I understand my obsession
my senses are worn
my heart and mind
thinned by feeling and knowing
even with such exhaustion

to the core of me
I try to make words appear

that can somehow be a solace
for those who suffer

as flowers blossom in children’s eyes
lavishly as from soil

their spirits play in empty parks
the God of light delights in their joy

I suppose
a few kindnesses
is the least I can do

for Juliana Marins (June 21–24, 2025)

A nun levitated above her bed
Her face in rapture
While outside the window
An old man with walker
Fell face first into sidewalk
And was devoured by ants
And across the world
A young woman slipped into a volcano
And went to sleep
Remaining beautiful
In the fires of the earth
Above or below
The mystery remains
It is levitating even now

There’s no bottom to this marsh.
I’ve seen shadows of monster carp,
and swarms of giant catfish.

I’ve seen an eagle drown,
and water snakes swim
into the unknown.

Divers go down
and never come up.

Those who survive
say there is a darkness down there
that’s hypnotic—

a black diamond gleaming up,
like a lake in the marsh
with endless shores,
its own sky and clouds,
a sunrise from another world.

And how deep that lake goes—
nobody quite knows.
They call it a black diamond—
rarer still than any gem.

Take me to the water’s edge
and scatter my ashes there.
I’ll be part of Lake Erie happily,
laughing in its waves.

Take me to the water’s edge
and hold me above its light,
like my father held me as a child
and continues to in my memory.

The sun and water—one element
in the fabric of those first sensations.
Like being born out of eternity,
I was also drowned in eternity.

Scatter me kindly when I’m gone.
Drop me in Lake Erie’s waves,
release me into that material light—
I’d rather be home than away.

The path through the forest
winds in and around the trees,
circling into distance—
going everywhere and nowhere.

Trails veer into singing meadows,
and here and there
a footbridge spans burbling streams
where worries flow away.

A snail migration is its own duration,
a slow unfolding measured by itself.
And the forest snakes you see
conceal what they reveal at length—
like the indigo buntings
who lie to your eye.

You breathe something greater than air
amid all this flourishing.
It’s in the breath of the forest
to be dying into so much life.

Stay longer, and the shadows
gown you in regal attire.
Bees carry a crown to your head—
I am father of the forest.

How to get violence out of your head
with three easy breathing techniques,
how to lower your heart rate
by practising these gun-safety habits.
You can **** your anxiety,
bury your depression once and for all.
Anger-management: shoot whom you don’t like.
Muscle tension? Try rioting for exercise.
The herds will run straight off the cliff,
into oblivion.

Which is why we offer relaxation techniques
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Guest lecture by Wim Hof, who can *******
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We understand you can’t love.
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Psychotherapy and self-defence,
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Passing the limits of feeling at all,
you can go anywhere, without fear.

after Gil Scott-Heron

Living in the void, living in the gaps.
Dying in the void, dying in the gaps.
Rioting on the news, dying in the news.
Killing for the news, living through the news.
There are two ways to get where you’re going,
but you don’t have to take either.
You can be your own person.
You can’t be your own person.
Accept defeat, accept victory.
Straddle the gaps, don’t fall in.
Don’t let the sides choose you.
Don’t let them shoot you down.
Don’t carry their hatred in your heart.
You’re only dying in the gaps.
You’re only falling through the cracks.
Riots in the streets, war in the Middle East,
war in Ukraine, famine and the inhumane.
We’re living in the gaps, stranded in the gaps,
drowning in hatred and unhappiness.
Politicized puppets, lost in information gaps,
with inconclusive raps and toxic apps,
hating each other, deluding each other,
murdering one another, murdering our brothers.
You can’t hide in the gaps.
You can’t last in their death-traps.
We only just survive in the cracks.
We always get caught in their traps.
We are strategies on an economic map.
We are saps eating their scraps
that fall through the cracks
and drift down into the gaps.
We are races all in collapse,
pitted against each other in the gaps.
We’re falling into the gaps.
We breathe the bad air of their gaps.
We gasp for breath; we gasp for breath.

Why this sudden cessation of wind
that stops me mid-stride
like a green wall of silence—
a hush that halts the forest’s breath
and presses deep within myself?

Not the peace that surpasses all,
not the bold silence of being alive,
nor the breathing of a statue—
this silence is something else,
a waiting, a holding,
where leaves and tendrils
and the fecundity of life
linger in quiet suspense.

Birdsong threads the spaces,
seeding time with delicate light—
and I stand still,
caught between the breath of the world
and the hush inside.

Today will never end
Cottonwood seeds drifting
Today will last forever
Cottonwood seeds still afloat
This moment requires
No more moments
This now is now and now once more
Cottonwood seeds afloat
It’s all in the weightlessness of change
And changes that keep changing
Becoming one reality
Of a never-ending moment
I feel it now and again now
Like a joy that exceeds time

Doesn’t just happen when sleeping and dreaming.
What stirs the leaves when there’s no wind?
What stands up the tall grasses?
Why do seeds float in timelessness?
Why can light appear like shimmering water?
Why, when we are well,
do we almost disappear into joy,
And the body sometimes feels
Like it’s floating on a cushion of air?
But maybe everything is wind—
the light, the clouds, the earth itself,
rotating in its weightless orbit.
Ah, it’s change that’s weightless. Problem solved.

Rotting food and rotting children
The rot of the heart
And decomposition of spirit
The oxidation of conscience
Microbes consume us
If there are rotting children
In the world
It is because spirit is starving
For a solution
That is beyond itself

Did anyone else see it today?
Gallons of goldfinches
Poured out of the clouds,
Like gold coins were falling,
Like the wings of the sun
Were coming undone.
Some flocked, and others scattered,
Singing and flying
Like improvised jazz,
Like the music of joy,
Like playthings of peace—
Heard and seen,
But just out of reach.

My head was full of the sun’s *****
It could give birth to anything
It could impregnate death with poems

The earth was my bed
Nature was my wife
I was the father of dreams

Green ants covered branches
I said to the flower bloom
And it bloomed with mirrors inside

In spectral graveyards
Every grave is a garden
Of grasses and moonflowers

When I stood
My head cleared the clouds
Who knew the moon
Could be touched by real poems

First its stillness held me captive—
A fox snake in the grass.
Then, when I nudged it,
It rattled its tail to fool me.
When it curled up
Into a striking position,
It was like copper melting,
The essence of hydraulics
Came into view,
Like a rope of water
Collapsing into itself.
Strangest of all
Was how energized
I was by the encounter,
Like I’d been envenomated
With energy venom,
Or a spirit snake
Was crawling round my spine,
And I too was seeking the sun.

I’ll share this photograph of my parents with you.
It’s like an old wine overflowing time, still new.
They’re eighteen and twenty-four, in their best poor clothes,
Posing under an olive branch on a Roman road.
The picture is classically imbued; they, permeated
By natural light like actors in a neorealist film
Embraced in some final frame of desperate justice.
The photograph arrests the wind of the day, that moment,
Blowing blades of blurring grasses into living inertia,
Light pregnant even in the stones and shadows;
And there’s something more, something magical,
Beyond youth and beauty, a divinity being born,
Cupid bending the olive branch, the arrow flown.

When I did peyote,
I heard ceremonial drums,
impossible to place,
and chanting, low and rising.
Later, I told the shaman on the reserve
about the drums, the chanting,
and he said, "The spirits liked you,
that's why the earth was drumming,
that's why the spirits were singing."
That was nice to hear.
Better, I thought, to be liked by the spirits
than by what passes for humanity.

1
The rivers of the river were moving again.
The shattered ice glided
In one giant flow of crystal shards.
A concert, a symphony of treble sounds,
Frozen keys struck with light and music
Glittered all along the seaward shore.

2
Was it the beginning of time?
Or had the end of time begun?
The earth was locked in ice.
Darkness was upon the land.
When sunlight filtered
Through the poison gases
It struck the ice and multiplied.
The light passed through itself,
Melting and reforming,
Until the air had cleared.
Light took the shape of a fern
And ferns unfurled out of nothing.
Light moved and there was wind.
Light poured over its rim
And from ice water trickled.
When light was exhausted
The night was born.

3
Those who live by the river
Have heard the sound of light
In that staccato of shattered ice;
In the sharp tintinnabulous
Wavering myriad of chimes,
They have heard the cold
Remote music of a crystal age.

On peyote you cross the Devil’s Highway
to the mystical oasis of Quito Baquito,
where the roots of cottonwood, mistletoe, and tule
tug at the springs beneath a chemical desert.

Before the colours of night blaze like day,
you hear the drums of the sun’s rising—
spirit voices in the desert wind,
desert wind in the spirit’s voice.

Your senses dissolve into what they perceive.
Like the desert, you are everything around you.
Among saguaro, mesquite, and Joshua tree,
you are pierced by peyote’s plumed arrow.

Floating over puddles from last night’s rain,
May apples and trilliums carpet the woodlot,
Birdsong and light darting between branches,
This walk, endless as the light that follows me.

At the cemetery the light rain of tears.
Half the sky is cloudy, like my grief;
The other half is lit by the sun, like my hope.
I start my car and turn it toward the light.

Computer spiders spin electronic webs
Everything depends on the word “grid”
It’s a cyberattack the generals say
And others say it was planned from the start
Neurons flicker and go dark
We become space a black hole a dead planet
Lightning dies on the vine the current falters
In times past a power outage lost time and food
Now it’s your mind you lose
Your network of imaginary friends
Your memes and your mined minds
Nothing left to mimic or mentalize
Step out into the dark the coyotes are laughing
The bats have pinpointed our weakness
How long will we stay in the dark we cry
Why ask--  have we ever lived in the light

The day seems dead
you wake from the dream of death
and realize again it was real

I walk around the house
breathing the dead air
feeling dead inside

with every loss
the air grows thinner

Now that they’ve taken the body,
the German women begin cleaning,
and they clean everything, walls, floors…
Why all the cleaning I wonder?
Does death leave a stain--
or shed its shadow like a viral load?
They must clean out the humors
just like in the olden days.
Cleaning is Germanic grieving.
They put their grief to work,
and the Protestant angels
who appear on the scrubbed walls
witness the rinsing of death’s last traces.

I know about dogs who are half house flies
I know too about the praying mantis
and its preoccupation with dragonfly brains
I’ve watched a leopard slug outrun eternity
I ride horses with six legs
play with ceremonial knives
if I cut myself
I bleed out a little dark energy
and move on
I’ve opened the curtains
and seen the monster give birth to a monster
I’ve opened secret doors
and stepped into the arms of the dark
forgive me father for I have sinned
for the world as it is and my idiot grin

RIP Frankie Ala

Where space flows like water,
So that nothing is hard or sharp,
Everywhere the pliant, buoyant, firm,
Infinitesimal balance of motion,
Equilibrium's endless flowing
From every direction holding, releasing…

Or eternal and simultaneous interchange
Of subatomic and celestial particles,
Infinite number and regression,
The farthest point always near.
Gravity’s first rising.

Or regeneration’s genesis,
Beginning of all emerging,
The birth before birth,
Genealogy’s first molecule,
Progeny’s spring and curative.

Or clarity’s deepest water,
Simplicity’s essence distilled,
The weightlessness of all need
Where love is greater than chaos.

Last night storms drained life from the air.
I breathe in what’s been taken,
with the same breath I put it back.

With nothing to see I look at the news,
only to be disillusioned
by evil’s triumphs and the fall of goodness.

Yet every day I try to add
something of being back into the emptiness,
haunted by the suspicion—
as if a shadow moves across the page.

A suspicion that meaning is fulfilled
only after you’re gone and unaware.
But that in others, it will make itself known.

Sunlight on the outer
fringes of the clouds:
somewhere,
a table set for summer.

A nun levitated above her bed,
While a fish peered through the window,
Sobbing in the way of fish.
The silence swarmed with ants.
A watch opened its mouth to show its teeth.
A trophy ram’s head looked on,
From the mountains in its glassy, dead eyes.
Then there were mass arrests.
The whole state turned into a prison.
After that got boring, we went to a ball game.
The nun was now levitating above the field.
The game was suspended until further notice.
Then it began to rain baby antelopes,
But all of them were dead,
Limp as the rain itself.

While I was enjoying the trip
My friend was inconsolable
For all the two-timing he’d done
To his beautiful fiance.

At my brother’s lakeside house
The lake was acid-trip frozen.
The crest of every wave remained
Exactly where it crested.  

I looked over at my friend
Who was now sleeping.
I was too far into being to sleep.
I was eternal and living it, in the moment.

One time my father was getting hassled
by some wiseguy from Detroit,
but all dad had to do was make a phone call,
and the young, dumb wiseguy
was chastised for hassling an old friend.
And I still have that secret little phone book
of numbers—those numbers—even though all of them are dead.
Maybe if I have to, I can call them all in hell.

In the beginning, Black Bill dressed like my grandfather,
Like a simple man from the provinces,
Which made the story my family would tell
Over and over all the more engaging,
About how Black Bill bought his mansion
In Grosse Pointe, Michigan.
When the builder dismissed him as a peasant,
He pulled out a large down payment in cash,
Leaving the builder blinking at that fat *** of bills.
That was how they interpreted the American dream.
It didn’t matter how you got there, only that you did.

They went to the same schools,
Lived in the same neighbourhoods,
From the same small towns
In la provincia di Palermo.
Often they were distant relations
And cumpari from the old country.
My mother would say
“Jimmy Q was such a nice man,”
When the Feds said different,
And my grandfather
Would hug someone called Black Bill.
My father treated them respectfully
And they reciprocated.
They respect a respectful person
Because it shows indifference
To their business practices.
And now, with time, I’ve learned,
That guilty by association
You keep your mouth shut,
Wait until all are gone
And write poems about them
Like legends of their time.

When I was a kid,
We drove past
One of those endless Michigan cemeteries,
And my uncle caught me staring,
Maybe with more fear
In my face than necessary.

In his gravelly, wiseguy voice, he said,
“It’s not the dead you need to fear,
It’s the living.”

After that,
I never feared the dead,
And I never trusted the living again,
Especially him.

The older guys knew what to do:
dig a deep bed
and bury the coals under sand.
A survival tactic
they’d learned somewhere.

On that freezing night by the lake,
no one talked much,
just the crackle of cooling embers
and the weight of breath in the cold air.

I remember the heat on my back,
like the sun was buried under me
and our blankets were made of myriad stars.
We survived till morning
and followed the frost to the tracks.

may depress,
but I see it as the tree of winter
shedding its last leaves.

If it’s cold,
it’s only because winter
has paused over us,
resting without a coat.

If it’s grey,
it’s only because winter
hasn’t slept in days—
his face gone ashen.

Intellectually,
I’m indifferent to vicissitudes,
but my body feels the changes—
my body is the weak point.

I compensate—
growing leaves and poems
on my limbs,
that the spirit might carry
into Spring
what the body can’t.

Bread flour on the table
on my hands
over my mother’s apron

She'd dab some dough on my nose
and we’d both laugh

When she shook the flour
from her apron
an angel hovered in the air

When the loaves
went into the oven
it was like mother heat
and warmth
shaping the dough

That first taste
was the bread of life
the last taste
will be the bread of life

Why do I love Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise so much?
What has happened to me,
Overnight I’ve become an old man who weeps
For a song without words.
Is it because I’ve known the past,
Or because I know the future—
And that is a bitter knowledge to possess,
To know we will ****** each other again,
And that nothing changes
Across landscapes of madness.
Another Vocalise will have to be written,
And another me will have to suffer
The sadness of knowing,
Of hating who we are,
And of what we’re capable—
After all, there’s something tragic about music
If it exists to heal the wounds
That we ourselves inflict.

A house finch on a juneberry tree
Feeding
On the fruit
That has yet to be

for Brigitte

Give thanks for her hands,
For the years they’ve woven,
For the soft touch, the steady grip,
That’s held you through the storms.

Give thanks for the quiet nights,
For the way she rests beside you,
Not needing words to say everything,
In the silence, she speaks.

Give thanks for her eyes,
For their spark, their warmth—
A mirror to your own heart,
In their depths, you’ve found your home.

Give thanks today,
Tomorrow,
And every breath between,
For she is the song that calls you home
And the silence that lets you listen.

I twist them into strange forms,
Others—vile abominations.
They beg,
Cries thick with desperation,
To be people again.
But I tell them,
“You shouldn’t have stared so long.
I’m a poet, you know.
I have this power,
And no control.”

My left knee tells me it’s still winter.
My shoulders are still unsure.
Every part of me that aches
Aches more for the uncertainty.
I smoke some Acapulco Gold.
A serpent creeps down from the sun
And curls round my spine.
A warm wind blows over me
And for a while I don’t feel old.

Two blue jays land without a sound
then—
a hawk

light
and shadow
tear across the grass

the jays lift
and the chase
disappears
like it was never there

A day of such absolute stillness
Belongs to its own mausoleum.
It’s probably been dead for years
Like the power of any potentate.

Scanning the trees and the ground
It’s just like Keats might have said,
Scarcely has the very smallest leaf
Moved from where it sometime fell.

It’s a day to sit still and be grateful,
A day for thought and restful eremition,
Like a cancer in remission,
The spirit, at rest, beside its flesh.

Just last week in the neighbourhood
I saw an eastern bluebird
For the first time in years
More often they are in open spaces
I’m glad they’re still around
With royal blue and russet feathers
They are always beautiful to see
Now that it is almost April
Winds can still turn from the North
The earth could still hesitate
And ice encapsulate a flower
In a prism of glass
I’m afraid for the eastern bluebird
Will it survive a blast from winter
Will it have time to nest
It might be the last one I ever see
The last one to weather the changes

When you wash an octopus
the water becomes an octopus.

When you boil an octopus
the steam twists into tentacles.

When you cover the mirrors,
the octopi come alive.

When you crack open a window
don’t they all escape?

Samphire makes a long journey
from cephalopod to plant.

The stigmata in my hands--
shaped like baby octopuses.

How many times
have I died for my young?

How many limbs
have I regenerated?

How often have I used ink
in my own defence?

How much blue blood must spill
to save the world?

How many hearts do you need
to survive through our losses?

Blood-dark days and lilies in bloom,
the knife, the gun, the operatic end—
all goodfellas and grandfathers,
all godfathers and millionaires
at yet another Sicilian funeral.

I was young and arrogant,
I dared to walk behind a Mafia boss.
I could have taken the long way
around the circle of captains he sat among,
but I didn’t—he felt my presence.    
He turned, slow, deliberate.
The look he cast my way
haunts me to this very day.

It was as if the dead man’s eyes
opened in the boss’s stare,
and I was staring at a cold, dead soul,
staring back at me,
and at another funeral—my own.

Every time we went to his barber supply shop,
he’d ruffle my hair
and say, “hi kid, how ya doin'?”
He knew my father from Sicily.
They went to the same school together,
but after the war, my father became a barber,
and he became a mobster.
He was friendly with dad,
like childhood friends often are.
They’d joke in dialect and laugh.

It wasn’t until later
that I learned who he was,
his businesses were fronts
for covers and covers for fronts.
Anyway, what did I care. I was a kid.

And that was the rub.
Under the RICO Act
I was “guilty by association.”

At ten I turned myself in,
but I never snitched,
and I’m still serving time
in the garden of good and evil.

Another time—young, handsome,
and likely high on laced grass,
at a Sicilian wedding anniversary,
I asked a beautiful mob wife to dance,
and flirted with her on the floor.

Right away, my father drove me home.
“I’m saving you the beating
of a lifetime. Sleep it off.
In the morning, you apologize.”

I couldn’t believe how messed up I was—
the drugs, the homemade wine,
full of amorous traces from the earth,
and the woman’s smouldering beauty.

When I apologized the next day,
I saw bullets in her husband’s guns—
but in his wife’s dark eyes—
a trace of arousal, a flicker of regret.

Tell me where Jimmy Hoffa is.
Long as I can remember,
he’s been buried in my psyche.
Long as I can recall,
he’s been hidden in my memory.
America, I don’t recognize you.
All your money belongs to the rich,
and decent folk are a thing of the past.
Is Jimmy Hoffa in the air or the earth?
Was he incinerated,
scattered everywhere and nowhere
both at once and neither?
Is he buried under a building or freeway?
Perhaps at the bottom of a lake?
Crushed in some wrecking yard?
All the stories are true.
All the stories are false.
All the people talking are liars.
All the liars are telling the truth.

My cousin Joe was a simple man,
But he was also a man of the earth,
Which meant he was deeper than most.
In the final weeks of my father’s agonizing death
From stomach cancer, Joe came to visit
To say his last goodbyes.
My father, after yet another seizure,
Was sleeping somewhere near his death.

How many seizures can you bear
Before you reach for those Dilaudids
Prescribed to your father,
To numb your own pain?
How many episodes can you endure
Before you wish for death to take him—
How many words can you cling to,
Before they all sound false.

Outside, Joe sat beside me,
Sensing I had reached my emotional end,
He said nothing at first,
But the silence felt like an answer.
Then, quietly, he spoke
About how he grows his potatoes
And why he has such a big yield.
How deep he dug his holes,
How he covered the root potatoes
In loose sand, not soil,
Giving them space to grow,
Waiting for the flowers to bloom and fall.
I clung to every word
Like it was some holy truth,
And in that quiet moment,
He placed his hand on my shoulder
And said, "Come on, let’s go back inside."