A face looks so carnivorous
From the nostrils down:
An open, ravenous trap,
Half full or half empty
Gleaming with ivory shears
And threatened sharpness
Of incisors clicking.

I fear it's raging hungers, this face;
It looks ghastly unkind
With tearing, strong molars,
An impertinent softness of tongue lurking
Concealing the violence till the last instant
While delicately testing
The perfect temperature of warm blood.

Who says humans
Don't eat their young;
Things sometimes happen in the dark,
Late of night, things you'd never catch in daylight-
Why do some never have children at all;
Perhaps they became too fond of newborn flesh,
Delicate as the palest veal-calf of the restaurant.

And it only looks human
When you add in some eyes.

Hurry scurry, wrinkle your nose,
Harem scarem, wiggle your toes;
For each thing's connected to every other-
The Earth is everyone's old grandmother.

Bubble bubble, stir in some trouble,
Soon the *** is bound to be double;
And I've a twin who lives in the mirror-
She rushes to meet me when I come near.

Oh cellar-door;
Such raised beauty rarely spoken;
You are the praise
That holds our gaze.

Oh cellar-door,
You will always be there;
When all the other
Word towers get razed.

I see that brick wall you’ve pointed me toward again,
A thousand times now, my brother;
Both with words and without,
In concealing codes and sly gestures.
I will just pretend to be walking there now,
And will circle that wall for a thousand years;
Even though my body fall down, my spirit
Will continue on in circles;
Even though my spirit finally wear itself through,
Like worn out house shoes,
My energy will continue to spiral, magnetized with momentum.

In my constant walking, my abiding presence
Will eventually become a bounding curse
Upon you and all your petty generalizations,
And I will ambulate the circumference of your limited minds;
Your little crime-seeking, self-satisfying standards.
My round bastions will deflect every intended wound of yours,
In dizziness you will behold my travelling orbits
And you will say that the I-that-is; that-something; that-somewhere
Has finally gone completely over the edge
Of sanity- but viewed from the other side,
I will still be standing strong and upright: unmoving even.

It’s not which side you’re on; it’s which can endure,
And your time will someday have to polish it’s bloodied hands
On my petrified reflection,
And your farcical mystery religions will crack and fall over,
Under the propellant power of self-doom.

I’m going to start walking now.

My poetry's really meant as decoration
For the days of life that we get rationed;
My lines for scrapbooks, wrapped around vases;
Words embroidered utilitarian places.

My words antimacassars for things nearby;
Some dangling sentences passing by,
Upon the latest quilt or jewelry box;
Or purse, or duffle, or coffee mug.

Please use my poems as flourishes and frills,
To substitute for things sans time to feel;
Shabby chic poetry, for every need:
Then there's always something to read.

Atoms skitter to the center
In the square dance of all matter;
Quarks should rotate once around,
Keeping us on earth firm-bound.

Swing your partner far and wide,
Perihelion's kept astride,
And the strings of matter
String along the boson's heart.

Now come together; smatter, scatter;
Atom-smashers do not matter,
For this dance of matter
Truly is a dance of higher art,

Matter curtsys; and there's gravity
Fills in each slight curving cavity-
From above, you'll notice first
It all starts from just one burst-

So the particles keep on dancing,
Midnight comes, and still they're prancing;
Whirling, somersaulting like they never
Dared to dance before;

Keep on watching, as the clocks hands
Travel once more past the grandstand;
We're transfixed since matter never
Let us ever see this door.

We're the eyes and ears that dare
To watch this tantric ballet, bared;
Entanglement seduces; there's no other place to be-
Bow to your partner in this deadly quantum duel of rivalry.

Does a sunken Galleon live in time;
Does a once drowned book
Still sing in rhyme?
Do mermaid's fingers
Now turn the page;
Or Captain remember
Sea's foaming rage?

Does love unnoticed
Beget love forgot;
Does it freeze in December,
And thawing, rot;
If in your mind, there could no doubt,
Does the ink of Time
Ever run out?

Sing words; that the body of time
  Gives to eloquent mind it's due,
Sing words; the creation of bones that
  The body's own day shines through.

Sing time; that the world not catch fire
  While we're treading it's rhythmed core,
Sing time; that your lies and your ages
  Are the sign of a closing door.

Sing bones; we'll put up a big stone
  To show you when your last days are done,
Sing bones; and your loved ones will gaze
  At that last place you lost the sun.

Would Life still love me-
Even if creatures don't;
Or would Love want me living-
Would it care about hurt?

If Life could love me;
In spite of all,
Or if Love could cherish,
Though I still fall;

Should heart keep beating,
While lungs do breathe-
Does it bear repeating,
I'm meant *to live?

My soul is not poetry inside of it
and it is nothing pretty;
My insides are dead, rotting rhododendrons
beside a rusting pitch-fork
inside a barn, deserted for the last fifty years
and too dangerous, to ever go into.

But if it could go inside,
My un-poetry'd soul would hop, crawl, and climb,
in spite of its lameness
up the rickety old ladder, to the hayloft,
And there eat the little green apples,
already wormy
from the gnarled tree, outside the window.

My soul would peer out the window and look for any signs
of the once-life that used to abide here-
To feed it's ravenous hunger for poetry
and then develop the unavoidable belly-ache.

Of course, I know lots of others
whose soul is not poetry, either;
And we are all trying to re-light the same matches
once struck by people, who had flames burning them inside

Which they dutifully copied down onto damp, tear-stained pages;
(so the words would not burn up the paper)
And then there were the copy machines,
and printing presses, to duplicate their fires-
Like carrying a bit of coal to the next door, and the next one
so that everyone could have a bit of fire in Winter.

And the thick water, of all the world's approbation
soothed their old, weeping wounds
While the rest of us not-poets huddled around not-fires
in cold deserted barns,
and picked fresh flowers every day

So that we could earnestly watch them die
all over again, each day,
and pronounce it poetry,
while nobody noticed how many words
we managed to hemorrhage out.

My fathers aunt hated goodbyes.
She helped raise my father, who had lost both parents
At a young age; so in some ways
She was the only mother he ever knew.
The trip to see her was a long one,
So we only managed a visit to the farmhouse
Every couple of years, and I thought it so humorous
That when the time came to leave
She would always unaccountably disappear;
To be seen shortly afterwards, through the window
Or perhaps on the porch, looking moribund
As your car cleared the final sweep of the long driveway-
With perhaps a wave then, if you were lucky.

And then one day she died, and there were no goodbyes.
She died in her sleep, as all the wise of this world
Ought to be allowed to die; and with no goodbye,
No last wave, no tears. I began to understand then
That all those goodbyes, that she would never participate in
Were to be taken together, as a whole,
As a single, silent deference;
Or a quietly potent rebellion-
Against the final leave-taking,
That she knew would probably go unspoken,
And as it happened, so it did.

And now, I no longer say goodbye either-
I always leave the airport stone faced;
Afraid this might be the last goodbye
That I never knew about.

The clock counts the hours of raging indifference,
The clock watches all, in the house of stone-
Tick tock: another heart is feebly breaking;
Tick tock: another heart's wretched, alone.

The hours of chance break the hourglasses;
The sundial's overgrown, with moss and weeds-
Tick tock: somebody says goodbye, forever;
Tick tock: someone else inhabits grief.

The clock sees the winners and the losers;
The clock says nothing, but the words it knows-
Tick tock: don't ask for whom the hour is chiming;
Tick tock: for the mirror and the timepiece know.

My soul married yours long before it told the heart,
That was your secret gestures, it had been concealing
And shy alphabet letters formed our non-linear talks
On which ancient symbols were awakening with the news,
That my rapt countenance longed to behold only you.
And in Morse code, my riotous pulse was pinging,
In tiptoeing tiny steps, toward your smile-fragranced planes;
With small sips of blind and drunken-wheeling wonder,
On Adirondacks of time, I finally met your gaze.
And together found, we were writing the same vows;
Our fingers following a bright-feathered knowing,
And scented blooms of flowers knew your older names;
And avalanching comets swept clean the turgid dawns.
Then the seeds of forever were pocketed in your breath,
Wreathed by stars, and saved for hidden yearning.

We are legion, in between the plates of this skull:
Terra firma, of the mind’s fickle boundaries
On a piece of planet, that keeps getting recycled;
From burnt supernovas, to soup kitchens:
How many distant whispers from my old remnants
Call to me from the dark, moist body of my mother?
How many other plots have I called home,
While inhabiting these collections of dust and plasma-
I can feel my once-atoms trying to summon me again,
From every corner of this starred-and-****** universe;
For I was Sister Moon, once known to St. Francis,
And I am part and parcel of the unlikely rabble
Burnt St. Joan’s body into the stake, upon unsympathetic scaffolding;
My bones daily bear the brunt of every curse and offering,
Here in my own timeless tragedy, of trembling flesh.

Sunless steeples toppled the fonts of your apocrypha
The mumbled harbingers of guilt's ascendancy
The icicles of the chandeliers dripping
Carbuncle tears, as the ransom of sullen lives
Many Sundays saw the closing of word-stiffened pages
In the hands of the blue-suited multitudes,
In homage of cathedrals filled up with dead Lilies
The pure must wear dark colors, in a kind of fake humility
While the evil wear white alone, in broad strokes of denial
And attention is a weather vane spinning madly
At the top of the world, wanting only God to be watching
only God to be watching
only God to be watching

If time were a star, lived only in your eyes
I'd feign uncertainty, before your bright surprise;
And if nights were gifts, nobody could return,
I'd pray to wake, upon your star that burn..

In calm waves of imaginings  I am mermaid,
Always chasing you through the towering tides,
Disappearing between each scalloped crest;
Only my tail visible, sticking out at odd angles.

I have lean, strong swimmer's muscles; I can swim for miles,
Nearly keep up with submarines, ships, ferry’s,
For a limited time. My hair tumbles down
As though a nest, like *****, twisted seaweed
Around my face’s shipwreck-glass eyes
And sunscald lips.

I follow keenly the scent;
Something, someone who’s precious- human scent,
Pungent, earthy, vivifyingly attractive,
Counterpoint to the ocean’s ambergris.

Meanwhile there’s only horizons of teal water all around me,
And roving sky above; my sole company most days.
I swim with just the barest hint
Of whispered memories,
Something so far and long ago;
He who knew well the secret heart of me,
Within my fishy innards
And  in spite of my appearance.

Sometimes a stray dolphin befriends me,
And travels for a distance beside me;
Speaking in strange, native high-pitched dolphin talk;
And dolphins are interesting, but they are not men,
And they can’t comprehend what is it I follow

In the blind, long-aching of unknown distance,
Or what I pine for nightly, in my roiling watery soul
In the solitary caves, of this twilight world.

The peace that war knows
Wasn’t purchased with dripping blood;
The war that peace knows
Wasn’t punctured by artillery sounds.

The peace the dead know
Wasn’t bought by a furrowed brow;
The war not known to the dead,
Feels all the same to them, as peace.

Knowing neither wars,
Nor that the dead are dead;
Shouldn’t we be jealous-
And wish it were us, instead?

These nerves know all the ticking of seconds
In your syncopated ecstasies, and this flesh knows
When you've reached the edge,
There's no going backwards again.
This mind knows all the precise pinpricks
Of patience, wherever you've veered to wander.
But somehow, this world cannot disband
Its crystalline self, before disbelieving eyes;
Can never follow the ordered layers peeling away:
Everything will still be as solid, as fragrant
As vertiginous, restless in inhibition,
Expressing the scaled continuum of resolute being,
When your nerves are finally stilled,
And your flesh is growing already colder.
But my unruly mind will no longer grasp then
Its footprints in carefully metered seconds;
But only in the leaping of frayed centuries, in aqueducts;
The rivers racing forward, into blind uncharted distance
Yet undreamed of, hidden under moonless nights;
Forests folded under the weight of eons, suddenly registered,
Calamities sped up to meet the counterpoint
Of time's new frowning dissonance;
And how quickly the wood begins to warp,
The rusted gallows to peek through, all the torn tapestries weaving.

Our empty syncopation's are patiently ambushed
By restless margins of undeclared territory;
Shivering cymbals, entraining cloistered memories,
A nimbus inclining toward unredeemable quarries:
Refrains unimagined, of star-tipped dawns
Upon certain days of ritual, unbelievably worn.

Breathing dragons of fire-squandering meridians
Pour round water upon semblance's drowned emotion;
Cleave then to me, who cleaves to the last vestige
Of rarefied air, breathed by bellows-smothered centuries
When your foot trod the newly opened ****** earth,
And your hand hinged loves diagonal, even unto death.

Genitalia are so amorphous;
They have no chance at heart or conscience.
Identifying characteristics; maybe,
But who spends time studying such a thing?

They are only the messenger;
First at knowing ecstasy,
Last to realize abandonment,
The body's inherently secret code
Attempting to speak the rhythms
Of everyman's language:
Bitmap of the soul's holiest desires.

They can't diagnose trouble,
Or predict rejection:
They are only the saddle upon an unbroken horse;
And wildness all that ever breathes,
Through it's foaming nostrils.

And what is desire, but the body's own fire?

The vampire really craved him some blood,
And thank god; they'd just buried Mrs. Flood:
He pried open her casket,
And was using his ratchet-
But her fluids had turned thick as mud.

Two vampires decided to dine
On a lady, whose blood was like wine;
While pausing to savor
It's delicate flavor,
One said, the House issue is fine!

Vampires sleep days and fly nights,
They are known to be fearful of lights,
And feeding's quite a trick;
It's got a big kick-
Though impossible, with bad over-bites.

To a vampire, an ****'s a feast
On the blood of man, bird or beast;
And he's not into zoology
Psychiatry or psychology;
Doesn't even care, if it's deceased.

Bad poetry makes me ugly:
Look, each line, a cliche
Each blemish, a simile;
My smile grows more bitingly smug
With each overzealous superlative.

My raccoon eyes are ringed
By metaphorical self delusions,
Badly performing alliteration-
All improvisations of incompetence;
And then the clash of symbol, deranges all thought.

Choose only the wound that is in your heart
That you would earnestly enlarge upon,
Steadfastly ignoring all the others.

I was the song
You sang once;
Beside the flowing rivers of time,
And I was the words
You knew once;
Words which we met in a rhyme.

Now I'm like the song
Forgotten;
Abandoned on the shores of life,
And I’m all these notes,
Unbegotten-
Which now only die,
In your quiet.

The dead breathe through the door of sky,
In echo'd dreams and prayers, they sigh,
For in graves desire has no feet;
Their burning dust mirrors life's defeat,
And shriveled tongues are ghosts at sea:
Unsung, unseen, invisibly.

The storms of mind wound sleeping flesh,
In clouds you see the angel's breath,
The child of music flies in space;
A shadowed flame behind his face
To touch the sun, in world's asleep:
And stone gods in their heaven, keep.

Let me forget transient sadness
Let me reinvent me
And not be too small inside

Let me grow fat with happy
Be tender with those
Who grieve

Forgiving of children
And men

And into other hearts
My own heart weave

Let me forget what's unhappy
A day's such a miracle born

Who knew existence would happen
Or that it would happen so soon

Let me love while time
Has patience, for lovers

Let me grow while Earth
Still has room, for flowers

Open my heart
To see others pain

And try to make a difference
Before I have to leave again

I pray for wings, for my heart to fly
I pray the most, in blue breaths of sky

July 5 2010

You, the invisible country
I have only read about;
Me, the half-veiled truth
That your words would rout.

You, the fettering bond,
With silken thread of chain;
Me, the evasive bird,
Comes circling round, again.

Give the land a name,
So it's heart, to frame;
Give the bird a seed,
Not caged, by distant deeds.

In men's clear eyes, there live the bravest things:
A hope that sings, as brave as any bird;
Though it should fly, through hours of glancing rain
That scarce has ceased, before it's song is heard.

In men's quiet thoughts, dwell hours of silent pain,
Though it wake you not, the minutes crawling by;
Like stately columns of soldiers, on parade,
The only shot fired's a lone tear, from his eye.

In men's bold dreams, are things not ever seen;
Yet mirror tomorrow's face there, in the rooms,
And flowers rare, not seen before on Earth;
But upon his least intention, they must bloom.

In men's most hidden soul, nobody knows
What ties the form, into his very mind;
Though it's the secret, central mystery:
Goes back too far, for anyone to find.

Unwilling the pain of shared listening,  their flesh one
go the closed voices only into lovers warm drunken secrets
painful of imagination’s beauty, which knows rare echoes of the words
their lips listened, covetous of real angels token posturing
lovely sweat pouring, like children's hearts pound effortlessly
paths again melting, into the delicate thrill of the still-ordinary
already the transformation, into sweet bruising elation
playful caressing of the passions we empty summer lives into
where all existence strolls fragrant, blossoms from the discovery of it
building up bliss, ceasing breathing, his first friction becoming
imagined time-telling giddy kisses, given and held by her eyes
in this electric universe, purchased time and again
with breath of the impossible imagined.

There are places it's not safe to go;
There are lovers, who don't really love,
Whose heart's lie buried, beneath the snow
Much farther; farther than your soul.

There are places it's not safe to go;
Where thieves would wait for you, just to steal
The moon's cool shadow, where it glows-
But till they die, can't ever feel.

There are places not safe to go
And secret storms, in dead of night;
And people who lie, and never show
Their face, in day's revealing light.

July 5 2010

And I wake up, greedy to live:
The sun climbs higher, in morning’s sky,
While Buddha sits, in his gold-paint statue,
And household saints hide in early shadow,
And woodpeckers do old style tap-shoe.

Coffee smells are rampant now,
The squawk box is rife, with trivial banter;
A nice background sound to go on living to
And the air foams up, at window and door-
The unspoken things are breaking through

A new day's come now, bearing gifts
Unknown, they're already on their way;
Life grows exacting and random, the same,
And again I awaken, greedy to live
And exult in the freedom, to play this game..

When I was young, white moonlight poured in, nights
Through my gauzy white curtains, and the world turned paler,
A ghostly apparition of it's daytime countenance.
The whiteness contained all the emotion, of my whole life's turning
Condensed down into streaming rays of silvered light-
And that moonlight scoured, cleansed everything it touched;
Nothing was sordid, forgettable, unimaginable; the magic turned all
Into a fairy's world, of majestic mystery and translucent dignity.

I trusted the moonlight. Moonlight today is not the same;
My curtains don't block it, but the moon doesn't seem to smile as large
And I know too many secrets and disappearances now-
When I knew less, the fantasies could sustain the weight of my world,
Which has since grown too heavy, and the hour now is late.

I feel if I could reach that lost moonlight one more time,
I could find the other self, the one knew so much more of nothing,
But was secreted between the moonlit nights
And felt satisfied, not yet knowing the deep inward emptiness of life,
And the way the colors get released one by one
From the central altar of night time’s lamp,
And how particles of soul get extinguished;
Released to another life, in the far-travelling moonbeams.

But the moon does not remember bewitching my face,
Which has grown cratered with time,
And while the moon slowly steals our breaths away,
And covers up our eyes with its brilliance,
It's hands pick our pockets nightly,
And take everything there that is light, bright, glowing
To return it to the moon-blinded young.

While we just keep on growing darker,
Until they shove us back underground again-
Now even the moon has forgotten my face.

Fraught in flame and framed by time,
I see your face by the candle's light;
And mercy accumulated, from many small acts
Composes your expression, and makes it soft.

You wear gentleness like others wear flowers,
You count love by actions, not hours;
Your callouses are knots, on a rosary of care,
When you enter in a room, patience takes a chair.

Noble intentions, steeped in palpable grace,
Eyes cast down, when any murmuring goes on;
Against friend or brother; you've naught to say,
Gentle your step upon the world, each day.

In a thousand worlds, are you present there?
Between the dimensions, singing like wind,
Breaking disappointment, pouring out love:
Light in your eyes, your heart a treasure-trove.

My inconstant heart
Tries to touch you, in the boarded up rooms,
The corridors sealed off from my reach.
My recorded voice echoes past empty hallways,
Down decrepit staircases.

Once my portrait hung
Above your bed itself,
Till you partitioned it off.
Even I will no longer grovel
When hope has already flown out the portal.

I'm more dangerous now,
Having nothing left to lose
And nothing to hold onto;
My timbers mutely rotting, while your siren voice
Goes on sweetly singing.

White feathers falling,
When an angel flew close by;
There's nothing up above us,
But I saw him, on the sly.

White downy floaters,
Floating on the sea of air;
In a single eye blink,
I saw him hovering there.

Souvenirs of miracles,
Signs and wonders too:
He knew he lost that feather-
And he said- give it to you.

The sky is the quartermaster
But you are it’s eyes,
Currying favor from
Life’s narrow surprise;
The days of your weather
Arrive fair or foul,
Delivering artifice;
As much as allowed.

I sail in your auspices,
Partake of your airs;
Not minding the skies,
Whether cloudy or clear,
For found nowhere else
Are the things you are giving;
And till your arrival,
It’s not really living.

Burn his words and letters,
Remove his touch from mind,
Forget his smell, however well;
Some fetters cannot bind.

Take his pictures from their frame,
Remove his dreams, before you sleep;
It's true the mind can be retrained-
But as for memories, those you keep.

Bored meeting again,
And we’ve assembled ourselves,
Well situated, to see the clock,
Later arrivals take the leftover chairs
And the words begin to drone.

Pencils getting pushed,
While we’re thinking, how’d we get here;
We left in such a rush,
Our brains are scrambled mush,
When suddenly there’s a silence-

A response is now required;
More murmuring and muttering,
Chair legs being squawked,
Drawings on white boards,
Handouts passed about:

We wish that we just had the guts
To get up; walk right out.
Our lives are lived in neutral,
While clocks hammer out our days;
We owe our every bit of food

To something someone says.
This meeting feels interminable,
In so many different ways,
And just when we’re most sure, we’ll die-
Adjournment comes; the end.

I was in trouble again.
I'd just awakened our baby- again.
Most mothers want their new baby to sleep;
That was their most prolific time of day,
But not me; I was afraid.
Sudden infant death was known
To stalk new babies;
How could I be sure
Death wasn't stalking her this very moment;
Slowing her breaths, her heartbeats,
Taking her away, by one sly degree at a time
To the land where there are no sweet baby dreams.
That cry of awakening was a drug for me;
A reassurance. I needed my fix.
I couldn't stop doing it.
But babies need their sleep.
So one day, her father sat down calmly
And he told me,
She wants to keep living much more strongly
Than you could ever wish it for her,
Her being is strong and it has an incredible
Will to stay alive.
Somehow, I finally got it.

Years later, and somebody had to give me
The adult version of this talk; she was nearly grown;
You can't live her life for her, can't suffer
All her pains for her, instead.
How many more times will I need reminding-
How many more days will she live
On the outside of my body, instead?

His beautiful complexity is difficult,
Confuses me; my neurotic inner child
Wants to be beaten or serenaded,
It doesn't understand many-layered things;
His whispered confidences, less alienating
Than others, made me trust too soon,
And his atoms, more colorful than
His brothers painted-on coats.
My being turns all around his center;
My wheels to his drum,
My arc to his sun,
Laughter when he's coming,
Cries when he's gone-
Till I'm reduced-
Subtracted-
Done.

The robotic surgeon didn't blink
Smoke, swear, or fool around;
He was the newest design of science
His metal feet firmly on the ground.

Robotic surgery was the latest
Improvement over the manual kind
There were no variations in technique;
No reliance on flaky mind.

He was diligent and precise
Cutting flesh to invisible templates;
He never erred and he never missed
Never once paused, to vacillate.

Trusted beyond the regular surgeon,
Using his fragile, shaking hands;
The robotic surgeon could do anything
Because he wasn't just a man.

The newest miracle of science was hailed
As the end, to the older style;
But one day the program blew a fuse-
And he cut her head off, by a mile.

What's easiest in coming is never as appreciated
As that over which we must expend ourselves in agonies,
Give birth to, by fully stretching open our being.

What's easiest to lose is never forgotten again;
We had it once, in the sweaty, half-closing palm of our hand
Studying it for long seconds, contemplating it's beauty there,
Imagining it to be ours alone, forever;
But something turned our head for a moment, a second
And at that instant, it flew.

Who shall praise the sour wheat?
We shall praise the sour wheat.
Who shall praise the stillbirth?
We shall praise the stillbirth.

We shall be grateful, yea; even for emptiness
And vacancy
For there is still another opposite, even to the
fullness of nothing down here-

We should be grateful even that we realize
there can be a 'nothing' instead of a 'something';
We should be glad-
Even the void here contains worlds of universes
While the echo there just goes on
past the unraveling edge of forever

if you have something real to say to this world,
something else will come along to fill up all
the available time; truth is the one thing
not allowed down here

the self is a repository that has been
collecting things since the first man
had the first thought, and if you don't
believe this, the primal fear of deadly snakes
still remains very much awake
in our dreams to this day as a warning
of imminent danger

your thoughts get strung out
from place to place
when you travel, and others
can read them like signposts
along the highway

i can feel you arriving before
I know you are traveling this way,
and the dying can be felt leaving their
bodies before they realize it
themselves; departures and
journeys are not what they seem
down here

loud music frightens in the presence
of others; the loudness will unveil
fragility and capability they did not
know you possessed

because I can be so deadly
at the heart of me, I must pretend
to the innocence of a child
or risk execution

On the ship of self we're riding
Somewhere we do not know;
We tip the doorman, pay the driver,
The wheels begin to roll;

Past scenery drear and lovely,
Past clouds and oceans all;
Till everything is featureless,
Beneath a darkened pall.

Still many miles we're riding,
As to the end, we must;
Unsure of where we're headed,
We must rely on trust.

At last the rolling ceases,
The doors are opened slow-
We find we never left at all;
The journey's in the soul.

The universe has rhythms
To rock itself to sleep;
Praying Jews at nightfall,
In front of stony walls;
A slow-circling hawk
By a fortress deep,
And a dozing child
Where a woman weeps.

The universe has secrets
It touch with guilty hands;
Buried unmarked grave,
Of one who was not saved;
A war to break at morning,
When death will have his day,
Words of peace on dying lips
They can never say.

Hide in plain sight
Hide the hole within your soul,
Hide your dark blots all away
And run away that you shall live;
And live to run another day.

Hide in dark and hide in light,
Hide your life's continual blight-
Hide from truths so they won't find
The blackest hole of all; your mind

Hide in plain sight
Hide the hole within your soul,
Hide your dark blots all away
And run away that you shall live;
And live to run another day.

Hide the brilliance of your soul,
Hide it deep, hide it well-
Hope they won't think to look there
Stand watch to guard it, if you dare

Hide in plain sight
Hide the hole within your soul,
Hide your dark blots all away
And run away that you shall live;
And live to run another day.

Hide in hell worlds of the mind,
Hide in spells they'll never find-
Don't let them own your living soul
Much better far, to live in holes.

I sleep in sadness;
Or else sadness weeps
Weary and diffident,
Around the world, entangled
In morose grey deeps.

Sad in your gladness,
That I can't participate;
In torpors I circumnavigate
The whirling ocean, gravitate-
Would wish that I could burn.

Wish, to feel anything at all:
That love had me in thrall,
Or hatred made a mess
Of my well ordered senses;
Life: this just is.

Bite me or kiss me,
Wake me up; enlist me,
My dreams grown fainter than a wisp
Nearly drowned in status quo,
When all I wanted, to flame or glow.

There's no time
As life grows taller
Than a winter shadow,
And strangles your words:
Where did glad go?

I chase myself around a corner,
Find no one's waiting there,
For no one to grasp hold;
There's a vacancy inside me
It's colder than cold.

Hell's a moderate place, at best
Everyone's happy and soooo well-fed;
Watching endless hours, of a tv show:
Please set me on fire-
Don't **** me slow.

I can feel this consciousness;
That it's nowhere, and yet it feels local:
It's not in the rocks or the soil, the trees
Or the sky; it goes where I go
And I know where I'm going-
But it goes, without knowing.

Time and distance mean nothing to it;
And I'm its parasite, all the while believing
That I'm the one in charge;
Keeper of the maps and the shoes,
The tires and the itinerary.

Without it, I'm nothing and nowhere,
Just as lost in space as it is.
But I can't help fantasizing
About being the kite for once
Instead of always being the kitestring.

I want to get so blind stumbling drunk
that the earth divides herself in twain;
and my half takes me up to heaven,
and then I want to go low again,
let the oceans sink me down into hell,
to drown all this creatures tiresome ambitions.

I'm dying in mundane status quo;
leaking icemakers and clogged disposals,
traffic fines and shopping lists,
car repairs and dinner guests,
and the endless wearing, wearying
wearing out the body,
wearing out the clothes,
wearing out the friends,
wearing out the soul-
need new shoes new wheels new goals;
need new gods;
I’m stuck in the shoals.

Pick a quiet spot
where the only noise heard
is grass growing old;
for life’s a careless happenstance;
that we should even be here,
dreaming forever our pick-pocket dreams,
one day this bubble will burst its seams
and we’ll go back to mute possibility,
where we’ll be filled up,
for eternity of eternities-

but down here, we remain half empty cups.