there was a little panda he was black and white
very very funny and very very bright
he lived in a country very far away
in a great big jungle where he used to stay.

oneday while out walking through the jungle road
he looked upon a leaf and there was sat a toad
the little toad was crying feeling oh so  blue
then the panda asked what is wrong with you.

i have lost my way he said i have lost my track
panda said dont worry i will take you back
then he heard a croak not to far away
coming from a place where the toad should stay.

panda led the toad to where the toad should be
to a little pond just behind a tree
panda said goodbye as he walked away.
toad stayed in his pond and never more did stray

there was a little panda he was black and white
very very funny and very very bright
he lived in country very far away
in a great big jungle where he used to stay
oneday while he was walking through the jungle road
he looked upon a leaf and there was sat a toad
the toad he was crying feeling oh so  blue
then the panda asked what is wrong with you
i have lost my way he said i have lost my track
panda said dont worry i will take you back
then he heard a croaking not to far away
coming from a place where a toad should stay
panda led the toad to where the toad should be
to a little pond just behind a tree
toad he was happy. he was now back home
never again from his path did he ever roam

I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs. my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened. soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I was startled. startled too that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad. I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of my enemy. the toad was dull save for its hop from water and save for its courage and save for a sickly orange spot on its back that was a star when the toad paused and a mangled star otherwise. a couple times I lost the toad, the land was new, but I knew to stop and the toad knew to rustle or in my more desperate moments to come wholly back. everything had been planned and my body wanted to be generous to the toad and it was hard not to run or use my hands or ruin this paradise that I knew then as vengeance but now as existential plagiarism which is nonetheless vengeance. I would not rub the toad over me and I had to convince myself repeatedly. the boy was no doubt inside the house as his dog was not to be seen but his sister was sprawled on two towels put short end to short end as she was very tall and her sunglasses were cocked enough so that her right eye could see mine. the toad was in her mouth immediately and then her throat bulged but was back to its original in no time. I lost the toad forever then but its orange star surfaced on the right and then the left of her belly button. I told her I would see her at school and I would but this was the last time I would see her in anything but an overcoat and the boy would try and come close but never again pin me down.

there was a little mouse and his friend the toad
and upon his back the little mouse he rode
they were best of friends and together everyday
the little mouse and toad they just loved to play
oneday as they playing they heard a funny sound
so the mouse and toad took a look around
there in the grass  they saw a little shrew
somehow he got lost and didnt know what to do
the mouse he said dont worry i know where you are
i will take you home again it isnt very far
follow me and toad he said we will take you back.
so off they went together down the grassy track
then they found shrews home a little down the road
the shrew he was happy and thanked the mouse and toad
the mouse he said goodbye then off on toad he rode

there was once a goat he had a coat of white
he had a funny beard such a funny sight
he liked to roam around all along the coast
travelling all around was what he liked the most
one day on his travels while walking down the road
sat there in the hedge he saw a little toad
the little toad was sad and had teardrop in his eye
the goat he said whats wrong. what has made you cry.
the toad said he was lonley thats why he was sad
i have lost my friend he said the only one i had
goat he  said dont cry i know just what to do
we will look together and find your friend for you
then suddenly they heard  another little toad
croaking in the hedge further down the road
it was his little friend that he was searching for
now they were toether and they were friends once more
goat he said goodbye im glad you found your friend
the story was complete and has a happy end

~ the director

one woman in particular became trapped in a man’s body and he married her.  a child they tried not to have soon arrived and brought with it a list of demands from the others.

his peers double crossed each other in small houses.  he himself was able to get away with punching a young girl for the right to drag a sled.  his child began to accept talking toys in exchange for keeping quiet.  

he was in love with his sister, always had been.  after she was mauled by the dogs meant for his father, he made walking his home until it called itself a hotel

of running.  last year, he caught a movie one had made of his life and though he missed the dedication

he did not miss
the death row scene, the saw his brother took from the cake, the plain basket
as it moved
with his mother

from bike
to bike…  

~ transmissible

the stomach remains dumb

the way she finds this out on a school bus

the way her mother
after losing
a child  

~ ephemeron

cornfield visionaries, they sat around the ball as if it were fire.  I myself was tired of magic

so we played four short and the ball was a fact.  a hard period planted in mud

or a long quote
buzzing the ears
together.  

~ alleviant

of all places a park bench will do for the man not yet reading but planning to the children’s book with its cover of mother and child and kitchen and some kind of batter on the child’s face.  presently the man is alone much as his mother is alone in one of his fingers.  two men nearby are drinking from a water fountain and in turn are each palming the low **** for the other.  they are friends but only by length of service and the man can tell one is aggressive and the other allows it.  the book itself is disappointing.  the child is just ***** and the mother is just angry and they learn only to be themselves.  the men at the fountain become two men on a bench and the reader scoots over to hear about the voice of god as ****** children take the park.

~ amends

your house in foreclosure and you leave it and you are holding two bags of cat food.
  
sometimes a tricycle is a particular tricycle
trying to clear
with its back wheel
the low cinema
of your bare
foot.  

I am mugged in your dream and mugged in mine and mugged by a woman in both.

I hope we can meet without talking money.  this story my mother gave me
about the world’s first invisible man
is a keeper.  he was born

that way.

your mother I saw her setting the patio table for two and I looked away but could hear
no one
beating her.

we can talk about your cat.    

~ homology

the empty raccoons by their emptiness have kept the priest awake.  the church dumpsters wheel themselves into the world and he watches.  he tells his mother it is the silence of god.  she shrinks from him more and more and eventually fits through a door he cannot see.  his house fills with garbage and he becomes convinced he is wearing gloves.  we do not argue.  he raises them with his hands to take them off with his teeth.      

~ fiction

my age, father paints an abstract jesus.  mother has the kitchen to herself and sits.  mother watches my brother lift a chair and leave.  my sister lets a train pass and bites at the shoulder strap of her bra.  not my age, I draw a violinist.  draw a dog at the neck of its owner.  at my age of apple and rope, I prefer god’s early work.

~ monodist

online, I pretended to be writing a very long obituary.  in house, I dreamt not of my wife but of a grape being rolled by a palm gently toward a grape the dream could not see.  as it is in heaven, I was not all there.

~ signage

I was limping the edge of the pond so as to confirm in the world my clearance given to me as before by frogs.  my punched nose was warm and my grief melted from it and I cupped my hands together for the blood and what mixed with it and when the cup was full I halved it and my already thick shoelaces thickened.  soon into this drama one frog jumped from the pond and I startled that indeed it was no frog but a toad or some form of toad.  I followed it woozily from my father’s land onto the land of the man who’d fathered the boy whose fist had found so recently fistfight heaven.  the toad was dull save for its hop from water and save for its courage and save for a sickly orange spot on its back that was a star when the toad paused and a mangled star otherwise.  everything had been planned and my body wanted to be generous to the toad and it was hard not to run or use my hands or ruin this paradise that I knew then as vengeance but now see as existential plagiarism which is nonetheless vengeance.  I told myself I would not rub the toad over me and I had to convince myself repeatedly.  the boy was no doubt inside the house as his dog was not to be seen but his sister was sprawled on two towels as she was very tall and her sunglasses were cocked enough so that her right eye could see mine.  the toad was in her mouth immediately and then her throat bulged but went quickly back to its original.  I lost the toad forever then but its orange star surfaced on the right and then the left of her belly button.  I told her I would see her at school and I would but this was the last time I would see her in anything but an overcoat and that boy would try and come close but never again pin me down.      

~ discipline

somehow sweet in his want of no trouble, the unwashed man goes hand in hand with your father to the backyard where they wrestle as if hurt were people keeping them apart.  your father’s jaw comes loose, the man’s ear seems held by too small a magnet.  at window you a sickly child with overbite and a scarecrow’s pipe stroke the puppet-corn hair of a sister’s doll and walk it cloud to defrosted cloud.  amidst this bartering of vanished weight your mother is being made to balance on her bare stomach a glass of lemonade.  in three days the man will come back, your father a bit healed, your mother less angry about straws.

~ the rabbits

the head of a shovel enters the earth of this southern field.  there is no more give here than in the northern.  the burying boy has been long facing the wind and will be longer.  in walking toward the boy, the old man’s knees have locked.  the old man is seen by the boy and the old man waves upright in the wind’s gnaw.  the tops of the boy’s legs reach his stomach.  

~ archaism

a man carrying his dog stops to kneel.  for my distance from him, I am disallowed any inquiry that would flower.  he sets the black dog in front of him in the manner I have imagined god at the simple chore of placing those first shadows.  I am holding my son nostalgically, almost forgetting how my tooth would ache and his tooth would ache and both would be things I knew and he didn’t.

~ sincerely

the males had in them a sloth and a jolly fog of sportsmanship

and in the females a mistake was made.

against frogs, and against the dim leaping
of frogsong

I had this friend

broke his arm
while *******  
at the wheel.  

I put my arm in the grief of my arm.

there was a little panda he was black and white
very very funny and very very bright
he lived in a country very far away
in a great big jungle where he used to stay

oneday while he was walking through the jungle road
he looked upon a leaf and there was sat a toad
the litttle toad was crying feeling oh so  blue
then the panda asked what is wrong with you

i have lost my way he said i have lost my track
panda said dont worry i will take you back
then he heard a croaking not to far away
coming from a place where a toad should stay

panda led the toad to where the toad should be
to a little pond just behind a tree
toad he was so happy. he was now back home
and promised from his pond he would never roam

A festering toad, happening upon his friend the owl, began upon an uttering. A sort of delirious asking. "Why are people so afraid of death?" With this owl content and basking in the moonlight, they did speak upon the truth of the matter;

"Because when you're dead you're dead see?," the owl remarked so haphazardly.

"But what point is there in that statement," the frog stuttered in with a knowing kind of sinful grin;
"After death, could we not begin to fly with the stars, or at least just pretend that we are orbiting Mars?"

The owl simply replied, "Remember toad, while it is I who pierces the veil, it is you who must lead the spirit parade through it’s transformation."

The toad croaked a sigh at the owl, blinking its ever seeing eyes at his brother-in-arms in feigning return,remarking that “these must truly be times of madness for a mad toad to lead the way….

A shriek! "THEY ARE THOUGH, the rest of the animals forget, basic reality is made up of nothingness, so cheer up, we are all basically nothing, but agile enough to get by don’t cha know!," the owl looks to the moon in its sort of quick jerking way as if seeing some truth inked in it’s light.

"Agile?" the toad cups the question with his consciousness…."Agile enough to derive strength from above and to cater to love through the rough when we tumble hard and it feels so tough... But you know owl, there's life and blood to this stuff so we best start emitting light through  agape sans the gruff.

The toad started repeating a mantra towards the Crystalline reflective lake due south, the direction of healing, transformation, and death:

"the essence of your mind is intrinsically pure, the pure doesn’t mean a non-***** story...pure means clear….void. No eyes, no ears, no mouth, no heart, no I, no problem."

The owl began to speak a slow sort of lullaby in response to the mantra; “Luckily consciousness is like a mirror that needs to constantly be polished.”

The reflective lake of all things replied: “But in truth, there is no mirror. Thus, if you are living in nothingness and if there is no mirror, how can you be contaminated?

This is the most incredible nothing life has been privy to experience, for this nothingness is like the nothingness of space….which contains the whole universe, and out of this void comes everything and you are it. The fear of nothingness….IT plagues those we know, because it has been ignored .

“NOTHINGNESS,” they say, “HEAVEN PRESERVE US OF THAT!“

At the appointed time Agnosia and with the approval of the moonlights shine, the foggy cloud of unknowing descended upon the lake, the toad, and the owl, who all began to speak to chorus in such sweet unison:

“That which is the knower or the known cannot be an object of its own knowledge, Fire does not burn itself. If you put something there on the divine platform, you stop short of knowing and you stop short of glowing.  Following the flowing senses of truth;  Don't stop until you can rejoice in the I that isn’t.”

Everything went quiet in the forest and on the lake, as the obtuse fog displaced itself. The forgetting had become complete.

I'm just a little old hoppy toad
a sitting here in the middle of the road
my skin is yellow and my spots are green
and folks all say I look real mean!

I'm just a little old hoppy toad
a sitting here in the middle of the road
my one eye is red and the other one's yellow
and if the truth be told I'm a pretty good fellow.

I'm just a little old hoppy toad
a sitting here in the middle of the road
I hop to the pond to take a swim
I plug my nose and jump right in.

I'm just a little old hoppy toad
a sitting here in the middle of the road
I jumped in the pond with a great ol' splash
here comes Mr. Snake better get away fast!

I'm just a little old hoppy toad
a sitting here in the middle of the road
just right now I'm as right as rain
and the snake to this day hasn't caused me any pain.