The Rules of War

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Nausicaa 375

Let go your breath
Nothing ever so short as these few years
Of smoke and fire
Sweetly we dream of dirt
And then next return.
Here, among the mouths of priests
And vexed half-sleep
We meet goodbye
In barges stuck in the sand.
Armed with sticks and mirrors
The tide comes in
And we are done for.

This fear is a vessel that takes
Us from our beds and returns us to the day.

Nausicaa 376

Because of these little birds
We come to sit on gentle rocks
Taking tea and talking
Without noticing the time

Once there was a little house
Full of canaries
In a foreign land
Where people came to sit on rocks
And tell the time.


The end of Nausicaa

Broken Boats

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Nausicaa 374

Bargain sister finds tomorrow
And she is hopeless among the buried answers.
The widow wife of the wild man
Granted trust for the exhausted sea
Wrecks are everywhere
Or was it just a dream?
Might this breeding be expected?
The night imagines itself
Astonished, ugly, confused.

Mailboats wait in the morning bay
Wait to be noticed
By some better eye of tomorrow.

waiting for these exhausted children, we give up.

Pilgrim Of Doubt

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Nausicaa 372

We float on the oceans of Egypt
Until caught and broken
Touched then bound our
Shepherd stars fade
And only our faults will
Finally light the way in
this good hour.
We anchor our vessel now weighed in
Superstition and salt.
The sand and sky know
What danger lies in sailing
And so calm themselves in beauty.

How is it that we
May touch these lonely rockets,
Rising, singly, above the nine o’clock trees?


Nausicaa 373

The seabirds keep their private weather
They make for drunken song this hope
Above the guns and murder.
Toothless and without sleep they cross
The ocean at night
And laughing, remember the act of drowning.
They, also, die of broken hearts.

My mourning hand purges
All this sorrow, by
Burning my papers letting them fall overboard
They light the evening
And call to mind the day
And our frightening nature,
Our mistaken clouds and
Our better, beautiful visions.

The Simulation of Ecstatic Prophecy

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Nausicaa 371

Again the flying color of fire shimmers
Burning tiny birds against the sun
Mixed with frightened light
The memory of flying falling
Comes into the night
A man on a staircase
Adrift in a storm
Stares out
Searching for a raft of bones and
The rusty guns of the old
Deliver the young to slavery in cloaks of instinct.

A yellow glass held up to the sky
To catch the sight of flight over ocean we
Hang these frugal prayers above the water
And try to witness your fall

Otra Ves

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Nausicaa 370

O, you who knew
The new want
The shoulder of Jerusalem
O, you who discovered the history of the garden
The tiny happy lovers
Repeating the same charades
The cross illusions of a vague and unstill Venus
O, you who came from June today
And still had sores in your mouth
From eating circus apples.

How distant the avenues of fools seem to you now.
You are a phantom child of falling night
Brought in among the sunflowers and wretched want

How quietly the trees wait for the sun.

Improvised Histories

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Nausicaa 369

Others join the day
While we watch the royal rain
Today’s payments light our way
And we, noble, turn back
To some dark plan
The mention of which brings ships
And we lose this jeweled country
To jumpers and customers and supermen
Who fly home at dinnertime
Who bring a better twinkle to tomorrow’s eye
Who pass through these streets on their way to somewhere else

Who rub whiskey and salt into these old wounds.

Chottie Si*

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Nausicaa 368

A warm instance
The odor of grass clings to you
Some forbidden perfume
Makes for millions of these breaths
Sweet jesus!
Know her by her low days
Her something women
By her potted priests
And the tiny grains of halfway beams
These dreams are not her dreams
But your calculations of light
They seem to overwhelm our mornings
And color all our supposed differences.

She comes back to herself
Spinning dancing shifting
Pouring honey on these altars
Dreaming in the morning wind


*Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan song from "Bandit Queen" Of course, apropos of nothing here- just heartrendingly, breathtakingly beautiful song.

The Vicious Cycle of Reality

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Nausicaa 367

God’s wife she takes the cake
Feeds it to the dogs
Puts her irons in the fire
Falls in love with skeleton violets
Locks up her secret wristwatch.

Look! your voice! (It flies between
The zeroes of the rich and
the magnetic influence of falling
I remember
A horse in a dress
The wonder of religion
The fault of the blood
The man to see
The smell of turpentine
The jaw of shame
A life supposedly
Composed of spots and strangers

The Memory of Water, the Useless Bay

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Nausicaa 366

The palace of arms shines in the dark
A bullet, really, straight and full of harm
The wind knows the way we used to look
Before there were babies and beauty and the tongues of fools.

You must know
How the rocks lose their false color
On arriving from the sea
Your hand holds out the washed earth
And pleases its blind name
Rocket watching you notice and give thanks
To the sad years
I will tell you stories
Of the rolling heel
And the drunken wonder
I will come to find you shining
In the dark.

The Sea of Signs

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Nausicaa 365

A drawing is just a misunderstanding
A small thing
That reaches back for some false eye
A dog that could whistle, maybe.

Where might we bed our idiot lives?
A needle to a bloodless girl
The innocence of the bone
Drying in the morning
Student of the devil
Stretched to the limit
Broken on the rack of change
What the eye brings it also carries away
So much false hope

So much loss.

Different Phantasm

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Nausicaa 364

This is a different stick
One with a hardened meaning
A stick that kissed us with a
Darkness meant to offend
A mountain that fell asleep during the telling
An extra squeak from a bird dying

We used this stick to speak
Of meaning and evening and how
It is wrong to ask secrets of the
Little eye.

The night now takes our extra troubles
And flies away into the dawn
We are called to take all our reason
And make it into little teeth
With which to eat our crimes.

Lost City of Moonlight

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Nausicaa 363

The music the prayers the rocks that wonder
With hair and flowers wearing the rain.

We rest exquisite
Until thought weighs us down.

We feel the kiss
And are cleansed but too soon wither.

The beast cannot bend.

It’s courting collar of hands and dust
Require it to feel too much.

Someway we take the stage
And sing the song that
Our age must spoil with all this poetry
And leave us alone
Costumed in moonlight.

The Splendid You

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Nausicaa 362

A cheap pinch
Becomes a kiss- these twins
Twining, barbed along the wire
The pair is met
And god is kissed and left
Without trousers
dressed for the sacrifice.

Secret mornings thrown away, alive
What comes together in forever
Charmed and painful the holes
Are whispering back to us
“This is fake mercy.”

Alekhine's gun

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Nausicaa 361

It was curiosity that rose
From a pocket and flew into tomorrow
And found these strange heights
And watched today, hot and worse, fall away.
Forgiving souls squint against this light of longing
They don’t know to remove their glasses
They forgive themselves these same wrongs
And put them away in twilight.
Then, to keep themselves from cutting
They wave to the seaweed,
Their boots suppose that sometimes
The eye turns up lame and limps for home.
Certain of its own poorness it dances with the devil for show
And finds the polite air
Where it makes its jilted way
Without reply
Without wonder.