference when the time bell rang its final note. The earth veered off its appointed path like a hijacked plane, leaving me ever-blurring memories of you. Ardor would have powered the rest of my voyage throughthe galaxy if I hadn’t lost my alluring Astraea somewhere along the way.
16Confounding Interrogative
Although the existential question, I know you know the answer. Or are we merely exchanging pleasantries? I’m fine with that because there really isn’t an answer, at least a good one. Or thereare many answers. I’m peachy, for one. But that’s a lie. Heartbroken catches only a corner of the truth. Torn. Shredded, but not in the gym rat sense. Missing you fiercely is a cogent reply but that’s an action, just as waves pound the shore, constant and true. Yearning for more time together. Again, an action, but a promising one, at least in theory as I can barely pen these words for the spiritual malaise in which I am mired. Blue is a useful proxy as I can’t get bluer than the aura enshrouding me. Why ask so deep a question when the answer is obvious? When, as I said, you already know it or doubtless have an idea. Are you ok? is more transparent but still poses the same troubling inquiryand to which, turns out, there may be no right answer. Or answer at all. Wait, what? Am I ok? No, I’m not. I am enraged at the injustices and stupidity, at the greed and self-interest, at the ignorance and intolerance, at the rampantprejudices and hatreds of the world and its putative leaders. Otherwise, as ever, I’m totally crazy about you.
17Confronting the Void
You can’t go back again, even when you be heavyon the sauce. It takes more than a pounding bass and crowing drum to conjure the final reckoning.In the near distance, shaded palms sway strangelyto a faux-disco rhythm as our fortunes, once in synch, have faded and failed us, like empty mortar shells. Showing no remorse, the gods, whoever they are, wrested your halo from my grasp. In its place, mine-cutdiamonds cast an eerie spectre on wispy clouds—moon rays and dangling legs wearing white moccasins forge points on a celestial exclamation mark. To bear life’s vicissitudes, I rearrange my slushy vocabulary, foraging in the ghostly black depths and casting outmy demons. More gnarly than it seems, tornadoes twist in, invading our space, no Moses to save us, only treacherous winds in front of us. Sirens howlin the crepuscular gloom, an undulating chartreuse, all without a hint of a lie or word of warning.
18Crossing the Trestle Bridge
At 4 o’clock in the morning, oil residue shimmered in the turbid water. Under the trestle bridge, blue and green melded together like avian plumage, showcasing their allure, the sky a crimson tinged with orange. As the water spiders skimmed their random way along the surface like zany collegiate oarsmen, all to the beat of quartertones, the past quickly merged into a murky, north-facing future. Obstacles to overcome, I sought refuge from a rapidly melting ice floe with other dispossessed émigrés looking for a spiritual lifeline. The world began to spin as the bridge beckoned me to get across, find a fresh string and don’t look back. It’s strange how some things flash in gold neon, too bright to miss, like mene, mene, tekel, upharsin.
19Deaccessioned
I didn’t need more than a hint to disappear.Frederick Edwin Church’s The Iceberg had hung innocently enough in the Dallas Museum of Art for years, bothering no one and providing joy to many. In 1979, it was sold at auction to raise funds. The outcry was vicious. How Church felt about it is hard to say; he is still dead, immune from havingto offer an opinion. How other artists alive when ennui and time ravagetheir work feel, I also can’t say. But when no one looks any longer, lingersor absorbs the penetrating power of the colors and lines melding into their psyches, it is surely time to quietly snatch the works from the pastel walls of the public museums and galleries and let them be sold into good homes. I was cast into a desert with no oasis, my sole constant lost, my lodestar burntto pieces and thrust back into the cosmos with no respite, no return to its prior sizzle. A leaf turned color, a fallen wind, a speck of hourglass sand, my former zeal fading with scant ceremony or notice. Cursed with perfect recall, I’ve become a spent placeholder, an afterthought, if a thought at all. A scorching emptiness, my brow furrowed with puzzlement,I’ve been deaccessioned, leaving a hollow cavern where my heart once thrummedwith yearning. Like Church and the other forsaken artists, I now howl at the fates instead of whimper into the void.And like them, I thought I’d be nothing more than collateral damage, but I was wrong.I am the damage.
20Dead End of the Dealing Shoe
Dead End of the Dealing ShoeFading into a losing vector, a total waste of time. Money, too, when all I sought was a little hot action, a tropical sun, a starlet on a runway. Perception can’t answer for life’s invidious dilemmas, save knowing they’re like the hidden thorns on Black locusts or Prickly ash. Who am I, anyway, to preach to the newly-converted, when they’re proselytizers themselves? Why not try to describe ‘green’ to a person who, blind since birth, has never seen a blade of grass? It’s all psychic debris but there’s nothing to be gained by whinging. lt might be different if I believed in the efficacy of prayer but where’s the sense in that when I’m always burning spiritually empty calories. I’d be better off taking aesthetic sustenance from the braying trombones of Ravel’s Bolero. At least poetry can be found there. The tell is in the texture, the release from constraint. I’d gladly stay the course but it’s only moondust and atmospheric particulate, speckles of trodden beach sand. The cards played tell a grim tale, a hazy silhouette on a fading shadow. The missing black jacks are scarcely to be seen but stay nestled in the dead end of the dealing shoe. So I strike a match on my boot heel for luck though it affords me little but the specter of an afterlife. Maybe it’s that time of humankind, but I wander through the changing dimensions suffering stimuli underload as my phantoms dissolve to nothing, and as the blistering sun morphs backwards into gloom, I along with it.
21Dénouement
That it may have been inevitable doesn’t make it any easier to bear. Maybe it makes it worse, who’s to say? No chance for closure in today’s hollow parlance. But the end has been in sight for a while. A shift from Drive to Low in under a second. Texts receding like coastal erosion, fading like invisible ink, dying like the last of the passenger pigeons, though hardly as tragically or wantonly. It took three cappuccinos to process the neglect or, kindlier, indifference or, even more kindly, the accidental slap on the alarm button. Nothing here now but irritatingly persistent mosquitos, and these residual words on the page masquerading as a poem, a false construct if ever. Certainly, no whimper let alone a bang. Much too late for praying but there’s nothing left to say, anyway.
22Detour
Upturning into the mist like shredded water, streaming forever, Fate gently disappears. Touched in splendorous velvet, gold-inflected lapis lazuli, I feel the tunneled winds fiercely hurtling over each other, shift-shaping what is to come. I take the detour, leaving uneaten grapes on the marbled white styrene. On the way, serpentine green confronts me, track-steeled on the edge of an abyss, feral-dark, moon-blank, staring blindly at the overflow, hearing the roaring cataracts, catching the lightning chains of yesteryear. The celestial fire leaves no debris, no residue along its majestic trajectory, only an abundance of doubt, a whirlpool of regret. Assuaging my uncertainty, I partake of the next harvest, the annual yield of ripened grapes, the ones that the unreliable bastard, Old Sol, infuses with sugar. It parallels the earth’s orbit around the sun. Mine, too. So, I take the end run. But it makes no sense as there is no time left for repose, just as God had planned it. (Or had she, that fictitious, faceless marvel, the One you cannot see. Or unsee.) When the turbulent serenity pervades the air, it’s no worse for its invincibility. We ought to have heeded that bright yellow detour sign instead of the outspanned wings of the devilish black hawk. No good could have come from that encounter but we were warned. As it’s now down to base zero, I’d take the surrealistic detour.
23Didactic Refuge
Over a fierce dialogue with the treetops, I find carousels in the clouds, circling above cataracts and cloverleafs, trying to straighten the inflexible path of the road ahead. Sconced in silver birch and white pine, it takes two. No one and nothing is that innocent, except maybe the wind. Scrimshaws arranged salon-style for viewing ease. Bowing to the dark, I travel cognito and count the roses two by twoas they preen and primp, a panoply of color and kaleidoscope of air even a parietal eyecan’t see. Caveat lector, I need to see with my own hidden eye, but the shamanic incantations bode ill. Never mind! I’ve seen the gunmetal ripples on the turbid lakeand the snowy white zaps on the backs of the loons, baby in tow. The flaming red creston the pileated woodpecker, too.Will you still be here?
24Fearing the Fears
Fear the unknown, the clock hands running backwards, the cactus spikes splintering into tiny arrows, slick green shards, all before the arrival of the intrepid spirit, disguised as a dark knight, a dangling participant. Bursting into light, the sun scatters its blue particulate around us, sheltering us from the furies, denying their malevolent intentions and sparing us the doom on offer. It’s a godless yellow benediction, trinity-like but one worth savoring.
25Felix is Gone
Harder words I’ve never heard. Difficult to imagine. Unfair doesn’t begin to describe his fate, but he was more than much-loved in his short life. My wife asked me to call her from Florida when I awoke. She described the scene—his lone, anguished howl from the living roomas a blood clot came loose and trembled into his heart, killing him instantly. No pain, the vet said, but how would she really know? I hear that howl in my head, in my imagination, in my being. Our little hooligan wasn’t even two, still a kitten, albeit a hefty one. We couldn’t have known. Nor could he. He would have been shocked. It was a silent killer. Malevolent, pernicious. And that whoosh you hear is not from his being swept into the bardo. It’s the hollowing of my heart. But he’s gone, now leading the life of the just, I hope, fulfilling his best feline dreams. Unworthy of piety or worship, meanwhile, God is a charlatan, a fraud,and a vengeful magistrate. I don’t know about you, but I need no further proof.
26Fierce Urgency of the Silence
Leaves don’t fall upwards. Whatever spirits they possess surely mutate into atmospheric particulate, the better to appreciate the crisp essence of fall, but also to embrace the existential. I knew a moment when my dolor was tangible, when I could feel your powerful chains across my chest,leaving me unable to breathe, unable to grasp reality, but now just an indelible scar on my psyche. The trees and clouds and streams also felt my melancholy, along with Earl, our resident groundhog, who briefly paused from surveying his domain to cause a fissure in our otherwise ethereal space-time continuum. If this is too overwhelming, you must know that our fates are already nestled in circadian flywheels, the ones we use to reflect fractals of time, but now out of focus and lost in life’s hidden matrix.
27Fool's Gold
Don’t call me Frisco, you said. It’s déclassé, de trop. I’m rightly the Paris of America, the epicenter of liberal thought, Chez Panisse and the Legion of Honor. Why then have you fallen on such hard times, I asked? I was advised last visit to take the hotel car to get a haircut, just across Market Street on a bright sunny day or they wouldn’t bear any responsibility for my well-being. How did this happen to the coolest city west of Chicago? Where is the San Francisco of the 60s? The city of Leary, Ferlinghetti and Joplin? I once knew you like—Make Love, not War. I guess you’re now lost to the ravages of time and circumstance. Pity.
28For Which I Should Be Grateful
Watching the red pines napping on a grey day, I dare to close one eye. I am still breathing so I must be alive. I should be reveling in putting one foot in front of the other, but your dazzle is occluding my vision. Letting the rain wash over me anew, wavelets of wind carrying me abreast, I would take the I from the I who is me but it’s illusory. It’s the ache that is real, especially confronting Sagan’s pale blue dot, now showing even smaller and paler. What I’d give to lead two lives, the one I crave and the one for which I should be grateful, but there’s no accounting for a selfish heart. I sense the dew forming on a tear-dappled leaf. I hear silent echoes, the ever-crushing sadness at my loss of you. Time can’t be hurried. Without pity or remorse, it ticks away at its own pace on its one-way journey. Trying to recapture the past is for conjurers and knaves, and a broken heart is meant for howling into hostile winds, not suffered alone in silence. As I log my inadequacies, you’ll forgive me if I slowly pull the dagger from my inconsolable heart while I await the uncertainty of tonight’s empty moonscape and tomorrow’s hollow dawn.
29From Somewhere
They must come from somewhere, these words. How do they emerge from the carrier in which they’ve been hiding with reckless abandon, awaiting their turn in the spotlight. Pinch them out, as with wirecutter prongs? Pull mightily, as with dental forceps on a recalcitrant tooth? Cough them up, as in a shakedown by marauders? All unbidden, they show up imperfectly ready for me to mold them into something tangible, comprehensible, for your amusement or edification. Your education I leave to the institutes of higher (and lower) learning. Cropping up most often is not rage or remorse or regret but sheer, rank, searing jealousy, incessant and irradicable, stemming from loss, my loss of you. And I’m lost trying to voice it. “Ineffable” comes to mind and I don’t even understand the word. I might as well be describing veins on a leaf or the hoot of a barn owl to come close. Try to depict the musical F# verbally and you’ll see what I mean. Ineffable at least is a placeholder of recognizable coinage, a proxy with purchase. Still, it’s no use, as the demon shivs its ugliness into my psyche at the most inopportune moments, namely, every possible chance it finds to cause mischief like my hooligan of a cat. Jealousy trolls around my tongue like dry saliva, its acerbity shredding my heart with dagger-like precision. Unlike “guilt,” which has no useful purpose, virtually or otherwise, jealousy punches well above its weight in derangement and staying power. It’s irrational, like certain numerical calculations or combinations, but it never fails to do the trick, complete decimation of my articulable senses, the ones once knowing beauty and joy, but no longer. Oh, just fuck off. Jealousy, I mean. Guilt, too.
30Gramps
Of the old school, Gramps carefully cleaned his double-edged razor blades after shaving. They were Gillette maybe, or Wilkinson Sword blades, whatever was most affordable. I never knew what good the cleaning did. He used a shaving brush in the old-fashioned way as I do now when I’m not paying cheek-service to the scruffy look of today’s hipsterdom. In fact, Gramps still had nicks and scrapes and left-over patches of greyish-white beard after shaving, but it suited his conciliation with life. It made me sad then and sadder now. It wasn’t that Gramps could hone these blades like a straight razor, unfolded and ready to slit the throat of the innocent, Sweeney Todd-like, on a strop to make them sharper, to make them last longer. Instead, it seemed to me an effort without appreciable effect. Cleaning the razor itself I could understand but as I see it now, I must have missed the point. The point was chance, the chance, that somehow it would make a difference. (For the next shave, perhaps?) But it was the meticulous taking of that chance that is surely the meaning, the takeaway in today’s parlance. Naturally, economy, and reluctant disposal played their part, unlike these last, all-too-many years of our collective discarding everything once the new, improved thing has come along. Having worked as a tailor all his life, he chucked only that which was truly at its end and ultimately, irrevocably disposable like cut cloth pieces that no longer fit. It made me, shall I say, respectfully sad? As we lived with him for a time, I knew him best of all the grandchildren. He was gruff in a charming way, not without repetition or temper. He walked Kew Gardens every week or so to retrieve a new library book, not that I saw him read much, but he wasn’t a character, just a man from somewhere in some old country who made Canada his home (as I was then doing) and at peace with his place in the firmament, surviving the Great Depression and raising two children, my stepfather being one of them. Why didn’t I learn more or remember more? Day after day, I can’t stop thinking of his cleaning those blades. And whether he knew it or not, I missed his funeral for some lame reason I still regret, fifty plus years later. Maybe he’s forgiven me (which he ought not to do) but maybe not. Who is to say? Who is to know? He wasn’t really my grandfather, but it didn’t matter.
31Grey Day
Almost without warning, you faded into the mist, like rain drying on a roof after a downpour. No rainbow in sight, I can feel the grey, I can almost touch it with the swirls of my finger pads as if these words hadn’t already been carved in the airy sky. But of course, they have, as my life skips away, lost in low-hanging clouds. Still, there is no need for you to rouse me from my reveries. Or for you to check on me again. Maybe it’s just ambient magic or the hint of witchcraft as there’s no other explanation for your unswerving ardor that sustained me for so long. Even on a grey day like today, when your absence tearsat me like the fiercest claw or shard of glass, my heart still tips topsy-turvy over you.
32Guilty Verdict
It rings, an unanswered phone, a divided heart,sheltering a long, bright red river, knowing the words to every song. In the hidden country, the sap from the maples runs thick, oozing brownsludge that turns golden in the harvest, the foghiding bells, a fissure in an otherwise stable, or at least predictable cosmos. But that was then.When thunder came in whispers, when lightning cameunchained, when the rivers overflowed their banks,when flash fires caused unspeakable havoc, the treesto crackle until dawn, all a fevered mess, as if by prestidigitation, evil sleight of hand, not explainedby any addiction to social media or careless toss ofsulphur matches. Unnatural derangement.The verdict is in now, the jury has spoken. The human condition is on trial and unanimously found guilty as charged. Guilty of exploitationand waste, of self-indulgence and despoliationof resources, without care or remorse, leavingour offspring and theirs to fend for themselves.Shameful! There’s no other word for it.
33Haiku 2023
cold, shimmering hands weave a mystical nexus betweensour cherry and treeinto the chasm, plumb depths, soft cadences echo on limestone, searching for real meaning light crashes our passions,now daring golden threads to open,to sleep by solemn songshadow-thrown mysteries offer sudden resolve, whenlit by lurid moonglowan innocent, steady visage casts a blind shade inside the nine-banded armorsix nights in a row resistance held, inviting, I can’t find you anywhereslate gray is deceit, as portence awaits us all, a leaf aloft, spinningapologies are moot, if the truth were still wavering—the way to tomorrowon Sundays we order the books we will never read,longingly, forever **Last verse published in Password, the Journal of Very Short Poetry, (Volume 1.1)
34HeartSong
I think I hear a fandango in the offing but it’s only a siren’s call, moaning steady and low. On a brass sketched swirl, the holiness of natural affinity and sanctity of magnetic attraction play havoc with my psyche, triggering a chain reaction of pure envy and want. Short sputtering bursts of sweet reminiscence and feral whim—the whiteness of air—barely fend off the persistent intrusion of gnarled spirits, the greyness of closely-held secrets. My solipsistic turn, never forsaken, is pierced by a dagger for pursuing spangled skirts under an elm, a rococo painting. Ghosting looks are all thatare left, beaming treasures now lost to me. As deranged as trying to peel the blush from a grape, I watch through blue-textured squalls as you drift from my life like the neap tide in the evening.
35Heavenly Angle
No copilot is needed for this heady venture.Fair winds hold no one for ransom. The word is good enough. A celestial kaleidoscope pivots and the stones tumble in their chambers, givinglife to the colors in sharp animation. Suffused with fervor, a leaf douses a caterpillar, one who has sought refuge on its spindly veins, with dew.Never knowing how the leaf flutters, we foray into an arbor, picking our way along a broken trail. Zero gravity abounds, holding us steady againstthe ravaging wind. It should keep, steady-fast,always the lover, never the loved, against a god, whose meaning can only be felt. The verdantboughs protect our sanctity but, it’s a hollow gesture, a misplaced belief in an unknown,calling us to worship anyway. If our purpose isn’t to love ourselves and each other, there is nothing to do but gauge the angle of incidencebetween the heart and the heavens, if we can everharness the power of our own capricious sextant.
36Heeding the Signs
It was just her luck to step on a spider when all she meant to do was avoid the cracks in the sidewalk. Like pulling three cherries on the slot machine, therecould only be bad luck around the corner.This bit of bad luck was more thanbeing outside without a raincoat or an umbrella in the torrential downpour that ensued. The real tragic moment happened when she saw a robin fall from its nest. Whether by happenstance or divine design didn’t make the sight any more palatable, and for the rest of her life she was haunted by the vision of that dying bird, something she could never unsee. A benign omen revealed, she shuffled off into the unknown 87 or so years later bemoaning her fate, whileI’m sitting here carping about the threerejections I received today. And all I’ve seen was an odd black raven swooping around, quoting Poe. But no mashed spiders, no steps on sidewalk cracks. So, heed the signs. When they matter, they matter.
37How are You?
Although the existential question. I know you know the answer. Or are we merely connecting as we always will? I’m fine with thatBecause there really isn’t an answer, at least a good one. Or there are many answers. I’m peachy, for one. But that’s a lie. Heartbrokencatches only a corner of the truth. Torn asunder. Shredded, but notin the gym rat sense. Missing you fiercely is a cogent reply but that’s an action, or continuous action of sorts, like waves pounding the shore,overwhelmingly constant and true. Yearning for more time together. Again, an action, but a promising one, at least in theory but it’s more a pipedream as I can barely pen these words for the spiritual malaise in which I am mired. Blue is a useful placeholder as I can’tget bluer than the searing blue aura enshrouding me. Why ask so confounding a question, I wonder when the answer is patently obvious? As I said, you already know it, I’m sure, or doubtless havean idea. The loaded “Are you ok?” is more deceptive but still posesthe same troubling inquiry. Wait, what? Am I ok? No, I’m not. I am inside out enraged at the injustices and stupidity, at the greed and self-interest, at the ignorance and intolerance, at the rampantprejudices and hatreds of the world and its putative leaders. Otherwise, as ever, I’m totally crazy about you. That’s my answer.
38If Only
No copilot is needed for this heady venture.Fair winds hold no one for ransom. The word itself is good enough. A celestial kaleidoscope pivots and the stones tumble in their respective chambers bringing life to the colors inangular animation. Lifelike hands, suffused with fervor, force a reckoning. A leaf douses a caterpillar with dew, one who has sought refuge on the spindly veins, the veins having no tensile strength of their own. Never knowingif the butterfly is going up or down, we forayinto the arbor among the fallen angels, picking our way along the broken trail into the unknown. Zero gravity abounds, holding us steadyagainst the ravaging wind. It should keep,steady-fast, always the lover, never the loved,at least against the urDivine, the one whose meaning can only be felt, inferred, lacking luck and originality. The verdant boughsprotect our sanctity and warmth, but in the end,it’s a hollow victory, pyrrhic, as the leavesmust laugh at our arrogance, our misplacedbelief in an unknown, one we can never seeor hear but calling us to worship anyway,as if a miracle tumbling into our vacant lives,without cessation, without purpose. Timelessobsolescence in a fractured void. Rejoicing comes free, absent dolor and heartache. Yet, as we stumble onto the truth, the truth, likechance is the threatened remainder of design.If our purpose isn’t to pursue happiness, There is no point except to gauge the angle of incidence between our heart and the heavens,using a sensory sextant, one always at the ready if we can ever access it, harness its power.
39In the Key of Melancholy
You can’t go back again, even when you be heavy on the sauce. It takes more than a pounding bass and crowing drum thrum to summon a final reckoning.In the near distance, shaded palms sway strangelyto a faux-disco beat as our fortunes, once in synch, have faded and failed us, like ebbed tides. Showing no remorse, the gods, whoever they are, wrested your halo from my grasp. All the rage, mine-cutdiamonds now cast an eerie spectre in wispy clouds—moon rays and dangling legs wearing white moccasins, points on a celestial exclamation mark. To bear life’s vicissitudes, I am rearranging my slushy vocabulary, foraging in the ghostly black depths and casting outmy demons. More gnarly than it seems, sea stormsare twisting in, no Moses to save us, only treacherous shoals ahead. Sirens howl in the crepuscular gloom, into an angry aurora borealis, undulating Chartreuse yellow, all with no hint of a lie or word of warning.
40Into the Abyss
Soft mist, cheeky interior, smoothly tufted caresses trace neural paths of pleasure-pain through the cavernous abyss. There is telltale power in the vertical crevice where the pink-red lives amid the antimonies and vascular ripples, applying the balm and the furor, the sacred passage where nothing forlorn happens, only lupine stares, ecstasy, and wildcat yelps. Fervid moments abound, urgent, with no time to spare in a collapsing world, a sensurround, where drowsing is a naked leap of joyous fulfillment, more than a spectator sport, as unmasked filaments and tendrils sparkle with heightened anticipation, tingle with nervosité, and jangle with zest and ravenous appetite. Sometimes the clock is silent, and the world stops on its axially, alluring convexity, irresistibly inviting and succulent, soothing like aloe, requiring no thought, only ardor. The abyss is infinite, more than a lifetime of possibility, an unchecked cadence, iris-petalled touch, cerebral ganglia afire. The silent troubadour sings of love and loss. Profane regrets disappear like rainwater on a pond, an admixture of untethered lust and rainbowed mist of violet dew, dappled and lingering in the ether like a Sunny Girl peony, blooming with howling desire and ragingincandescence. It is a hefty counterpoint to the unfurling ambrosia in scope and scent, nothing less than quivering molecules swaying to the music of time, Circadian rhythms of love. No echo sounds in the abyss, no deflecting shadows, no false patina of doubt or transience, nothing but sweet repose, leaving only the transcendent absence of absence, starving no longer.
41It Isn't, or Is It?
I won’t, so you won’t.Or you might even if I Don’t, though I might, Even if you don’t. But if You don’t, I might anyway.Or if we both don’t, it’s aDouble negative, and two “Don’t” make a will, not A won’t, so more likely it Will, rather than it won’t. Getting better and better, Either it will or it won’t.Better still, let’s have tea For two, shall we? Or let’s Just make a deal. I’ll speakAt your funeral if you’ll Speak at mine. Deal?
42Kaddish
KaddishA prayer for the dead, but they don’t need it.It’s misdirected, praising God, whileIgnoring his or her many misdeeds? We need to rejig the matrix, take the guesswork out of the equation as the Bible, the old standby, the greatest work of fiction ever scribed,is a series of fairy tales, and, as a predictive tool,fails time and again. Maybe its fine as a balm or palliative but that’s being charitable.And religion, the staunchest bulwark against rational thought ever devised,remains the opiate Marx described. Still, we need Kaddish if not to steep us in our mortality, our short timeon earth, but to bring us face to facewith our collective transgressions. Our time is short now because we’ve despoiled the planet through avarice and self-interest,not caring a whit for generations to come.So, as we rage into the coming inferno, may the last thing you say be “I love you, Brother,I love you, Sister”, and while I’m at it, do let me know when the world ends,as it surely will, if it was with ‘a bang or a whimper’?Amen
43Knowledge Unbound
I didn’t see the need to know until I needed to know,but by then it was too late. Still, as time went on andI learned that the less I knew, the more vulnerableI became. To the shifting winds of uncertainty, to the idle fortunes of love and loss, to the arc in between them,rising unsteadily until I was overrun with useless feelings,sentiment instead of thought. No matter how perfect you try to craft your world, nagging doubt edges its way in, almost never to ebb out. The doubt is pernicious, fraught with backlash and lethargy, constant states of being. Would that I were blessed (sometimes!) with a lack of self-reflection but, alas,it wasn’t to be.
44Labyrinth #1
You come to a fork in the road and take it, as Yogi said. (Turned out to be accurate.)Or you come to a dead end and turn back. Either way, it’s a mistake, a strategic error.Hold to the left, is it? Or to the right, I forget? A trip around the planet, yet sheltering in place, it’s still leading one way, incendiary and all consuming. No pardon, no grant of remission, no stay of execution. There’s only an end at the end. No deposit, no return. Just pure unadulterated life and death in their starkest, darkest form. Like crossing a busy highway with no other side on the other side. No shoulder to lean on, certainly none to cry on, folding back onto itself, a moebius strip of perpetual anguish, an endless loop in our psyches, our synapses firing on all delusional cylinders, but all for naught.
45Labyrinth #2
Nothing short of vexing, the clouds cloud over each other, celestial traffic leading to a vaporous merger. Overcast grey, interspersed with white striation, denying the black smoke above us, the haze hanging low in the air, motionless.Sycamores boost the darkness, as do oaks, while empty love surrounds us, never to be caught again, at least not in this lifetime. The thrill turned out to be chimerical, short-lived and trapped in a static time warp, but it took more fortitude than I possessed to leave the couch and yield the floor, rain pounding outside the whole while the Minotaur roared.An ill-defined moment in time, we teetered on the world’s edge, the sky holding its blue-tinged grandeur, though it couldn’t compare with the unfazed stillness of your steady grey eyes. Hollow words flourish in the spatial vacuum enshrouding us, reminiscent of our past life, but now a shadow without shade, a solitary journey, peripatetic, and fraughtwith uncertainty. Still, I carry your constant heart in my heart to shepherd me into the universal unknown, but, like everyone, we are bound by the strictures of Zeno’s second paradox, ones that continued to thwart us, half-way to half-way, again and again. So, despite our seemingly unquenchable ardor, our love was a logical fallacy, doomed—a book of tavern matches, the numbers inside the cover lit and aflame—yet infinite all the same.
46Labyrinth #5
Hard to turn back on yourself when self-forgiveness is an inherent contradiction,steeped in uncertainty. Still, it may beall we have to work with or worry about.Oh, sure, we can always dream, rely on the moon for light but there’s no tellingthe dark side not to make an appearancein the least timely way.
47Labyrinth #6
Playing us for the fools we are doubles the crows’ mocking laughter, their endless mirth. Loud snapsfrom suspect wires on which they perch echo my misfiring neurons, my cranial short circuits. Running on ambient fumes, I conjure painted doughnutsand white sailboats on pastel blue waters to smooth outmy jangled cabling. If only I could share my yearning for simpler expression, clapping back on ambiguity, you’d appreciate my profound dismay at your vanishment. Instead, in mauves and ochres, opaque dreams thwartmy vision, like staring at an ethereal haze wearing shadesor a translucent green visor when I used to see you whole and clear. I quaver as my feelings wilt for wantof some dazzle, some razzmatazz although I still can’t account for the unbidden words that appear here. Attractive, maybe,but it’s a chimera, as the news is all bad. Any solace findingits way to my door is arrhythmic, bits of this, bytes of that,making scant difference. Carrying the weight of what once was,rollicking streams haunt me while the Fates force me to skipover slippery, mossy rocks just to keep pace. And, as I’ve left my fervor idling on shuffle, every ending I reach,like this one, arcs ineluctably back to you.
48Losing Our Night Skies
Into the verdant woods without a compass or map, there is no escape. That bastard winter won’t leave, or leave us alone, blinding us with dark whiteness, black bitterness and heavy mantel of doom. Coveringthe dead without promise or respite isn’t good enough.It’s all afterthought, as I once relied on you for sustenance. Now the clock hands run backwards, the cactus spikessplinter into tiny arrows, the slick green shards makinga mess of my life. The intrepid spirit arrives, disguised as a shady knight, a dangling participant murking into view. Resplendent in sorrows, the sun scatters crystal blue particles around us, sheltering us from the furies, sparing us the fates on cynical offer and mocking enticement, while denying malevolent intentions, silent ambiguities. It’s a godless, yellow benediction, a trinity-like consecration, but, in the end, a barren moment in celestial time.
49Love Song #9
In progress
50Lovers #2
Lovers #2Sunbeams striating through the prism, a joyous field of yellows, blues, flowing softly across our mussed blankets, almost missing the sweetly twittering sparrows perched on nearby wires, making no sense except in their own, tiny imaginations or to each other, I guess. Would they have wanteda different life, I wonder, less haphazard but more constrained? Life is becoming a flattened spheroid,a sweeper instead of a slider, but who’s to care if there’s no sweet end at the end, only rootless whims? The reception here is muddled, continual short circuits, as we snatch fleeting feelings, random thoughts from the unstable air, the turbulence, ever to accompany us on our mysterious journey to nowhere.
51Maybe
Close the door with conviction as you leave. We’ve reached the end of the road. It isn’t pretty but it was inevitable once the hawks and vultures began swooping from their aeries high above the sycamores and pines, streams and rivers. Even though you didn’t notice, you were lost in a world not of your making, one you inherited without second sight or anxious forethought, like chasing random acorns strewn on the ground, awaiting retrieval, but whisked out of reach by legerdemain and crushed by green avarice. Who knows what wisdom they held? The chittering squirrels and chipmunks who cheeked them away but left prickly-wrapped chestnuts for us as consolation? And speaking of consolation, let me craft a new algorithm for our plight, one forsaking anguish, and try to reach into the heart of our hearts for sustenance, to quell our rage, as it’s doubtless for the best.
52Never to Be the Answer
A wicked problem. Outside the window, fraught with cold, vexing in scope, annoying in life, our spirit keeps searching for traction, anything to gain recognition, a foothold to prove worth to the unworthy. All for naught, as the effort goes unappreciated. Wrinkling, papery skin, so we push the Death Star forward. Ten paces are still the requisite number for phantom duelists, always mindful of the challenges—breathe in, breathe out—steady as the oak sounding quietly in the forest. It’s about love in its infinite guises. Ginseng, spirulina, and honey may cast a spell but it’s worth falling under as there is no god watching over us. Better to let, say, the trees be our guide, our intrepid sherpa as we scale the impossible climb, up the K2 of the loved and lost, the lost and loved, a half-step of meaning and nothingness. We, too, will perish into the distant void, our only hope and fervent desire that it’s neither too little nor too late. In the meantime, we live life in grisaille, the netherland between the real and improbable, the grey foundation beneath the hues, ever alert to the infinite. Still, there is no future in creating fantasies for ourselves, even ones we need but fear to acknowledge.
53Nine Bands of the Armadillo
white oak bark weaves a mystical nexus between birds’ nests and treesin the chasm of life, plumb depths and soft cadences echo on stone, searching for meaning light crashes our passions,daring golden threads to appear,then sleep in solemn songshade-thrown mysteries offer sudden resolve only whenfreed from insistent moonglowyour innocent, steady visage casts a blind shadow insidemy nine-banded coat of armorsix inviting nights in a row your resistance held firm, I can’t find you anywheregunmetal grey shell, full of deceit, portents still taunt us, leaves aloft, spinning, spinningapologies are moot, if the truth were wavering,a way to burrow underon Sundays we order the books we will never read,longingly, forever
54Obdurate Coils
My longing presents plain and obvious, while obdurate coils, like Slinky, keep spiralling downward, ceaselessly haunting my dreams.There is something liberating in not giving a damn. Striated strands of steel coil unfurl like efficient thunderbolts—but vague like quicksilver, as if seen through a cloudy prism. The accidental prototype—iconic, persistent, but still random, Slinky-hypnosis is akin to extollinga work before the rumors have spread outward. As befits us to know which version of a work worksbetter, which one is humming, we must seize the up-end of the coils, despite having lost our collective mojo. For Slinky, it is all about coiling downhill, with little buoyancy to be enjoyed while life, like mercury, with itsspecific gravity greater than one, only flows one way. We’re each captive to our own fleeting past, our own scripted narrative, always coiling around itself andforgotten in time, but housing hidden barbs to protect against hostile threats, perceived or real.
55Ode on Melancholy
Watching the pines napping on a grey day, I dare to close one eye.I am still breathing so I must be alive.I should be reveling in putting one foot in front of the other, your dazzle occluding my vision, letting the rain wash over me anew, the waves carrying me to shore. I would take the I from the I who is me, but it’s illusory only.It’s the ache that is real, as life hurts sometimes, often in fact, especiallywhen confronting the unlikelihood of existence in a cosmic void, Sagan’s pale blue dot writ even smaller. And paler. What I’d give to lead two lives, the one I lead and the one I crave when I should be grateful for the one I have, but there’s no accounting for a selfish heart. I sense the dew forming on a rain-dappled leaf, silent, and without judgment or pity or remorse, just sheer insistence.Time can’t be hurried, though. It ticks at its own pace, while trying toRecapture/reinvent the past is for conjurers and knaves. A broken heart is meant for howling into hostile winds, not to be sufferedin silence. I chart my inadequacies, and you’ll forgive meas I slowly pull the dagger from my disintegrating hear while the betterquestion is what was the weather like?
56Ode on Rejection
On the sharp edge of time, on the arc of the curve, we’ll hold our breath and count to 10. At least until doom comes calling, courting us. Ever vulnerable to the verbal switchblade, the cold, white steel serrating the lines, deckle-edged like a postage stamp—cue the right margin—we’ll create a visual tornado. Crafting a chapbook or compiling a tome isn’t going to land us on the cover of The New Yorker or The Paris Review (the “The” must be important!) or Rolling Stone or anywhere else unless we are the next Mary Oliver or Ellen Bass or Ada Limón. (Spoiler alert: we aren’t.) Fame is an unreasonable expectation, a metaphysical pipedream. Masochism is the order of the day. Plying sounds, syllables and inflections without consequence, often a mere spittle of words, we foray into the absurd. Searching for vital signs of imagination. Checking our internal meter, as we might nervously watch the fare click up in a taxicab. Forging headlong into the ether with foggy headlights. Feeling the Satanic breath whooshing on the napes of our necks, we are prisoners of the random luck of placement. Throwing darts, this poem, that journal. That poem, this journal. Daring us to hubris. Mocking us. Deluding ourselves. Inviting constant rejection, blows to the ego, not to mention the interminable timelag. Instead, “they”, those prickly pear editors, expecting us to wait forever just because they have a few other submissions at hand, would do well to publish our work before we die or the world ends, whichever first occurs.
57Offloading Books Breaks My Heart
O these books! The ones I had to have— to keep current, to be well-read, to be sophisticated, at parties. They’re nymphs now, adrift and abandoned, like the poor soulson the Medusa, at least those who escaped onto the raft, if “escape” describes that Géricault-rendered Hell accurately. I’ve run out of time. And shelf space, my shelves cratering like inverted bows, absent any arrows. I bought them, the booksI mean, out of love, or desire, or piqued interest, or wish fulfilment, or envy, or curiosity, or boredom, or excitement.But there they go, a potpourri of eclectic tastes, boxed-up books I was driven into acquiring as if tomorrow were just a fantasy. Still, I managed to keep Salinger, Heller, Oliver, Lewis Carroll, and a few others, althoughwhy, I’m not sure, as there may be no tomorrow, at least metaphorically speaking. Or existentially speaking either, like trying to describethe color ‘green’ or catch sylphs in a jar. Maybe others can enjoy them, the books I mean, but my opportunity and timeare fleeting, waning, lo, stolen away before I noticed them suddenly eluding my grasp. It’s also well past time for prayer, and there’sno consolation prize on offer.
58On the Schoolhouse Floor
Tangled limbs, shuffling off the effects of the dope and booze, like comatose warriors. Somnambulant half the time, we wore lumberjack shirts and denim, having sung ourselves out, hearing the high notes through the haze, the strings clear and sharp, no fret smush, no amp screech, just the clean sounds of the time. Mostly Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell or Gordon Lightfoot, usually by dripping candlelight. It was easy to see what was right or at least expedient. Lingering until we finished the Scotch or beer or wine or joint, jacking up stories we told over and over. Sweet dreams of neighboring fauns running into the hinterland, the realities of life too overwhelming, too onerous to bear. Sheep loose in front, a strange sight, leading to pathetic jokes, needling each other like breathing. One of us would be dead soon, but then, time seemed endless from that innocent perspective. As I unshuffle the cards, I see that love and rebellion were our key signatures. Always chasing phantoms, talismen, never to be caught, at least not in time. Most things can’t be unsaid. They linger like Matala beach tar, leaving nothing to do now but watch the world disintegrate. I try dorodango. I study Caravaggio’s last painting, and feel the arrow pierce my breast. Still, it was close, shambling onto the verge of oblivion. Tracking everything down to zero, the future wasn’t all that it was cracked up to be, especially when, without surrender or remorse, we took the wrong way home.
59On Trying to Snag a Dust Mote
Winding through the haze, I try to snag a peripatetic dust mote,one of the free-wheeling particulate vying for its place in the fervidsunstream, the blinding light stratum. I knock on oak, on white birch, steadying my quivering hand. Seething with rage at life’s untimely fortunes, the ones vexing us, I take a furtive glance, looking first on the bias, then firmly ahead. The colored glass pieces of kaleid-oscopic moment shift-shape on their gravitational descent, as on a distended teardrop or water bead lazing on a just plucked grape. The tensile strength of our love teases me, as my reluctant Muse asks, what is life but a random collection of wonder? I ask in turn, what am I to do with this cache of fading memories, noting that it took hours to unlock this brilliant and timely exegesis, even with hands that are working today. I caught the dust mote ultimately, but it proved to be illusory, my success fleeting.
60Only If You Have the Time
Really, who has the time? Any time for that matter. Let alone a pew for oneto kneel on, as if prayer has any traction in a godless universe, now seemingly barren of human compassion, human feeling. We’re living a lifeof slogans, cant, ignorance, abject history lessons, lessons of inhumanity, lessons of love fading like shaken lines on an Etch-a-Sketch. You can distract yourself by glib blindness, atonal deafness, but the result is the same, candlelight flickering itself out from being into nothingness. You want to followthe path of the righteous but there’s no longer any guidance, all the iconsof virtue have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, raging into the wind, butvanishing none the less, ever whingeing about the way the world ends.
61Playing Out the String
The text fades slowly down my screen,a disheartened sunset, once and forever lost in the constant, immutable recessingof time. A time of no beginning facingan uncertain end, a brief time of infinitelove, jostled and pulled by life’s exigencies into strange contortions and waves. Hypnotic for a blink, quixotic on the waythrough, wrapped in a swift goodbyeand slower uptake but ultimately fatal.It seems the slippage was inevitable, calling for no answer, yet an answer in itself, leaving nothing to be saidand no gods to beseech.
62Radical #2 (I Write)
I joust against myself looking even for one or two words that will make a difference—like rain, for instance, inconvenientbut necessary in the radical scheme of things. I need to own my own words, a construct foreign to me, fraught as it is with risk, and doubtless without reward or, if any, scant reward. Full of unmet expectations, I strive for le mot juste, generally failing to nab it, at least on my initial foray. Salinger may have had this problem, hence his word lists, but who knows? Still, I write as if someone—maybe she? —will read my words, appreciate my sorrow, my irretrievable loss, but find something tangible —a keepsake, a memento? — from them. Who am I kidding, though, besides myself? I write as if there are no tomorrows, and maybe there aren’t—for me, anyway. Only yesterdays, and they’re long gone,refusing to return, despite my ceaseless entreaties.
63Red-Hot Blue Funk
I decry the Fates, those that led us here without artifice, without design. Nothing left but a red-hot blue funk, theconstant ache memorializing my loss without respite, withoutrecovery. Only vibrant placeholders, substitutes herald a sheer unfathomable malaise. Howling with psychic rage. my roaring imagination runs wild, not wanting to admit to my new reality, pathetic as that is. Benedictions are over-come by darkening clouds, pineapples spiking from the ground to snag some blistering rain. I yearn for you to fall asleepin the crook of my arm and nestle in me once again. Having happily surrendered to your love’s inexorable undertow, I can only wonder at life’s tenacities. Really, what are the chances?
64Riffling
As though by magic, the flecks come riffling through the air,each bound by an unpredictable course, the one that mirrorsmy shredded life, taking no prisoners, unhinged by gravity. It’s all I could expect for ignoring the homeless man sitting next to a refuse bin, or for shooting that sparrow with my newly-won slingshot. Who was I, after all, but a privileged reprobate, forged by obstacles I easily overcame, often enough with the graceof others, better folk than I. Lucky me. Silent music fills my ears, echoes riffing off each other in my barren soul. Left to chance that might never arrive, I’ve run out of imagination, a parched islandin a coral sea, awaiting rescue. Like Godot’s, it’s a futile mission, akin to my irascible cat Felix pouncing endlessly on the elusive red laser beam, the one I control but never let him catch.
65Ship of Theseus
On a blank canvas, a caterpillar of divine design and undulation. Our palette ready to explode with joie de vivre.If it feels like abstraction, a sketch of space without a border. let it rest undisturbed. After priming our canvas with gesso, the drawing morphs from gestural strokes to meaning, informing splashes of chroma and hue, amorphous in shapeand purpose. We delete the lines, leaving a trompe l’oeil, a spatial puzzle of no remorse. Massive arcs, stately squaresand blissful swirls overwhelm the senses. Madness followsin train, as each stroke is painted over. And painted over again, proclaiming the order of the day. Alligator eyes stare, daring us to be impertinent. One could be forgiven for thinking this is a seasonal frolic. Alas, not. In the end, it has becomea hopscotch of riotous color, segueing into an invisible stormof one’s imagination, an evanescent phantom, a fractious mockery of its original iteration, a blank canvas again.
66Snow on Her Shoulder
Her reflection sounded in waves, mythicvoices echoing in the current, high voltage wires of lust and fervor. As her shadow cascaded down the railing,any choice was casting fate, rolling the cosmic dice against the wind-face.Unfussed about shear or turbulence, the volley of hail was all that mattered. Snow on her shoulderwas a mere afterthought. No one there believed in miracles, although they happened all around them. Over spent cartridges, the jackals began howling.More than mere noise, the portents were unmistakeable. They shrouded our love like a white cloud, soft but pernicious, sweet but ill-timed.
67SnowBitch
Sunrays gleam the dusky sky, insects abuzz, their tiny bellies swollen with nectar.A silent cacophony. Listen. The cicadas chitter into the night, the inchworms vex the plants, and the no-see-ums no-see their way into our legs and feet. Striking how they know exactly where the warmest veins are found, as I know yours.SnowBitch emerges from the foliage, a demi-goddess disguised as a mirror of air, an echo of beauty, a palimpsest, all sinister Venusian smiles, her beatific aurae turning me inward to reflect on the specter I’ve become, a vestige of the fire I once was. Only ash remains as I search for the willow ptarmigan, the noisy woodcock, the ruffed grouse in the arbor where I dissolved into vapor, chock-blessed by the verdancy of the leaves and the sun-streamed shards of pale, yellow light. Rifle-focused, I set my telescopic sights on your wise heart, ever-knowing it’s impossible to catch the intrepid moonbeams, the ones waltzing to their own silent rhythms on my polished hardwood floor, the ones I watch through the white arabesques on my frosted windowpane.
68Solitary Journey
No copilot is needed for this enterprise. Fair winds hold no one for ransom. The word itselfis good enough. A celestial kaleidoscope pivots and the stones tumble in their respective chambers, bringing life to the colors in angularanimation. Faithful hands, suffused with fervor, force a reckoning. Just then, a leaf douses a caterpillar with dew, one who has sought refuge on the spindly veins, veins having no tensile strength of their own. Never knowing if the leaf flutters up or down, we foray into the arbor among the fallen angels, picking our way along the trail of broken promisesand false hopes into the unknown. Zero gravity abounds, holding us firm against the ravaging wind.Steady-fast, always the lover, never the loved,at least facing the urDivine, whose meaning can only be felt, inferred, but otherwise lacking in originality. And luck. The verdant boughs protectour sanctity and warmth, but it’s a hollow victory,as the leaves laugh at our arrogance, our misplaced belief in an unknown, one we can never see or hearbut calling us to worship anyway, as if by a miracle,tumbling into our vacant lives, lives without purpose, timeless obsolescence in a fractured void. Rejoicing comes for free, absent heartache. Yet, as we stumbleonto the truth, the truth, like chance, is the nuclear fallout from our insistence. If our purpose isn’t to loveourselves, there is nothing to do but gauge the angle between the heart and the heavens, our sensory guide at the ready. That is, if we can ever find the right sextant.
69The Art of Vanishing
No more profound than a heartbeat, a dust mote skitters and shimmies before me in the twilight. That’s all love turned out to be, fraught as a fractured wind and without word of a warning. Only leaves spinning from their branches, looking like acer palmatum red from afar. But how conveniently vague and indefinable. Leaving me on tenterhooks (whatever they are), there’s noone left to blame. Seems my love only went so far, then got caught in the crosscurrents of distance and time. The rough air of circumstance. Still, it would have been pleasant to have a proper farewell, even as you vanished into the purple ether, a moody spirit leaving only traces of ashy, papery residue in my neural inbox. Much too late for praying, the ether has turned ethereal as it vanishes like a lost cloud, spent of rain. Not for the disbelievers, the cynics, the heretics, vanishing is only for the pure of heart. A rational choice doesn’t make it right. Rather, it leaves me adrift in a morass of uncertainty, twice the size of hailstones. Playing springs with my cat is my only remedy, at least unless he vanishes into some nook or other. As my own camera obscura has become blurry, and I have nothing but time, I may as well join him. As we all know, two martinis are perfect, one is not enough and three are one too many.
70The Cup of Pythagoras
It was no use, all the idle talk, when what was left was sheer nothing. Only when our cup brimmed was there a steadyand silent draining of all its contents, some form, I suppose, of capillary action, a miracle of design or science or both.More likely, though, it was love finding its way down, or up, working against gravity through a secret passageway atopor inside our bond of clay. Now that our flame is near extinguished, we have lost all purchase, all traction. We didn’t heed the warnings, of which there were plenty, some more oblique than others, but telling just the same. This seems to be the wayour boundless love ends, twirling, spinning in concentric circles on the thin edge of time.
71The Ides of April
Though the distance is bridgeable, you don’t mess with time on the Ides of April. Not March, mind you, that was Caesar’s destiny, his plight, not ours. Time is constant, but it comeswith less menace, more panache, akin to the vibrance of a honeybee.Fraught with hesitancy, stutter steps taunt me, awaiting theiropportunity for mischief, like my late, handsome hooligan of a cat.As a final ironic coda, everything ultimately turns to nothing. Having seen that the Blue Ridge Mountains really are a deep, cobalt blue, especially at dusk, I can die happy. Under my greendesk light, these words unfurl and become soothing, as I catcha glimpse of no moment, trying to escape the ordinary or at leastforce it into affirmation, turning salt into water and rags into vestments. Bother the rooks if you must, let them natter, and show the falconsour soaring flight patterns but if the sky is starless and absolute, let all of them, albatrosses too, wing their way towardsan everlasting repose.
72Tortoises
The trick is to age gracefully, not haphazardly,like the giant tortoises of the Galapagos Islands, peaceably living out their days, thousands and thousands of days. They may be prehistoric but despite their lumbering gait and bellowing calls, their solid carapaces, they put us to shamewith their pacific nature, their ability to co-exist with each other and with us. It’s easy to imagineone saying to another, Hey, Fred, I’ll come to your funeral if you’ll come to mine. Still, there’s no futurein getting older. Aging ages us all too quickly. Surely,the lesson is this: instead of scrapping for the last dollaron the table or the last inch of territory or tryingto impose your god on mine, we might well lookto these creatures for guidance on a more generous,a more forgiving way to live.
73Unspooling the Narrative
I fight the urge to unspool the narrative, although it feels right to attack it with vengeance. As I try to bind the rent from your leaving, I crush sonic waves into their constituent pieces and rage like an orange in its peel striving to grasp a meaning, I run my fingers along glass shards, watch fire palms of gauzy white mesh and read psalms that leave me blind and breathless. I face a boarded wall, bound in graffiti-cribbed hoardings. I rework the pleats of doubt shrouded in a violet haze, crackled by torpid air. Without you, I stay strangled in the dancing knots of time, still threadbare, an abstract painting without soul, random colors of lunar chance and shapes of negative heft. Our oneness with the nth dimension shows elliptical and hyperbolic, teasing us to shatter the optical void, giving us all the gray time in the universe to fill our spectral pockets and satisfy our wanton needs. There are two lies to every side and two sides to every lie. Neither the Tarot nor the I Ching prevaricates, at least if you catch them on a truthful day. Taking no prisoners, I let you escape, unscathed.
74Void
We trust its obliquity, its spatial emptiness written with one hand in invisible ink, the text known only to the spiritual addressee. Of singular purpose, we forego the clear path, forcibly head into unstable air—turbulence in aerodynamic-speak—and leave only a legacy of dynamic obfuscation to the layperson. Pregnant clouds bear acidic droplets, waiting their turn to rain chaos, devastation and ruin on an already fire-enshrouded world. If there’s a tilt in the void, it is surely imperceptible, no more than a degree or two, but enough to fracture the space-time continuum, while also slashing the fabric of the void and our collective devotion to it. Chanting the syllables of an unholy hymn and shimmering like a Mitchell or Rothko oil, there is no surprise in the void. It is just what it is or even what we want it to be, perhaps a deliberately scuffed spheroid, a nasty visual hack, a fragment of wind shear or the furious punch of a burnt sesame seed. Illusory free will fully at hand, we exalt in the void although it is colorless, odorless, painless, certainly pointless, but it’s all we have left to lose.
75What is Made is Made
Slashed maples, desiccated birch, swaying sycamores, all fire the fires, sparking a pyrotechnical uplift. It must be known we sense our bearings without regard to provenance or salvation, spiritual or earthly. Red pines twirl and shimmer in the wind, their shadows slinking beneath us, silent as a curse, while painted words beckon with soft sighs, resisting the urge to act on a whim. It’s nothing but gravity at work, carrying the weight of the larch, the oak, when it’s clear that what is made is alwaysmade by fragile inflection. This is the way the world tracks its insatiable orbit, like a random tear caressing a cheek, or the sigh of an innocent yawn, borne aloft by rollicking zephyrs, incidental clouds. As we have tried the trees’ patience beyond any reason or right, it’s now time to sow, to tend, to reap.
76White?
White Elephant? White Rabbit? White Russian? Casper the Friendly Ghost? Mrs. White? In the ballroom with the wrench? The color of innocence, if a colorat all. The virginal color. Never mind. No more guesses, only accusations. It’s all nothing but spliced turbulence. Shred into ribbons. It’s to listen to the Airplane, the sultryGrace Slick. It’s to hide the nervous polar bears caught on an ice floe, heading, alas, for extinction. Along with the beautiful snow leopards and ghost tigers. It’s to cherishthe sacredness of a life well-lived, for the breaths we breathe, their purity and power. But the chips have fallen, leavingthe heart, grieving and empty, to yearn for a better world.And to mask the evil that lurks in some dark places. It’s oneof god’s eternal tricks, one of her practical jokes, the absenceof color, like death, although no one is laughing. It’s thereto prism the light into rainbows, variegated as on a leaf or spreading oil spill. It’s as rare as a real white elephant, the mammal, not the cocktail (although a cocktail wouldbe useful right about now). It’s also to shoulder our fate in its own way, jack-knifing into our open ribs. Even so,it’s still safe to say that no poem should ever start and end with the words “White Elephant”.