Sun of York

The shoulders of a king
hunchback
where time flows through some roughend eye
makes not only believers but descends to where ashes now lay.
This can't be the peace we hoped for

were we not deserving of something more?

These sincere despots quickly setting their minds
to darkness and end times, they feel and think and breathe and hope
but only to the end of their own days.

Practiced Adders

if we ask for what we want
does this make us lacking
in some essential thing?
the force to move a mountain?
the opportunity in decline?

Vision across the top
saving the best for last
almost always stops us in
our tracks:

a pirate ship on a vacant lot;

A shack in the center of a highway;

A tree on an island;

A flag in the wind;

A heart in the sun.

How To Cross the River

From this distance
a car might look like
a shoe sliding
down a river

But a car is not a shoe
and a shoe is not a fish
until a vision
twisting faster
Makes it so

We Go By Dreaming

We can’t fly but
fall instead and
sometimes are destroyed

We get by on dreaming where
we are not our bodies
but our voices,
singing together to make a perfect noise

A bird sometimes escaping a climbing cat
will make a crying sound

You Must Pay To Live Here

The misery of falling rain
is most apparent when
you don't own a coat

To drift along the grey current;
to ask directions of a happy stranger;
to change hats along the shore;

these and a few more other things
are the price to pay.
And you must pay

Revelation

On Killing an Insect:

How happy we are when restored
when usually against hope the bad news
sustains a certain relentlessness
becoming a suspicious spot;
a hole here or there;
and then there is that constant cough

even in summer, never too far off.

But both Torturer and Inquisitor have a trick up their sleeves:
for a price, anything is possible,
like this card neatly folded lengthwise and
signed as an empty promise in game of Monty

Oblivious to Oblivion, ours and others,
we marks often overlook the art of suffering

Electric Djinn

He takes his place
with a precociousness
that makes him little more than camera
the thing that does not matter

the struggle for a particular demon
the demon of light that warbles
in and out of existence;
it runs between the raindrops

the smell of burning witches-
some new perfume
brought over from the Demon-Haunted world-

He finds himself so inexplicably happy.

-for Carl Sagan

Phantasm

Draw the light through the trees
so Paris may find his Helen
The day will suffer from any comparison.

As mote-sized demons circle
in clearings only clearly visible
with closed eyes,
the morning ships are launched

as the battle rages
our hero stoops to remove
a sharpened stick from his heel.

Rash

This heat
this Wednesday
this August

A morning barking
this is a warning
no chance for second guessing
a meaning without any meaning

Managing Picasso

Picasso lived for our sins.
the greatest sin he ate was the need to polish everything
and everything was happy again so
we all went back to work

mostly paid by the word
afraid that our secrets might be heard by
invisible citizen-angels who also
witness our shameful acts

Now Picasso stubbornly refuses
to die but loses a little
more ground each year.

Getting Rid

Why not start with the eye?
(circling, I struggle to
hold each form in correct
orbit against the others.)

to keep looking looking
and to understand what
is seen, rightly.

That's the trick!

100 th post

If a Flow goes nowhere fast
But knows as it goes
That knowing is not
Necessarily

Going, than

Rising, a thought ought
To resemble singing
But, instead seems like
Pissing

In the wind.

To not have a thought
Whether an I or about
The me out going (or not)

Isn’t proof of some failure?

How to Be (Errata)

Desperate for another season
another word for expression
the shoebomber is owed
his due

Comical footless he
totters on a bloody stump
watching the wind through the hole
he has blown

Satisfied that he has
made the universe smaller.

Missing Pieces

Port of storms
The weather arrives ahead of us
With pieces missing
And speaks to the rocks as if
It had some way of knowing
We would not come home again

While others roaming in
Dark skins pick the leavings among the shipwrecked
Lovers still kissing at dawn
Their guard down now that
The monsters are all gone.

but for hope we travelers
stay longer in a more beautiful but stranger land
trusting our currency might change
as our fears grow older

Limited Space

A winter's Mistress
is mostly Coincidence
and not much reason is
spared by intuition

So I watch the changes waiting
for a larger season