Nose Down, Tail Up

Poised like an underweight boulder flexing

its undeveloped apex at the milk and honey below,

a turtle promises an avalanche, intends

an impending spread of consequences

heavier than a hundred butterflies flapping

their catalysts at the future. His shell is poised

to invest all the slow-motion promise of his start-up

in the dividends of his momentum:

ripples that swear to sever the reflection

from what it reflects and ravage those pebbles

content to populate a pond’s unprotected coastline.

Soon, says this still frame to the next, soon

we will be a picture made of motion.

Late This Morning

The clouds abandoned their high ground for a hilltop,

stooping to peer down until their shoulders poured out.

Their thousand faces fell like falling was freedom.  

A troop of infant thunderheads toddled from the front,  

Left their lightning leaning against the posts they deserted,  

Left their license to kill picnics and bride’s big days

In yesterday’s poorly forecasted pants, and wore

fog-face to play hooky with our troubled solids.   

A plumage of wet tongues toured the neighborhood angles

hoping to scour their softness off, scrape away

their skinlessness, rub an actual elbow, test

the limits of the privilege of formlessness

on our abundant corners. To a sheltered cloud

our rooftops might seem a field of caltrops worth

stomping on, to see if their feet can feel, if a wisp

could ever know a thorn’s love, if the mists could learn

separation that cuts like loss, not just drifting apart.

These empty giants have no heels to leave undipped

in the river of invincibility, and

maybe they long to confess a secret weakness

they’ll never have. So these clouds have come down to squander

a strength older than inheritance itself for

a few gropes of grass and tailpipes and plastic flags,

they forsake the divine right of physics that floats

their wandering lifestyle for a chance to touch

dirt and die the death of a dewdrop. 

These clouds must despise the immunity earned

by grandfather sky, the wisdom of separate beds  

learned by falling hard for the first mountain he saw.

Her motherhood is a debt they cannot forget

as easily as their shapes or gratitude.  Again

one cloud strains his head through the pin oak,

in hopes the grasp of green exceeds the leaves’

rules of engagement, that they’ve grown sharp enough

to punish the wind for cutting in, but the cloud

only feels another fearless unclasping of hands,

another joyless reunion on another other side.

Escape is still not enough.  They needed to prove they’re not

proud, defrock the stratosphere, bare the sky’s limits.

So this morning they blotted out that bloodless

blue, they tossed their first-class tickets for the jet stream,

diverted the burning baggage of sunlight into

each other, puffed-up prisms that they are, and spread

that wealth of white like Jack Frost burst a vein,

blurred the sky back to the color of canvas, and

then forgot which philosophy they were teaching.

When the chance of rain came to collect, they danced

like girls unable to imagine the cost of lust,

they held bits of world just long enough to wet them

and let them go, like boys who never lost a toy

in an ocean or a forest, they can’t imagine

how susceptible they are to all that endlessness,

and then the show was over. The clouds were driven

back to their mansions, and the story of their morning

wasn’t even worth telling to each other, up there.

Hypnagogic Gallop

My hands are full of fire,
My feet are stumps of blood.
I have been climbing this mountain
Since Noah rode the flood.

Heels Off

That naked heart of hers is sharp.
She's showing it to her sisterhood,
one at a time, private showings,
like a gun, a drug or a story.
The boys round the corner and she
sheathes it in her eyes. Stillness
is her signal they should keep loping,
a cold snap held like an arrow
on the string, or she simply has
neither guile nor energy for playing
some inbetween scene and that's
his fault that walks on uncued.

Her hello is a polished hollow,
like a barrel, burnt powder
from the last overblown perfunctory
greeting scrubbed with a sexy
she's scraped clean of hooks,
one thin needle of hug and leg
and pressure blowing through and
then she's through it, too, moment over,
mission accomplished, happily
a woman in a room, a proper
object of desire, seen and heard
and that is all. Soon she will
sew in her closing, the same
short sweetness at her parting.

At night I imagine her anger tames
her, rides her around her bedroom
like a show-horse while she bucks
under the covers. In the morning,
she can't remember her dreams or
why she feels better only after
waking up. That's the first thing
to hurt her, and her day begins.

No Scythe Required

That grandstanding hand,
each fingertip a beacon,
his palm gripping every eye,

that unopposable thumb
granting boon or doom,

his empire is the man
he makes each man into;

oh, beneficent sanctuary
of purpose, oh safety
of the gargantuan body

of the work his arm
raises all our arms to,

bless us this day of days,
so named for it is the same

day's worth of necessity,
the same span of tasks
his hand grants our every

hour of our burning,
so much like the light
he shows us, but hidden

in us, in fear of losing
the fuel used to earn
our right to buy more fuel;

oh, time, you are the father
who's hand never leaves us,

even after we must let go,
you drag us ever deeper
into our empty future.

One Up, One Down

The new year is like a baby
being beaten into shape.

The sun burns in her heavy
height, as blind as any light,
nuclear bubbles burst like
laughter at the gratitude
she earns from an earth
that rounds her table, not
too hot, not too cold, but
just right. The black

between dreams his length
is time itself. Sat center
in his rings, like a king
whose throne is for his court,
Saturn sells himself again
as the original purveyor of
duration, while his daughters,
the only lovers he made
for himself, know him only
as the progenitor of endings.
He has a poet who pretends
a pretty logic proves
the sire of the final must
be the father of the start,

but that is a song sung
in a cycle, not a circle
fit by the compass of the
real. Somewhere another
word crowns itself.
The calendar buys a new
dress. The cups fill up.
The books open to page one.

The old year dies like a man
who everyone wants to forget.

repeatably unbeatable

someone says
the heartless speaks little,
although i'm sure
the heartless speaks too much.

someone argues then
that by my definition silence
must be full of heart,
which is ridiculous, since
as they say, we all know
emptiness is empty.

although I'm sure
i should have said something

in answer, so the sword would say,
i didn't. i know the blank

is burgeoning with all the
beginnings that the pinprick
present is ready to let burst,
or as i often tell myself,
i should be sure that space
is as full of spirit as we
could wish, but here's why

i don't speak. correction
never yet helped an error.
better said, i know that
the heartless is loud,
but that the heart is as loud
as every mistake it makes.

that's not an argument,

it's the truth, and nobody
can talk truth without being
a tyrant. so the proud

mouths itself until it is
as quiet as the heart
it's shouting over.

the repeatably unbeatable
rises and falls
like a rhythm clobbering
time into a mind.

the speech completes,
satisfied that a self
has spoken from the
center of some unknown
but important something.

Weathering

The littlest pains are creeping,
a slow swell of blind weight piling,

crying brings no giant, earth
mother has shrunk to sibling size,
and her after-image, sky father, is
as thin as any infinity is.

The dirt asks the rain
to pelt it back together.
All that far-flung dust
that never dreamed of flying

wants to sleep, or die or do
whatever verb can still make peace.

The big pains are stalking
bigger fish in the big-boy pond,

frying with the skin and bones still
in, for the line of heathen homeless
begging for better than loaves,
more than wall-eyed, stinking protein,

the water asks for quiet.
She's been writing this song
a century, and she'd finally like
to hear it. She plans to fall

and cannot stand how she hits.
She does not end in the noise,

that is the rain's mediocre, everyday
pain. She never gets to the ground.

Durance

Time may merely be the instrument set
to play the tyranny of a tempo
engraved around the sole sphere ever let
roll from the roar of the first crescendo.
Perhaps fate is also a slave, and only
made to play our master, a uniquely lonely
puppet without even a parallel
to imagine one day touching, still,
time harbors no stillness for us, the galley's
oars must stroke without hurry or delay.
Time breaks no pace nor makes provision for
weary foot or head. No pause for the poor
hearted wanderer to tour the treasured
storehouse of doorways all inherit each
night by dint of dreaming, no moment for
the lost to go once more unto the beach
to beg a place in history's shrewd net;
never waiting for the unfortunate
to ford even the shallowest occurrence,
or explore the shores of lesser horrors;
no stoppage of the plodding of the plot.
Not even the full-blooded patriots
of the practical may woolgather before
the glory exchanges their headlong rush
for another present in prettier wrapping.
Never a rest, never a step unlocked,
the scores of the recklessly hopeful must
give their war-march the same and only drum
that every atom of existence hums to.
No nameless thing, no spirit, no one and no two
are spared their seat in the dark, hurtling core,
that blind, piercing line that must ride
the unbending track of the unending next.
We all ride the rocket which stops for no star,
each full hour of ceaseless thrust is ours
to sit or stand or rush through, the only trust
given is the debt each passenger must
pay for their perpetual endowment of now,
for the privilege of being billed.
Time honors no breadcrumb trail of science,
promises no sanctuary to sound
planning or the savage magic of music,
no, the only truth that holds time
is the same, constant, inescapable
speed he lets beat down on every being
that began after him. The counting set
by no chanting demiurge, no angels' chorus,
no dragon's wingflap, no mathematical
constant, that rhythm will never let loose
of the ears of men. Those hands that pull
toward the only forward we know, those hands
gripping the silver thread no mind nor
body can ever break or break stride from,
they are the same hands that hold time
to his one coursing of the universe.
Destiny is held a great success by this.
Every dictator is measured by the stricture
he makes on earth, as it is in his heaven.
Time takes us through the only image
there is, the sacred resurrection of
occurrence, the same glass-thin second
come again to shower their scattering
and their sharp upon on us until we are
the same as our gifts, always shattering.
The word can wish it otherwise,
but the word has yet to learn the secret
of being true. Time has leave to travel
undescribed, unenforced, unplanned, to unravel
its secret self in plain, ignorant sight.
The words make treaties with us, but have no might
to defend us against our marching orders.
Time gives us no country, only borders.

The Regular Trip

Morning stumbles over the hedge, sudden
dump of yellow splattering the clean gray,
the yard's crisp uniform of cold cluttered
with lukewarm shards of a day already
dropped into the hopper. She steps down hard,
hoping not to wobble her one chance
to perform a perfect orbit. Except she catches
her toe on the greasy thorns of some man's
scalp. As he scratches out those loops and spikes,
teasing strands of self to their wakeful place,
she tumbles over his ticklish wisps, thumps
thick into the tree roots. Her abrupt slump
smears his yawn into a pool of buttery
sun, crushes the flutter while still in his
shell, spreads him out like chalk on a line.
The shock knocks the last requests of dying night
from the sanctuary granted by the black
cassock of a dreamer's pupils, forcing
the dark to march out from the close comfort
of a face in the shade to the far fence,
where one upright line holds the shadow
of his head as ransom for the riches
morning demanded for landing on his space.

Attainment

Atop the mountain sat the place,
man-shaped and rare of atmosphere,

the vacuum held overhead
called my head to face it.

When it was my turn to sit,
mouth open so that wisdom

would fall out and run down
to the earth it was raised from,

I would say: the world is fair.
And that is what is wrong with it.

To Do or Not to Do

She knows you have to do things.
She doesn't like knowing,
so she says it when she can,
to make sure she doesn't forget
just because she doesn't like it.

Love isn't nearly enough, she says,
the world is only work.

A few years after she says so,
someone else demonstrates
that work is not enough, either.
Nothing is. She remembers she
used to say the world is what
we do to each other.

She says she wonders if she knew
what she meant, but she knows

now she knew better then, before
knowing better was something
she had to do.

Making It

Faster, faster, says
the spinning. Beat
me around to myself.

If It's Not Sensational, It Isn't News

The American Dream is not dead.
Evidence: his most wanted
status is undisputed, and he
hasn't been caught in fifty years.
The most efficient and highest grossing
killer playing the field today,
he is still on the loose.
There's a reward for information
that leads to his capture,
but that's a one-time, flat rate,
there's no profit-sharing.
The Dream goes by aliases,
steals identities, and dresses
according to the fashion,
so be sure. False reports
are a tax on us all.
Plus, he's wanted alive, not dead,
so remember to shoot to wound.

Where's the Neighborhood?

Two empty birdhouses,
with no reality television crew
to spruce them up for sale.
Two empty birdhouses,
no sparrow can afford,
no finch can land a loan for.
The hummingbirds ignore
the dark decor, the crows
refuse to see the exterior
color from fifteen seasons past.
The bees say build your own.
The falcon watches to see
if a squirrel can help
remembering where the seeds
sat freely in the open.
Two empty birdhouses,
and all around them, life.

Miracle Work

The rosebuds always increase,
like entropy.
They promise to open as other
things close.
It's like that saw about doors
and windows.
Whenever something shuts,
something else is forced
by someone to open.
Or from heaven's point of view,
what goes down must come up.

That's Not Even Irony

Time is perfectly fair.
Even the physicists say so,
time has a place
in all their equations.

Two Takes on a Minor Occurence

Like a greasy-lipped child
leaning over the fair-ground rail,
profligate with quarters, the tree
drops leaves toward the glass,
one round mouthed, empty glass,
the only game in town.
Each leaf wends the unseen warp
and weft of the meters down
the yard of air to bounce
on brick or dive through
the hedge to wait for the earth
to collect it, until one plinks.
Except there's no prize for the sunlight
grubbing fingers that let it go,
no doll, no candy for the spring-green,
rich-green branch whose unnecessary
yellow was shed for his
one-way mission, no one
counts the score, one in the glass
from twenty feet up, no bonus points.
The woman whose water it was
doesn't even smile.
The leaf is just dirt that hasn't
crumbled yet. The chance of landing
in the mouth instead of out, she calls
inevitable, that's just what dirt does,
land in her cup.
The man drinking tea, as near as
she needs him to be today, he rejoices.

Still Life with Book about a Painter

First necessity, the table,
flat field of play for things,
those next necessities, things
for the picture to picture,
but first, the painter sets
the table, now as empty as the canvas
he's to make into a mirror.
He'll paint no realism, of course,
he builds his reflections
in the shiny side of his style,
he leaves the job of honesty
to factory-cut quicksilver,
his mission, should he receive
a commission to do so,
is to seek to show the sort of distortion
physicists have yet to measure
in refractions,
and this is practice, this table.
The painter sits reading and drinking
and thinking and breeding baby dreams
he'll only ever really feed one of,
he's getting read to prepare
to layer up a display
no light-fingered device ever
captured and abandoned
to their memory storage,
to their eclectic ghettos,
where now and now and yet another
now-it's-just-another-then
pile up like the wings
the angels never get since
bells have all been synthesized.
Yes, he says to the table,
yes, you await your burdens
so faithfully, a phalanx of laterals,
lines alongside their brothers,
a table with four equal legs,
angles all right with the world
and a top as squared away
as a meal in an army mess,
you are a table ready to hold
objects. So the objects
appear, or are arranged,
or are arranged to appear
by a hand or the co-ordinating
mind behind the eye that hands
the objects to their places:
perhaps a clock, freshly wound
or melted over a slab of real
perspective, perhaps a glass,
half full of glints and highlights,
or perhaps a dead game animal,
motion stopped, body quietly
gaining the momentum of putrescence,
or the royal colors themselves:
flowers proud their flesh
is the only alchemy to extract
the proper spirits from the earth,
happy to challenge the clever
paste of oils and minerals
to duplicate their results.
They might sit in a vase
decorated in vain, say the
narcissists, or perhaps some
other variation on a cornucopia,
a ceramic collusion of glazes,
a pewter mug composed of crannies
and protuberances. Of course,
any fruit will do to play
the part of hue receding
from surface to shoreline,
but no, this table has none,
this table has only his feet
on it. Soon it will have a book,
closed upon the packet
a tea-bag once was wrapped in,
a book he has finished with,
for the minute he's sitting
still in for now, at least,
a book framed by the table's ends
for and to no pictorial purpose,
which is lucky, since the pages
may have closed their legs,
but the cover their pimp
wanted them to be judged by
is a garish thing men would
never hang on their wall,
but seem to enjoy blown up on billboards.
This book the painter
has stopped reading is about a painter,
or more precisely, it is about a girl,
who happens to have the painter living
in her background, or more precisely,
it's about a girl some author has imagined
alongside the painter she's sketched
into a foreground he never lived in,
and what's funny is, he's dead
enough that he can't live his life
any better to spite her pretense
to depict him. At least he asked
his subjects to sit for him. She's
just dead enough to need corpses
to flesh out her dumb-show,
she needs to rub better nametags
off of gravestones for the sockpuppets
she's hiding her hands in.
The painter looks hard at the table,
but the table has no opinion of the book,
the table doesn't even care
that the book is as flat as a family
member or lighter than some fat candle
or unlikely to leave a ring,
but the table doesn't know how
to do its job unless it's told.
So the table would need more
things to answer the painter's
question with, much more
than a paperback cut to fit the poster.
Maybe a magical artifact
some tomb-raider's financier
can claim copyright to,
maybe the keys to a car or a house
so hotly contested by their former
owners that their children
have made up new last names,
or a fork that comes with a camera
and wireless internet,
or a travel mug with spill-proof
lid some time-traveler claimed
he let Christ borrow,
or the coffee he turned to wine in it,
or the blood on the tine of the fork
the time traveler used to take a picture
of the cross taking over the man.
But after the painter picks up his feet,
after he picks up the book,
the table is empty. He can't
remember what he had decided
should be in the picture. The table
is also outside, which feels
wrong now, there isn't some
wall where windowlight
could write slanted commentaries,
it's a whole yard, trees that
are never, ever still. Landscape
with empty table, the painter
will call it. Except the sun
goes down. He loses the light.
The scene becomes about something
else and he cannot remember
why he has unfolded his easel,
why it was so important
to find the long lost tube of blue,
what it was about these things,
which after all,
weren't ever really on the table.

This Message Was Sent to You Free of Charge

Raise your hand before you ask
what dreams you are allowed.

Yes, there are stupid questions.
All the fantastic lands
have hotels on them already,
and homesteading is against
the law, you imperialist.

You cannot sing a note
that is not owned. Just
try to invent your own octave.
You cannot make a wish
we have not wrapped
up in a gift you need
to give someone if you
really love them - if you
don't believe us, you
can open them all and prove
it, just remember to pay
first. Make sure not
to sleep without your
ticket to dreamland,
we take our responsibilities
at the border seriously.

If you wake up and tell
what you saw there,
you may be in violation
of the confidentiality agreement
signed for you in absentia
before you were born,
don't go digging in
yards that aren't yours,
don't endanger the hard-fought
peace that protects
the sanctity of imagination.

We own the language
you use to think with.
Please don't steal from
the well we inherited
as your appointed guardians;
please, for us,
don't make us charge you
for your own muzzle.