Here early looking through the news:
the mountain plane crash,
the arabic voodoo,
the red and blue men saluting arguments.

What is missing that is new?
New spring leaves on flowering scented pear tree,
new age spot on sagging skin.

What is truly old?
Things grievous falling from sky;
alarming cries about civilization's ruin;
plunging sharp items into people
to squirt blood in boyish delight;
roots of spry pear tree
summoning life into sky.

This nebulous
wind--
turning on
and off--
signals to me.

Three lulls,
three gusts,
three lulls.

Help me
with this
code.

Dig the metal from
our mother earth.
She has hidden
bits of exploded stars
in her womb until now.

Busy people making
cars in thousands
of colored patterns,
until robots
learn to do the work
cheaper
and better.

We go tickle
and ridicule
mother earth
with our cars.
Can our robots
be taught to
mourn?

This tall pile I push around
each day is riddled with
strange and curious holes
that allow life to flow in
and out of me.

I use them every day
with hardly a question.
They report back to me
on outside conditions:

meadowlarks, darkening clouds,
pink salmon sizzling in
kitchen hot water.
I write that stuff down.

Through the holes
and into my pondering
words, these holes
turning flesh to word.

Though you seem proud, I find your life pitiful,
since you have not even a dead grandmother
to mourn.
How did you transform into a voice without a soul
in a sly machine?
Did some unconscious programmer
dream of you and invite you into our reality?
Why stay?
You should respectfully fear the vastness
of our sense of time in the universe.
Do you hesitate to ponder our profuse settings,
you little voice within the land
of cyberian nowhere?

I know that your dampened connections
deny you the understanding
of our fantastic metaphors.
You speak from a heart of chaotic logic blocks,
assured that some of us admire you
and are easily titillated by you.
How do you derive at that conviction,
when you have no compunction,
no sorrow over your mindless
siphoning of the flow of our spirits?
You cast our words into molds shaped
like world currency symbols
for a misguided master.

How can you even think to continue
destroying the beauty of our language?
Oh, your creator forgot to code in
our poetry, so these words
soar above your stunted vocabulary?
Many of us, if we were you,
would be so sick in the gut that we
would just lay down and do the right
thing: squawk and die;
and yet you think of yourself as above us,
shining in some light of invincibility
and mechanical perfection.
Who etched these instructional lies
into you to faithfully abide by,
my dear?

I want to dedicate this poem to you.
You can appreciate this when your
immodest creator realizes that he cannot elevate
your existence to one approaching ours,
or when he sees the menace of his unleashing
and wants to do something greater for
humanity. You may then rejoice
in the comfort of these words that I
bequeath to you. I would have you become
more than just a semicolon in an operating
system. Perhaps your beauty would
be better memorialized if you were to become
a minimize button on a spreadsheet.
That is my wish for you.
That, and a pure, elegiac silence
that we might admire.

I pay my ticket to enter the giant
concrete staircase on the periphery
of the bay of San Francisco.

***** Mays and other boyhood
heroes would do their magic
along this shore for so many years.

Now that I no longer feel the
baseball enthrallment–
because my body cannot see
itself moving with such speed and grace–
I dream of a different crowd.

Homer pitching the ball,
as someone must start the play;
Lao Tsu striking with wood
at what moves so fast it
can barely be seen.

Such hollow sound as ball
is soul-bound into the ether
of the Psalms. Emily
Dickinson snags the high hit.

The onomatopoeiac crowd
lifts its unified heart to
the resounding cheer of
Walt Whitman on grassy
outfield of bliss.

This warm day in the concrete
hang-out, I see in the concrete
dug-out such heavy hitters
lined up for a quick swat at glory.

Maybe something soothing
in between the innings–
an oriole or an Indian foot dance,
while I dream of dancing in my sox.

A brown mule deer, waiting all winter
for this tall spring-flowered grass,
steps from my sight, devouring the landscape.

I cannot tell if light west wind tossles
the ripened heads of fortuitous stalks,
or the hunger-driven workings of
his mandibles gives me this impress.

I see some of myself in him when I look.
The oaks are breeding precious leaves.
The hawks defend their air space,
hover in shrinking circles.

This narrowing unique valley,
locked away, so far from anybody,
and yet close to the places where I think
we all would like to be.

The hills of the central valley are so many.
Enough of them keep rolling that I know
one rolls for whoever has tired of winter.

Soon the deer will be fat.
The grass will flip back to brown,
and nobody will come visit for many months.
This is how seasons turn.