just in case
you have been waiting,
someday never comes,
it’s always now,
it never changes
from that, so stop
saying it, someday
I’m going to do
this or that,
someday never comes

I believe that a haiku
is not just seventeen syllables
written in three lines, but
a poem, with three lines
that present distinct ideas
tied together, and brought together
by the poet artist,
who can constrain him or herself
and preferably there would be
one idea on the first line, 5,
enhanced on the second, 7,
and then both tied together
in the third, 5, totaling 17
so,
let us try harder
make sure that we are writing
interesting stuff

(or whatever, I don't know)

When I was a boy, a big part of winter was going to the ice-skating rink in Winnetka when everything was frozen. We roller-skated in Glenview and bowled in beautiful downtown Northfield. Weather did not deter us. But when I turned about fourteen, this huge wind came along, and I went out and stood in it, and leaned into it, and after that I was not the same. I forgot all about school and in my heart became a wanderer. I left home one year later, off to see the world. I have had a wonderful relationship with the wind ever since.

Because you are so busy
with the way I ought to be,
measuring me up against
that standard constantly,
you haven't taken time to get
up close and try to see
just who it is I really am
and what I want to be.

Chicago alley
fire escape
mournful sax

spectacle society or a faceless society? who could tell. after historical laughter comes a historic dread. when the sky is the limit of power we are doomed to endure the mania of failing floors. nothing is trully free to harm reality, not even poetry, and whose reality is more real. words like disfigured worlds,  they hack the body time. what is beauty and what is truth, this complex breathing creature in an unknowable form, this  hidden vulnerability: we can't bear who we are, we want to sink in a history without memory.

the rawness of things suspended in the air
an invisible hand pushes the hours through us into the compost and delight of memory
I don't have words for tomorrow, only your name today and warm tears.  I was born into a dead language so
I have this detector for the silence of windows, it sneaks in my lungs
pain is offline, the dark swallows itself
no wonder last night I dreamt a girl in a blue kimono
-you are my hiroshima, I breath like a prehistoric fish-
she was smiling to something only she could see.
love, this prehistoric wonder,
a fragile skin of this weary world