1.
The trembling of a maple tree:
Autumn buries spring.
Not everything
Hoped for came to be.

2.
The future happened and was not a sum
Of my earlier projections;
Newer directions
Proved I took stock in the obscurely dumb.

3.
If a pathway to another life
Could be fashioned immediately
I'd have no need to be
Treading the edge of a knife.

4.
The crooked palms, the bleached concrete—
All mine. My eyes have usurped them,
Just as the hacked phlegm
Of a *** supplants the street.

I was not
knee-deep in a bog
swinging a blunt cutlass.

I was not
naked and kneeling
before a jungle trellis.

I was not
youthful when young
(never felt summer).

I was not
alive when I lived,
being entombed

between antitheses.
I was not
happy, though this

was happenstance.
I was not
not awaiting a soundless fury

to consume my essence,
when that essence was what
I was not.

Like the sound of a stream --
archaic and ruthless --
her voice flowed, and I dream
all voices were once like this.

If I could clip away
the blossom that we see,
I'd throw it in the sun
and burn it happily.

To watch a petal's ash
evaporate for good,
to stand at a dug hole
where its flower once stood,

is to acknowledge death.

Buddha's and Christ's paths were equally right.
Imitating them obscures one's own path;
inward vision frees one from fear of death;
ego-consciousness curtails the light.

When people kneel before the Roman cross
as before something sacred, I'm at a loss:
they're revering an ancient torture device.
Still, they claim "it's about his sacrifice."

I've never seen any rose the same way;
a forgotten Dionysian frenzy changed
that love-symbol into something "deranged",
at least in moralistic terms today.