if it were all chrysanthemums
and no sting,
all landscapes
and no crumbling,
all minerals
and no sediment,
all revolution
and no debris.

It would be great
if reality were not reality,
it would be great
if life were not life.
It would be great
if there was an idea machine
that could sift truth
from lie.

To press a button
and get an answer
and never ever
have to wonder.

But for now we bathe
in freckled light.
Zap, spark, corona, thunder
and then the aftermath,
the morning as indistinct
as wet clay.

Tears watered
the beginning
and in the beginning
there were brilliant colors,
and in the beginning
there was all events
prior, and in the beginning
something amassed much
bigger than great.

are the first among us
in early spring to notice
the flowers, taking notes
and comparing posture.

they look strangers in the eye
like no other, as though the least
amount of recognition
were the most familiar.

they sweep lonely men off their feet,
just one encounter and the lonely men
in turn go searching for the trail
they've left through this city,

in crowded alleys, in libraries, in the park
at dusk, in a statues rust, at a trafficless
intersection. everywhere there are traces
of their presence, like a dustbowl

in its aftermath, if only the dust
were silver and the violent winds
intruded on the stillness to hold
up shelter against the oceans
of desert.


i met the loneliest of them all,
the postulate that nature offered
was now her ex-lover and recovery
would be backtracking.

lonely women are the last to be pitied,
and lonely women were not always
lonely. you must have experienced
the kind of love that is unbridled
to experience that kind of lonely.



Lonely women will be lonely
until they die, so that by the time
lovers wake up together she will
have already offered herself to the soil

so that by the time they take their first
step out of the bed she will have
already become minerals.

All this time I had thought
it was rock versus air
and then came the day
we exchanged names,
because there was no other way
because all those others we adored
were no less than infinite
and you cannot trap sunlight
in your hands.
Our communion was instinct,
a song from the deepest cave
and our love is like the friction
of bowstring against violin,
there as long as green vines
continue to crawl up bricks.
There as long as the cynics
ignore the saws of radiant light
that cut through the fault lines
of their enemies skin.
Our love is the final resort
of metaphors, the place they go
to rest in peace, the farmers
overalls. You greet me
without a smile, at your front door,
paint chipped, hair that tells the story
of your difficult day and I remind myself
that means and ends
are both offspring and kin.

We met like they all do, second
glances, eyes wearing the best
kind of suspicion, an exchange
of names, insidious
and innocent.

Today I encountered the most holy
of holies, all cloaked in ordinariness,
sawdust, flowers, and paper clips,
and our love is like any other,
making us feel as though
that we are the last
to witness it .

as the seconds sparked
and the minutes glowed
brighter and brighter
until time finally burned
on the blue horizon.


facing each other

the blind-folded Now
and the dumb Hereafter.

I don't
know I don't know
I don't know I don't
know I don't
know.

"I have gotten from there to here"

Its a simple tautology, chant it

either/or an uncertain accomplishment.

From there to there to there until there became here.

This too is fairly obvious,
but still, it seems so strange,

how many times must you be reminded

that you are too ill-equipped 
to string the sequence.



And what about those weak suspicions

that reappear from time to time,
the ones you are
 quick to disregard
out of the fear that you may be a lunatic.



What if they were correct, what
if a moment were nothing more
than a brown package
of stimulus.

They came to you, one after the other
and you what could you do but follow
them, like crumbs in a trail that lead
you further away from home
and into this carnival.
Where people who sing lullabies out loud
carry pistols and globs of color
are merging in all
directions.

Wedged in between "there to here"
and "here to there", the laws of tenses
never made this much of a difference.



Babies know this all too well.

That's why they're the last 
ones
we turn to for wisdom. 

But should they ever decide

to permanently stop crying.   

You'll know what they mean by their silence.

I stood upside down on the watery
side of the sea line and looked at the
world I was standing on, the stars
blew out and re-appeared like the people
walking past the cafe bench. The guy
with the newsboy cap, made his
rounds around the city, a white-out inscription
on brick caught his attention:
“You anticipated
this time in another place.”

The daughter of the woman
behind the flower stand
draws chalked fish completed with
succeeding circles to indicate
bubbles, bubbles on the asphalt.
She was right: I had learned
to breathe underwater and as a litmus
test I turned my eyes to the single
tree on the island. It shivered
like seaweed. I went up to the stand
and purchased the ugliest peony,
the one with petals that were
chiseled like frozen waves.
I gave the lady
my last quarter and as I
turned around I saw the face of the guy
with the newsboy cap, only this time it was infinitely larger,
peeking over the horizon like the sun
when it first rises. And then, a hand coming up,
from under, fingers tapping from the other side,
taps reverberating through sky,
as though there was inside and outside
and this whole time I was
in an aquarium.

I believe in predestination like a hard cover
book lying open underneath a ceiling fan. I believe
in imagination unfettered like the wheels
of a bike kicking up rain. I believe in tasting
everything like the teething puppy chewing
all the furniture. I believe in arrangements
like the photographer with no camera. I believe
in impetus like the dry clump of dirt that erupts
into fine powder because of a little tension
in between your fingers. I believe in relevance
like the poetry addict who wants to ask Emily
Dickinson where she got her cardigan. I believe
in economy like Curiosity who found her way
home by following the trail of cat crumbs she left earlier.
I believe in complacency like the larkspur
in love with a promiscuous hummingbird.
I believe in delusion like  the saxophone player
who can’t distinguish Carnegie Hall
from the subway station.

We catch the sunset
while eating
breakfast: ignoring
mothers, ignoring
landlords, skinning our knees
and skipping supper,
using the kitchen with some
improvisation, forgetting to stir
the pasta, blotting bacon
with coffee filters,  
flinging linguini on the walls
and the ceilings (for
if cooked it will cling
but if raw it will fall).
“Is that pasta on the wall?”
“Is it purple?”

Outside a boy
in a dress shirt and a girl in
a paisley skirt walked past
the window, holding hands
and clutching palm
Sunday leaves.

Then the strand of linguini
began to detach itself from
the ceiling, like a break dancer,
with flimsy limbs,
and when it dropped
it fell through the air
like an Olympic
diver, twirling and curling
with two ends clung
to one another
and then unfolding
underwater.

After the rain,  
vapor rose from the valley,
from where I stood I saw
a panorama of mountain
peaks robed in low
clouds and bands of dusk's
signalling shadows. Mist
rose from the basin
and then parted  
into shapeless white
arrays that continued
to move, continued
to patrol the hollows,
the range, at an unhurried
pace and a timeless question
came to me:

Which came first
the mountain or the mist?

Suddenly the scene slowly
disappeared, began to erase
itself, from the furthest
peak to the trees below
my feet. Suddenly
I realized what was
happening:

an immense bundle of white film
heading to where I was.

I closed my eyes
as it swallowed me.
Who knows how much time had passed
when I opened my eyes to a blank sheet.
I'd never been in the belly of a cloud:
there was nothing to see.
But the taste of cold-minty air;
the muffled sounds of insects crying
reminded me that I was still on earth,
stationed in a location; free
to imagine anything.
So I pictured
one of those Chinese
paintings, thick calligraphy:
the story of a girl
who was clouded
on ground and grounded
in clouds; the brush strokes
depicted valleys shredding
at her feet, dissolving
into vaporous streaks
and then forming mountains
behind mountains
behind mountains,
behind the place where I
was wedged in between,
a place where nothing
was the same as Infinity.

Gauge Symmetry


It was an eminent arrival: to awake in a definite
location in time and space, involving the single
***** with more zeal than the rest. But where
am I really? Staring at these thorny lines engraved
in my palm during an hour I should be asleep.
I can’t help but think that the love of a life
should have spared me.

A caption below the photograph in the times reads
It’s an illustration of a tactic employed by Hezbollah
and Hamas to use their own civilians as human shields.
And somewhere else laying on rubble, once road, a blood
smeared newspaper ruffles in the breeze, then violently
unfolds from a burst of wind, never to be read, a stray dog
licking a wound pauses and perks it’s ear.

Earlier, in the library I walked the spiral staircase
and traced my fingers down a dusty spine:
“How
we
became
Post-Human”.

It must have been an artificial insemination.

My skull throbs from an inoperable legion
of fractal thoughts which I developed upon listening
to the sounding tremble in Pathetique, too immature
to know the power of what it heard like that time
I foolishly laid my eyes on a carnivorous
tulip, it spat me out alive.

Moon is no comfort, only an aperture. The day
is overexposed and my eyelids clasp
down like a shutter, I try to fall asleep
to remember where I really am and where
I've always been.

His laughter, his reprieve is an interval
in between a tinted field,
lying flat beneath dry stalks
of desperate color,
burnt umber and piney
green. He imagines a Japanese
pond, the fragrance of yellow
water lilies and retiring beneath them,
in the shelter of the shade.
Submerged underwater,
amidst a choir of Koi fish,
huddled under the dangling
roots, crumbly and loose
as worn rope.
He imagines
one by one they would
part away, swimming towards
the glittering frost
beyond the blue green.
From your perspective you can see
a slight swish, a slight ****** as their
heads peak above,
the opening of
their mouth, to take
in a gulp of the sun.

Below he thinks

This place is like Eden.
Eden, incandescent.

You were thirsty.
So I said I will meet you in a dream
and pour you a glass of sparkling pink
lemonade over dry
ice. As it sublimates
a shroud of frothy mist
will form and travel past
the brim into the air
between us.

And you will
trace silvery incantations
onto the glass with your
fingertip. The mist will linger, but then
it will thin,
eventually it will evaporate so
all that is left at the bottom
of the cup is a shallow pool
of sparkling lemonade.
Your etchings, dissolved.

At this point in the dream, I will leave
for a few years. When I come back
the cup will still be in the same place
you left it and I will breathe close to it
the fog of my breath will cling
to the glass and like a ghost
it will reappear: All that
disappeared; All that
you wrote, years ago.

Then I will wake up
and forget this dream.
Years are only seconds
combined. The evidence
will remain, my tongue
quaking from the burn
of dry ice. My head
wavering with confusion,
as though what it contains
is not opaque, but foggy,
pink and citrus. From
this point on, I can't say
what will happen to you.