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These are words to shape something that everyone wants
but no one has a corner on
that market.

It all remains unspoken; the remains we wished for
are not the ashes we asked for.

The ones we left behind in the fire
we started in life are now delivered.

in the eye of remembrance
is the dust of stars
sifted into a plastic bag

Love and hope, faith and trust, peace and wisdom; still,
I question what i know, what is true.

What shifts us to enter this circle, holding hands,
using words that wonder how to make it
not be the end of everything?

I will plant a tablespoon of ashes in all the places
where the spirits dwell.

I will leave this poem so you can find the place
where other spirits dwell
You are, you be, you witness,

you prevail, you gift, you create

you end whatever you want to end

you continue, you are the wind,

and the stars...I know

i saw them in your eyes.

You are, you be, you are loved

by me and all who know you.

You are the one who will continue

to will, and yield and never, ever end.

Oh, small death;

Le petite mort.
Time being
a pressure invoked
on a constant skin
involving bone and bone
a subtle grinding
into other matters.

Man being
another gravity displaced
by motion and the blood's pleasure;
each joint ******* raw
the thin marrow of another.
This life taking turn
with death or mirrors,
take your pick

Tonight i saw my father leaving in the cold.
His face a reeling night of red-eye,
unhurried, lonely, breathing ghosts.
Himself, a wheezing remnant left behind,
a token grace of winter on his way
to gather drunken, half-breed, fallen dreams.
Lost cheers. Lost salutations.
And wished for in his wake

Tonight i saw my father leaving
in the cold behind him
sons who silent promise
better dreams to leave by.
Today, when I was feeling worse that Jack Kerouac
I thought this must be a touch of the Doubles,
a dizziness from reflection, or perhaps an accumulation
of appearances, too many appearances.
Pull the shades.

Sit back and relax, confide in yourself, i say.
Where did it all begin, and for what reason?
Am I a mirage of the identical, a disorder
in the analogous, some transmutation of exact endings?
One imagines Zarathustra singing in the shower.

"If you can't find a woman, find a clean old man", says Jack,
ride the greyhound, hang around the men's room, try dope."
He always shouts from the freeway entrance,
thumb aimed offensively in the direction of L.A.

Later, in the woods, I whispered like Thoreau;
"simplify, simplify. One pair of ***** is enough for any man."
Be yourself, I said. Walk down the sidewalk.
Step on all the cracks.
When winter sun dies
Night lives longer than your love
Wake me in the spring


Calico woman
standing in a silver sun
I cannot paint you

The seed plants itself
Nature washes life away
There is no flower

Old men on benches
newspapers shade ancient eyes
Obituary!
On my way up the stairs
carrying a cardboard box
of old books, bad poems
and overdue bills heavy
in my hands, not thinking
between steps, moving,
on my way up the stairs
remembering slowly, not thinking
that on my way up the stairs
i carry coat hangers, cockroaches,
an ex-wife, a hot plate, werewolves,
toys and old landladies.

three years now
on my way up the stairs
eight or  nine rooms in
three years
one month in a closet
three weeks
in a '49 Plymouth and
god, nothing in here is so
immediate as what pain is.
there's much less to move
than remember.

on my way up the stairs
is the same as now
is 19 ways to forget
this is climbing and could
have come two rooms back in time.
on my way up the stairs
carrying a few letters, two pair of shoes,
an armful of clothes and what happens
is swift, irrevocable, between
steps, not thinking, in suddenly
like a snapshot falling
from the pages of a book,
a memory, i see it
on my way up the stairs,
the brilliance of finding
on my way up the stairs
a thing lost, a memory flashing
and fading and fading
is a picture of a picture of
my daughter forgotten in a closet ago
on my way up the stairs
i keep falling from these pages
captured and posing, in this
yellow faded place
on my way up, etc.
to be read aloud in the cadence of climbing stairs
thinking of something
when something came inside
and seemed.

There is a great stuttering
in me, gathering movement.
It comes in the air
as normal as Mercury.

I tell you, if I stumble
it is an act of faith.
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