What if belief was vanity?
I would not write a word,
for if I knew a thing or two,
my meaning would be useless.

And if I write, I am vain...
vainglorious, for example;
but, yet, the courage to dress up,
starts in children everywhere.

Children are not holy,
and to that I bring the blame,
grind me up in the mill, I dare ye!
To which I can taste the sane.

Nothing belongs to me,
And that is my war,
Myself condemning myself,
So far from the world,
far from Life.

There is another gravity
which falls into the stars,
whose weightlessness enables
the tendrils of space to abound,

whose blackness befits the shadows
cast by needling trees,
a circumnavigation
brought about by ease

Speak easy as led by good feeling,
a meaningless pass,
a meaningless pass.

That's the animation!
- that captures the heart
and flourishes a bloom.
Pity though,
for I see it not,
and must dwell upon a Who.

A desire is infinity
but limited in scope,
To the well-worn feathered being
t’hither gusts a hope.

Of all the friendly shrews I've met,
they've come and gone to my regret,
but by their pace I think I see,
their means of immortality.

That the body is a man,
that I do not know.
The body, rearing, is a Titan;
sand, its simple subject.

A baby, dying, upon its birth?
Tis' truth, we're blind to see.
A baby tells you with its eyes:
a soul can only know.

What should I say to you,
Other soul,
Who sparks a funny feeling in my heart

A handful of the rosary:

One for the bell,

One for the crow that flew the town,
upon the spire’s clattering ring.

One for the herb
meant to freshen the room,

One for the beating moth,

One for the well-worn apparatus
that keys keep hidden for the host.

Standing conifers
girdle them down
to recumbent silence,
their eyes-formed-plates
laterally diminishing in eighths,

They wait cross legged,
sheltered by palms of rock
and shattered limbs of lost parts,
their minds slowly wandering,
wrapping up the sky and up
to rest in sky

They are dreaming of singing,
dancing so
loudly
in the cold and new night,

If you are worn,
take musk upon your hands
and onto moss-ridden stones throw
upon yourself the swell and
look,
it is large and empty,
a disruption of rock breaking in the air

It is:
root splits stone
twining dirt into
valley covering,
splitting pine into pine
and path into path,
cutting and wandering
by the foot,

A microcosm but repeating itself repeating
itself,

Disrupted, and if upside down,
falling into sky.

Oh vanity
Oh sanity
Sisters that I can't please
Tugging at both my arms
As if I were cavalier

Oh paucity
Oh raunchiness
I fatten upon a feast
Though shame and morning and mourning and frost
Wake me up too early

I

Salient soliloquies startle unemployed brokers breaking windsurf and almond joys against a heavenly myrtle, or
Shallow ponds of serendipity swallowing enormously at bandits who bait their breath as minutes retreat, or
this poetry is about reminders, or
Children hiding under ghosts evoking dead pools of drinking moss,
who dream of knowing silence

Who,
spreading dyes of crushed grass give scarecrows a purpose to perch,
In a land called Home,
In an outlet called intelligible,
during a shared history, which,
Under dissection,
startles earthworms from their native volumes now standing naked in the daylight,
The daylight, which is contained,
a specular cocoon or an inverted dome: the sky.

II

a pinwheel,
when spinning, is unsuspected of employing Nature’s most dangerous tools,
One of flatness, one of exuberance, jubilation,
of the dirt that falls upon ones clothes as one passes through the pines and pins of solitude,
solitude, which,
in a wave from the unknown, dispose of forgone longings through the greeting of a friend who remains a stranger until they’re gone.

How small an insect may appear
to a lump as large as me.
What if the whole world was an insect?
Would be I as small as me?

Then, would my life glide so fast
as a tiny ember's leap?
For things too small to grasp in hand
seem to me replete.

Sacred silence,
sanctuary,
sword held to the sky,
marking
some obscure signal,
some obscure sign.

Sphere of liquid
Gaia holds,
a nursery of fish,
decoration
for the lorn,
the love-held way
of late.

My dad introduced me to a shiatsu practitioner,
Shiatsu is:
Japanese acupressure.

The gentleman, named Fujikawa,
told me the body is mechanical.
Pain, he said as he pressurized and stretched me, is real.
“Real pain” was his phrase. He repeated it often.

Fellow reader,
take care of the body while you have health. The body is a gift from nature. In my own case, I grew up not exercising much. Exercise may be a missing part of your life. —

Streetlights glide past on a Tuesday night,
so alone, and the air,
cold wet.
Your faces form a phase like
a string of pearls,
occurrences distributed in space,
Watching mournful over the
deserted pedestrian causeways
eliciting sonderous ghosts,
Leaving voicemails
for romances that never happened.
And selfishly, I presume
a perspective,
Or really, I dream up of a
place to meet you,
like an alleyway (I am a **** in this instance),
Or the leftovers of a wedding
eagerly awaiting the clean-up crew.

Think lowly of me, dear child.
I was here before the end.
Poltergeists do not exist,
only friends and then the end.

I supplicate the breast
to flatten beneath the earth,
warmth is to me made,
though I don't understand.

Alchemical winds
guide matter, groaning against
the firmament in its
transmigration:
foundations of the world.

Such madness;
as a heavenly body
turns its face, revealing and
concealing at once;
as a fruit fly
clones its black
cloak under the
plain daylight;
as a hat
lies upon a coat rack,
and haunts us at all
ungodly hours of the night.
A ghost! - one that
we mistake for whole.

Such empty evil
as a vessel that consumes others
like itself cannot be a sin
greater than creation.
And as all things cast shadows
in the light,
so walks a shadow
that some call a friend -
a visitor born of the same
fate as your own!

Well first i went up santa ana street,
hung a left, at little ida road,
and by and by the rain it came and washed out all the dirt,
and into those little running streams.

The concrete of the bridges they sung with hanging moss,
right over the heads of the horses,
and bit by bit the rain it fell and receded into earth,
oh heavens it was one downright cloudy day.

oh mystery it sung a song one precious and unborn,
of a mind much too loosened on the earth,
how a soul might plod no-one can know, how you feel much the same
day after many membered day.

many mottled heads they hang in reproachment and in mirth,
the jury of an open field of grass,
and all who come who dare to listen can only find a friend,
in the falling of the long remembered rain.

oh mystery it sung a song one precious and unborn,
of a mind much too loosened on the earth,
how a soul might plod no-one can know, how you feel much the same
day after many membered day.

The morning fast approaching
Leaves no time behind,
Just as gravity’s keep has swayed
Yet another tides the day.

met a stoner on the highway
who was crying like an angel
of grace, leavened
like the abacus of misery’s
loom, a fellow sun-washed
tarnished
goodness graced
ill-believer who
saw no distance in the stars
and burned his soul with needles,
coming down on a young child
eclipsing serial apocalypses
in calypso’s grace,
a *****,
or a *****, poisoned
on a long winter’s algebra
entering into a space of
infinite solitude within the held notion of all beings,
O Shadow,
oh strange manifest of worldly sin,
where is my friend, oh master of destinies,
what shape is he in? does the dream
of a lost dogs sorrow hypnotize
like the eyes of a sparrow,
shooting like an arrow from a
deep dark hello,
how does one to think?
know?

The most important thing to practice
when changing oneself
is simply, calmly, and kindly
starting again.

The rivers start in mountains
and travel under roads
until they come to holding places
between here and the sun.

The sun starts way before us,
before then I don't know,
but travels onward after us,
to places as of yet unknown.

The places seem to move to me,
but to me place is here.
Places really don't make sense,
and to that I drink a beer.

Visages perch like leaves offered to the sun,
as we lie below, sleeping in a stream,
toe-to-toe, our gills inundated with burning.

A half-light permits itself to be shown.
Its voice is used.

Sea monkeys may sing their fragments.
Their dreams are sharp coral
that drag power from the broken body
of a shore.
They are in sin -
a thing owned so unseriously.

With the setting sun, the great aftermath
looks on in leisure, and as a slave to the mystique:
time’s wide course
does not return nor continue accordingly.