Thumb out, he hitchhikes from Prague
to the south of France, floats
the Marais Poitevin face-up
on a flatboard, sees
the last sunbeam slip behind the Louvre, sings
a song he calls "To California", snores
on one more of his friends' floors,
four euro to his name.

Honest directness may
bring some lasting peace:
murdered Cicero spoke
two millenia ago
all evil man may ever know;
still our statesmen gesture
in orchestral dumbshow.

Is peace born out of a lie?

Each new morning they wake,
senseless, enchanted;
an immense multitude
that works toward a coffee break.
They gaze, glossy-eyed,
upon the imperial upshot:
Democracy and Despotism
mix in the Melting ***.

I am abandoned by the wind,
left to deteriorate in the fall.
I face my life's end,
growing funereal.

Generations of a blackbird
lived on my limbs when I was young;
their song's no longer heard,
muffled in this dying tongue.

Around me once-bursting life eroded.
Prosperity surrendered to the drought.
Peace and cradling boughs corroded,
engrossed in lonely thought.

If I could drink the wind or see a sapling sway
just one last time, I may feel a little more at ease;
but now time retires and nature runs away.
I whisper, quite weakly, to give the young some peace,

*"Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more."

Dear Grandma,
Yesterday on Broadway
I thought I saw your face
front and center on the Times ---
it was Margaret Thatcher, she's passed away!

They say she was hatred;
ruined the British manufacturers,
the miners, and the arts;
forgot the Irish freedom fighters,
watched them die from a distance;
they say she failed the English poor,
even fulfilled the Belgrano's fate...

Grandma, I thought of you in your garden,
picking ripened Early Girls ---
you so resemble Mrs. Thatcher;
what will they say of you when you've gone?
No more than brief obituaries
printed in the weekend papers?
Murmurs at the memorial
during your eulogy?

Although you've wronged me once or twice
I can sympathize with your point of view;
I hope someday they'll forgive Mrs. Thatcher,
as I've forgiven you.

Tea sprouts wildly
by the roadside:
jade splayed fingers

flaming the earth
in warped green flicks.
Mild, astringent,

the aroma drifts
into the
triviality

of the present.
Looking over
my backyard fence

toward the road,
quick, damp-green scent
antiquates my

vision: Eisai,
holding seeds from
Kyoto, hikes

across border
hills into a
feudal Japan.

The tea-lined road,
framed by my
imagination,

is an anachronism,
a snapshot that’s
double-exposed.

I've heard the song birds in the trees,
I've received their grievous melodies,
I've joined them in their ardent song
and now know hatred is not strong.

I've debated many men who think
weakness grows in an intimate link,
and such talk has only strengthened their hate;
unknowingly they fulfill their fate.

It's harder to give a compliment
than hate someone for what you think they've meant;
because of this I've banded with the birds
and sing of love to love's cowards.

Geraniums wilt into the bedrock
behind a treehouse the canyon knew.
The lanterns have extinguished.
Crow in the ****** overhead sifts
downward. Below the trundled dune,
poppy after poppy -- hidden in mantling dust --
deafens in its own rustle. Where
is the moon today? Where
does the sky end and wrap
inside its craters?
A caw splits the wind in a palm,
drives it through a lantern's smoke.

We used to watch the lanterns wane
before calling it a night.

We used to put bees in jars
before pulling our blankets up.

We used to sing old gospel songs
before getting out of bed.

I feel older than an ancient discipline,
I swear I was like this before I was born,
I'm trying to discredit my happiness,
but I'm as aimless as ever...