Insomnia stole my dreams from me
and dropped them in a hole,
dug into my phsychy
deep within my soul.

My mind unmoored left drifting
in a sea of restless nights,
drownding in the darkness
of a world devoid of lights.

Gruesome blister on a denatured mind
Chimes rumble the anchored soul foggy with Elysian wine
Flippant ruse ignites a battered fuse rusty with malevolent impotence
Blustery portents beyond expired extent throngs the chapels and pickets along the electrified fence
That separates the grave from the gravity of a physics enslaved
A physics where disillusioned mathematics and decay are as sure as taxes and the last earthen day
Nescient of giant leaps our stepwise ascension is helical and cheap
It snails along with unctuous repetition of pendulous rhythm and sails biologically with evolved and animated meat
The advent of acid and bass is a keepsake for the epicurean chase
Of a fulgurant galvanization of phases that remain unfazed
Trends punctuate vain diversions and lionized conversions both raise and raze
The velocity of money ensures a melliferous alchemy of a well-oiled plutocracy buffered by praise and pay
Ivory-tower elegance is immune to demotic ignorance
When the shot-callers devise the rules to the game with impenetrable clandestine eloquence
Hebetude and lassitude sink abundant platitude and offer trite prescriptions for useless attitudes
But the vogue of disembogued vanity entraps individualism and trains martial raillery
Trends tantalized by preening epigamic tens makes the roosters become owls that neglect nest egg hens
Fatuous ambush of the Kardashian putsch is as clockwork as Big Ben
Murky lies appear in flimsy disguise suitable for mice “say cheese” demise
Privacy cries and answers only lurk accessibly when spurred by wise “why’s” never asked when garish time flies
Tweets and beats make us obese with threadbare wheat cultivated by nescient bleats
Beatific ambition obscured by the wail of sheepish sheep
Outnumbered by obtuse angels and a cute horde of meretricious dissolution that ever wrangles
The shelter turns to rubble and the cloister turns to bustle: useful convolution thus entangles
Agorophilia defiles a voiceless lechery on speed dial
Disembodied violence sprints a green mile bankrolled by the peaceful throngs slowed through the paid but dilatory turnstile
Thus we loiter in queue as the slew of vibrant militarized celerity taxes our pews
Pews which enthuse jingoism eager to apportion sentient deaths through religious abuse
We can surf beams of light chasing verisimilitudes of diversion bright
Of unwagered immersion gambling a pittance for vicarious thrills and riskless fright
To discover the vestige of war, a useless artifact of sore egos we now deplore
An enormity of unmoored evil percolating apace of the paradoxical rush hour from shore to shore
But more decisively than an implacable brush fire on pristine ground abetted by sleek star-crossed winds that soar
Irenic ignorance placates, because a vagrant vacant mind is more a felicity than a bellicose grimy crease
Because excess corrodes squinty detests, and partial enslavement is both a rest and arrest to earth’s untenanted lease

like a compass that has lost north
spinning without pattern, without end
my heart races erratically, unmoored
by just the soft touch of your hand

She stands—
every few minutes turning abruptly to no object.
Hips pushing forward, shoulders sliding back,
red soled sneakers and plaid flannel slacks
beneath a dramatic black trench coat,
in the grey shadow of a gothic church.

She smokes the grey and blows white,
and scrolls through the neon screen
with her one ungloved hand,
a bun perched stiffly on her scalp, unheeded,
an afterthought, if there was one before.

Her backdrop—the heavy iron fence of a graveyard,
and centuries old glorious stones watch
as she spends her minutes
engrossed
in the luminous green of infinity.

it would feel normal if it was a bus stop,
a grocery line,
a hospital waiting room,
even a lonely bench.

But she stands,
and periodically pivots,
meanders two steps and stands,
and jolts three steps back,
glitching through slow time,
anxious and unresolved—
yet so engrossed.

Finally now she is following the fence out of view, slowly,
and I hope she finds rest.
I feel grateful as the sidewalk carries her now
away from my puzzled gaze

The great stones and I exchange long glances,
and perhaps they are more compassionate than I,
for they seem not phased.

Oh stones, teach me patience, teach me rest.
For you are glorious in endless rest,
and I am still anxious and unresolved.

Like the licking of an old dog that insists you take her
for a walk
the insistent swell
laps your legs.

Off port, headlamps
slip by in an unending current
supplying the illusion of your
inevitable progress forward,

and little certainty you had ever been moored at all.

Now for years I haven’t seen him
nor know if he is alive or dead
the shadowy man who floated like dream
each moonlight on the roof surfaced!

When from my window his silhouette I caught
saw him on his voyage embark
the moon stalker day’s small-time clerk
wove a magic spell on my thought!

As the moon came over the eastern edge
silver orbed in her glorious rebirth
he would be there lost in his gaze
like a moonman stuck on the earth!

Madly his eyes riveted on the sky
in pursuit of gain unknown
as if once unmoored to her he would fly
leaving this world disowned!

Hours passed by his wonder not ebbed
eased not the moon stalker's trance
it seemed to me moon's waning he grieved
mourned dimming of her silvery dance!

Each full moon saw this unfailing zeal
on the roof two lovers' meet
his eyes sky bound till he had his fill
the moonman on earthly transit!

I do believe all poets must not only read a lot of poetry but read a lot about poetry. Of my 50 favorite poets, there is not one who has not written about poetry, the philosophy of their work and of the craft. That in itself is fascinating- and difficult, like the depth you find in NY Review of Books. I do about 2/3 (poems) to 1/3 (being books about poetry) From the most philosophic works of archetypes by Northrop Frye to the most public and basic questions of Zupruders good seller "Why Poetry?" .
That last book opened up a new reality for me, to I ask myself all the time who am I writing for, in context to all this reading...I realized I was really trying to communicate the poetic truths of living, of my own small life in the world so full of beauty, horror, paradox and death. I realized to do this I had to make compromises, to not try to impress or amuse myself with poems that could only be understood by me. The craft and presentation became as important as the message. That is currently my direction, I'm writing "collections" of poems with themes so a reader could enjoy a concrete theme. (The last book I just read, a signed collection by Ferlinghetti ( nice and cheap in a used bookstore) was just that- the theme of light in "How to Paint Sunlight." Accessible and very full of several poems about light)
So you are stating two different issues:
I don't like being not understood, Having people throw up there hands perplexed, I'd rather be popular.... Its lonely
But I cant write for others because than it would be feeling like a commercial venture My motivation would be destroyed.
Id rather be desolated and write for those few who get the twinge...
Well, first of all, we poets are possibly lucky because we ain't making beans for our poems. Forgetaboutit. Even our most lauded poets end up teaching to get the health care and severance. I suppose there may be 3 poets in Amerika that make a living on just writing poetry....if that many. Who's buying? I didn't see much word "poetry" once in this weeks NY Times review of books. Only some letters crashing last weeks review of Leonard Cohen, who the critic called a wonderful lyricist and performer, but an awful poet. These dialogues are important to me, but really, quite a small audience. Either way, lyrics and song paid the rent, not Cohen's books of just poetry.
I'm sure there is no immediate cure for your paradox. If you want to be popular you have to make compromises. If you don't want to alter your vision, you can get the joy of a smaller readership and forget the rest. You have to manage expectations is a world that hardly notices our craft.
It's hard to be both, I suppose you should stay true to your motivation. And if readers like me don't get it, **** em. Let it suffice we acknowledge the craft, and that we will get closer to some poems more than others be enough. For me, accessibility, the ability to engage a reader into whatever poetic truth I am feeling, is more important than in any way hiding the meaning in the poem in which I alone can understand it.
I want people who never read poetry, which is most people, pick up a poem by me and feel the poetry power without feeling intimidation which is what most people feel when they read most poems published today. For me its that fine line between letting the imagination do the work, and the poem setting up the narrative to allow it by inviting a reader into it. I get great joy reading my poems to non poets who are scared by even the idea of it, and get them to feel something new, that wonderful way Aristotle put it- that poetry provides an ultimate truth that is found beyond the boundary of philosophy.
Best Mark
…………………...

Admittedly I have gone off the rails focusing on the meta or man as dreamer. Are we not dreamers first before descending into the material, deadening the faculty of imagination or as the I Ching says "a darkening of the light"
I want to bring the reader up and when I read I want to have the sensation of ascending I try to give what I like to receive which is to be brought into greater fluency and light
Have we abandoned our inner life to such an extent that when confronted with it we find our selves strangers to it; reinforcing and amplifying a kind of cognitive dissidence?
Are we in a sense a stranger to our selves having lost the lucidity of our magical youth
Do we see the world as vacant utilitarian stuff and other humans predictable lusterless cogs in a wheel like cued robots?
Witches Seers, Voodoons , Hermeticists, Kabbalists and Occultists of very stripe know and use objects as essential to their operations and craft because they have hidden meaning and power.
Has the life of fantastical creative cognition been sacrificed to inveterate congenital pragmatism?
"Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality".
Andre Breton
To transgress is to process ones madness as opposed to the customary botched behaviors of repressive modalities we hide behind . It seems to me that poetry is a great ground for that exploration.
Perhaps Its a good thing for a reader to think about what the writer means, albeit a difficult pleasure as opposed to the instantaneous and facile modes of naming and claiming Reading towards the abstract can be a mystical experience Most people who read are shallow readers Shall I than aspire to be a shallow writer?
What surrealism (Detailed descriptive language unmoored from linear rationality) affords the writer like pure abstraction to the visual artist is a great opportunity to explore the musicality of language ie the musicality of form i.e. the energetic configurations of architypes.
Part of our craft that makes things crackle as you know well remains sound play ie the strategy of syllables ... Long vowels / short vowels...the length of words and sound of words in relationship to one another
As you know Mark to analyze the subtle abstraction of sounds i.e. words to the ear is just like music and like music although not wholly translatable has an undertow of non verbal meaning especially if exploited out side the linguistic necessity of linear prose like poems i.e. a device that most never use consciously and strategically or certainly to its fullest potential.
So when we say a poem is beautiful do we impart mean its those amazing tintinnabulating sounds that ****** with their musicality? Poems that do that well stand out to me.
Further I think we are in error when we confuse the realistic with the materialistic. It seems to me realism has magnitudinal underlying meta elements that need to be felt in poetry and to think other wise in my opinion would be a dull conceit
A good example is thought itself
When we speak our ideas thoughts impulses we have no real sense of where they emerge from The processes are so meta their incomprehensible even to neuro science and scientists have little if any understanding of consciousness or its meaning as far as I know
So perhaps the surrealist has a place of worth too; and that is to remind people of their inner life out side the cage of end product think and commodification. After all what is a life and what is a poem?
Best Z

I hear them
The tolling, wailing bells
So we've come to the end
The last page of an epic
The silent fadeout of the silver screen
The dimming embers of a massive bonfire.
We've unmoored our boats from the flotilla we once knew as 'home' and 'family'.
         
                   The end of  us

We stand in the ruins
Of a great building
It once held the relation
Of a father and daughter
Of a husband and wife
You set it on fire
But we will not put out your flames
With our tears and blood
Anymore.

Let the fire take away your poison
And let the rain scour away every last toxic residue
Of the bond we once held.
This is my requiem. Perhaps one day this too shall seem like a dream.

Some nights,
I dream of my father's fists,
or the blue-green color of his eyes
and how they watered,
became oceans,
when he'd had too much to drink.

There was a galaxy inside of him,
a great, gravitational mass.
He opened his mouth and swallowed worlds;
became a death-eater,
teeth biting down into a swollen black tongue.

When I was a fetus, I felt him pulling,
so I gnawed my way out of my mother's womb.
Covered in her blood, I met my adversary.
I dove into the sea to stare him down,
but could scarcely remember my amniotic swimming.

I drowned. My lungs filled
with the emptiness of space,
and for ages I floated, unmoored,
drifting by stars forever unimpressed with me.

One day, the universe will collapse,
time flying backwards toward its end.
I will see him as he was when he was new,
a stardust embryo not touched by awfulness.
I will know what it means to love.

What’s the difference between
Drowning and drinking, adrift?

Between
floating unmoored
body taught drum leather
through the current’s veins and
slipping beneath the surface’s mouth
The brush of its lips over arms
body taught drum leather
And sinking until sand meets skin.

Swallow a drop, scream a wave
Salt-blind eyes, sealess, starless,
The compass spins in circles
Lost.  

Can you tell me what I’m supposed to see
I can’t make it out
from the periphery
I never could judge the distance
Between you
And me

The golden hours of the morning met my eyes with favor.

Cherished and tender, the Sun kissed her skin in a swath of freckled light.  

I meet her gaze and she fades like waning of my magic.

In her absence, I stumble from then to now, tethered along by the wish of her reality.

She is ethereal, her between moments, unmoored by convention.

She is a freedom, I do no know.

She whispers her truths, words which wage war with profound ambition.

Dusk comes and I succumb, it is time.