You'll soon lose interest in walking
and talking and wearing the cap
of a fool. You'll.
            Words: walk, talk, wear, cap, fool, you, soon, lose.

Idea!: Four word poems, ten
syllables per line, six
lines per paragraph. Graph.
            Words: idea, word, poem, syllable, line, paragraph, per, graph.

The night I wrecked my father's car
necking with my date after the dance
inching forward into traffic
foot tapping the brake like an *******.
            Words: night, car, father, wreck, date, dance, neck, traffic, inch,
            foot, tap, brake.

The USFS issued paper sleeping bags
like tissues during forest fires and fed us
steak and pop. All you could eat.
            Words: paper, bag, sleep, tissue, fire, steak, pop, eat, food,
            forest, us.

Things hurt. Pain is a message
to shut up and slow down.
Breathe deep, take care. Wait and see.
            Words: hurt, pain, shut, slow, breathe, care, wait, see, deep,
            message.

Just as the war
in the Iliad goes back
and forth according to Hector's
fortunes, so does marriage and a truck in mud.
            Words: just, war, back, forth, fortune, marriage, truck, mud.

Fear destroys the last free assessment of life.
But what is there to fear. Death
is most of all like sleep. Death
is but a dream missed.
            Words: fear, free, assess, destroy, life, death, sleep, dream, like,
            but, miss.

If a poem or essay can end with a conclusion or its opposite, either one,
Can it be of any use to anyone?

Do the discrepancies and disparities, dualities and densities, reflect only
      the dementia
Of the bearer of the pencil?

First entertain, then enlighten if you can. One stretches truth in order
      to pretend,
Another leavens with levity one's inevitable end.

Most days it's not possible to bring your life into an expressible state.
Disparate hopes, arduous chores, word choices. And, of course, the  
      state of the state.

Driven by ideas rather than rhymes, for it is not metres, but a
      metre-making argument,
That makes a poem. Convenience store or university English
      department

The day's disputes, down to the meaning of the weather, leave you
      indisposed
To share your heart of zero and your inner rose.

It is the strong force, the energy of the loved ones combined with
      cooperation for good or war.
Dad's years in New Guinea fighting ****, he said, were his best by far.

The best that can be said or done is Be where you are. Love the one
      you're with
Not necessarily an adult of the opposite ***, perhaps just a kid who
      hates math

And school, dresses goth, reads rarely but learns a lot from movies
      and YouTube,
Has the presence of mind to say I am who I am, deal with it. That's
      who I want to be

And have always been. Today clean the house, again. Woke up this
      morning to two thoughts:
How sweet to be alive! Life is tough.

Electron herders,
that's us. It began
earnestly late 20th century.
The first organic computers
using polymerase and ADP
came later. Weaponry
via numbers, words
magically appearing,
telepathy. Measurements
in which the last significant digit
is the Other. However
immediately depleted
our resources were,
antibiotics were always at the ready.
Forgetting what we knew,
reverting to austerity
because in times of prosperity
we forgot to be austere.
It's the uncertainty principle
taken to the nth degree
where the bad god resides,
Zeus, passionate, confused, obtuse.
Yes, we are electron herders
matter gatherers and shapers
of our time. Cancerous
cysts, irrational exuberance,
collective experience, experiments
gone well or wrong,
we were trying all along
to last forever. Flood and fire
saw to that.
Prospero was our answer
who threw his book
into the sea and wanted to be
mortal, meditative.
Find himself. We found
the world without the self
cornus to oxalis
orbitals and calculus
waves and particles
equally likely to be
within us as without us.

Supermarket celebration
shoppers are cytoplasm searching
for cellulose, muscle, photosynthesis.

Oils, petrochemical and vegetable
love: faith and trust
for instance, the Food and Drug Administration.

In America, the custom is
to avoid meeting the other shoppers' eyes. We graze
like cows or wander as zombies to the oldies played over the aisles.

I've always liked it here.
Cornucopia, yes. Also
a place to be alone and depressed, or cool off.

Water and bone
and the known ingredients. Neurons
for remembering, calculating, touching stuff.

I have a favorite bagger
who has the smile of a lover,
wouldn't rather be elsewhere.

Like glamour stars in bikinis
(but unlike tomatoes and bananas)
cashiers and clerks are admired from afar.

Joe says What's not to like? Ice cream, yogurt,
profit, tofu.
To eat your fill is a blasphemy against God.

At dinner, Zach asks
about our nation's history, wars.
I say We're taking on everyone, one at a time.

First Britain, then Britain again: "He was the surly English pluck, and
      there is no tougher or truer, and never was, and never will be."
Next Mexico: "Death is indifferent to what hide he tans; life crushes
      men like flies."
The War Between the States: "Well done, Mr. Cromartie. Time now
      for rest."

Most of Latin America: "Not only humans longed for liberation. All
      ecology groaned for it too. The revolution is also one of lakes,
      rivers, trees, animals."
Then Southeast Asia: "The slight bump the mortars make as they kiss
      the tube goodbye. Then the furious rain, a fist driving home the
      message: Boy, you don't belong here."
Now the Middle East: "A land to be admired like all lands. Harsh
      mountains and deserts, indigenous plants and people, adapted
      ungulates, carnivorous mammals."

Can't forget the Krauts & Nips: "Then I heard the bomber call me in:
      Little Friend, Little Friend, I got two engines on fire. Can you see
      me, Little Friend?"
Nor the Commies: "You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the
      beginning of a new one. I put this book here for you, who once
      lived, so that you should visit us no more."
The original indigenous people say: "In time we'll become prosperous,
      or else we'll become martyrs. The force that placed us here cannot
      be trusted."

           Your past, your romantic past, is a shadow. Like all towns, Port Angeles was a combination of rain and clouds, sun and mist, with a chamber of commerce, barrooms and boards of directors, the known and unknown. No one of course is completely unknown. I was known for my tragic love life. She had found another man, a backwoods man, living on the land but not above a night on the town, who according to her would wipe snot on his pants, a statement of poverty or thrift or anger against the niceties of society. All of us heated our hovels with wood but only the rich burned hardwoods, me and probably this guy were softwood gatherers.

            There were few aspects to my life. First, I can remember a nook in the kitchen of the house I shared with a beautiful faceless woman who wore a ring in her nose where I wrote and watched flocks of unidentified birds comb a tree for seeds. This particular day the sky was blue with clean pillowy cumulus clouds floating toward Puget Sound. I believe all the poems written in that nook have been forgotten by their author.

            Nights, for entertainment, I would wander the aisles of the supermarket, admiring everything and buying nothing. I had no money. The fluorescent lighting, clean straight neat shelving and floors, warmth and the fact I could identify nobody attracted me. I lived on cream cheese and honey sandwiches eating them leaning against the kitchen sink. Thinking go back to New York City which is what I ultimately did. Drove cross country nonstop three days and three nights seeing and feeling nothing.

           I populated P.A. during the Reagan recession inherited from Carter. I'm unclear how presidents affect your life but good or bad, democrat or whig, alive or dead you've got to get a job, which I did. I supervised the living arrangements of developmentally disabled adults in what I thought were humorous contexts that gave no offense. They were beautiful and incorrigible having regular *** without protection. Normally harmless they'd sometimes have altercations with their neighbors. I balanced the checkbooks, paid the bills. Supposedly teaching living skills, I had few of my own as evidenced by my sleeping on the floor, I had no bed. One mature woman colleague judged me a short-timer living a useless fantasy about big cities. Still lost in my own history, still didn't know the calculus.

            I had a dog, Shade, black lab, leftover from my near-marriage until she realized I had no economic prospects, no interest in further *** or her logger boyfriend, and a complete inability to translate or imagine nesting and gestation. My homework comes to me in daily disconnected increments. Shade lived in my gray van, a Dodge slant six, which I could never afford to fix. Once the driveshaft disconnected from the rear axle and I tied it on with rope. Drove 60 miles on a knot. Shade was hyper and sad, both. He smelled bad but was a good dog with a lonely heart. When my wife who wasn't a wife finally found a boyfriend who wouldn't wipe snot on his pant leg they took Shade to British Columbia where I believe he runs free on a vast estate by the sea. I once beat Shade like a slave because he attacked a small dog out of frustration and loneliness and until I had kids and started saying and doing things just as bad to humans it was the lowest meanest moment of my life. The farmer who saw it will never forget or forgive it.

            Having confessed all this there's just one last fact to tell. The mountains were cold, the waters clear, deep snow and shadows.

Between conjecture and classification there is
observation, experiment, data (collection and analysis),
statistics, calculus, and a good guess
about God's intentions -- probabilities, fractals, chaos and complexity.
This is the thunderous city.

The form of the poem, the rhyme.
Form cannot be first if you want to reach high artistic levels, since
      you are then bound by form, and that form is very often a
      betrayal of reality.
Yet I find I am attracted all the time
to philosophies in short skirts, jewels and eyes lined with kohl.
I love where her legs lead, to her very soul.

Three women hike by under an umbrella in a winter rain. Two men
      side by side run in rhythm.
An oil truck takes the hill in low steady gear.
My old Marine, 89, died last night without anxiety or fear.
May I overcome my pain enough to reach the place where the deer
      lay down their bones
and, like them, die alone.

When making an axe handle, the pattern is not far off.
The purpose of school is to introduce us to the world's innumerable
      wonders.
The periodic table, World Wars I and II, Huckleberry Finn and Jim.
      But soft,
what light through yonder window breaks?
It is a billion trillion nuclear detonations per second without which
      nothing can be done or faked.

The temple bell stops, but the sound still comes out of the
      flowers.
Forests and the composite species will be nameless. Genetic
      prowess,
receiving the sacrament, performing Lohengrin from the Great
      American Songbook,
the look of love in all the wrong places, facebook,
fakebooks, folios of old family photos on or in pianos.

How can I be both still and skilled?
When we took Pop-Pop off the ventilator, we put him in a refrigerator.
He stopped eating, he stopped breathing. Circle with a dot.
He had his dream, he'd rowed his boat.
No single line can completely explain -- or rhyme -- or untie this knot.