he laughs at me,

old, edentulous, wrinkled.

excruciating, the smile,
excrescent.

ecs, ecs, ecs
- the laugh,
cacophonous,
cacographical.

the ruff of an eddy,
abysses of exasperation,

the laughter of time,
voraciously lustful.

Moon, blow your light
my way, but don't cut my time

Let me dream just a little longer
while my eyelids shine
in the dark starlight

Let the ceremony end slow
back in my old home,
not in a cold forest near the sea

I want to see again
those three rivers that flow
together and listen to a woman
singing to a child
in her mild mannered way

But in spite of the night
and my wishes
something keeps creeping
past me in my sleep
like numbers of smoke

It was you, dark woman,
walking across the room bare
footed turning on the air conditioner
in the winter, a pair of scissors
in the folds of your robe.

Once I spent a winter
with a poem; everyday
in the woods at work
I would say it, never
writing a word until
I had it down in my mind;
it became what I called
a floater, a work song,
a chant, until it sounded
just right and undramatic,
and then I wrote it down
in the dirt with my boots
without changing a word
leaving it there for the birds
and the worms and the roots.

“The whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano key.”*

to O. F.

Maybe your soul is a kite right now
as I am writing on the kitchen table and
winter orchids are  earnestly blooming,
May you be peaceful in the final womb
Dostoyevsky wrote about you, the humble one -

There is a hole now in the shape of morning
I can't find you smelling pears anymore.
Only my eyes filled with dust over your casket
You hid your dreams so deep,
devouring oblivious dreams
She poisoned her milk and
that's how you learned to deny
all the streets you never went.
spring sun used to find you listening
to the solitude of trees, while the seasons were recycling your shyness.
Somehow you didn't notice the light slowly descending
into the green chaos, or just the old mundane hatred,
the embrace of a disavowing (d)evil.

- this poem could be full of the noisy blindness of life
of crushed dignity and helplessness
I want to find the right letters to write
only two impossible words: pure heart-

Farewell delicate soul,
You have died enough
.

Poetry
to me
is taking
my pain
and making
it sing.

'Perspective betrays with its dichotomy:
train tracks always meet, not here, but only
    in the impossible mind's eye;
horizons beat a retreat as we embark
on sophist seas to overtake that mark
    where wave pretends to drench real sky.'

'Well then, if we agree, it is not odd
that one man's devil is another's god
    or that the solar spectrum is
a multitude of shaded grays; suspense
on the quicksands of ambivalence
    is our life's whole nemesis.

So we could rave on, darling, you and I,
until the stars tick out a lullaby
    about each cosmic pro and con;
nothing changes, for all the blazing of
our drastic jargon, but clock hands that move
    implacably from twelve to one.

We raise our arguments like sitting ducks
to knock them down with logic or with luck
    and contradict ourselves for fun;
the waitress holds our coats and we put on
the raw wind like a scarf; love is a faun
    who insists his playmates run.

Now you, my intellectual leprechaun,
would have me swallow the entire sun
    like an enormous oyster, down
the ocean in one gulp: you say a mark
of comet hara-kiri through the dark
    should inflame the sleeping town.

So kiss: the drunks upon the curb and dames
in dubious doorways forget their monday names,
    caper with candles in their heads;
the leaves applaud, and santa claus flies in
scattering candy from a zeppelin,
    playing his prodigal charades.

The moon leans down to took; the tilting fish
in the rare river wink and laugh; we lavish
    blessings right and left and cry
hello, and then hello again in deaf
churchyard ears until the starlit stiff
    graves all carol in reply.

Now kiss again: till our strict father leans
to call for curtain on our thousand scenes;
    brazen actors mock at him,
multiply pink harlequins and sing
in gay ventriloquy from wing to wing
    while footlights flare and houselights dim.

Tell now, we taunq where black or white begins
and separate the flutes from violins:
    the algebra of absolutes
explodes in a kaleidoscope of shapes
that jar, while each polemic jackanapes
    joins his enemies' recruits.

The paradox is that 'the play's the thing':
though prima donna pouts and critic stings,
    there burns throughout the line of words,
the cultivated act, a fierce brief fusion
which dreamers call real, and realists, illusion:
    an insight like the flight of birds:

Arrows that lacerate the sky, while knowing
the secret of their ecstasy's in going;
    some day, moving, one will drop,
and, dropping, die, to trace a wound that heals
only to reopen as flesh congeals:
    cycling phoenix never stops.

So we shall walk barefoot on walnut shells
of withered worlds, and stamp out puny hells
    and heavens till the spirits squeak
surrender: to build our bed as high as jack's
bold beanstalk; lie and love till sharp scythe hacks
    away our rationed days and weeks.

Then jet the blue tent topple, stars rain down,
and god or void appall us till we drown
    in our own tears: today we start
to pay the piper with each breath, yet love
knows not of death nor calculus above
    the simple sum of heart plus heart.