Poems

Shrine

Here are the many-colored portals of history,

where rain slides down city windows

like weak wine,

and we each receive tongues of flame

and names, like

Ubermensch, and

Rose of Sharon,

to cover our childish names:

Drink of Dust, and

Watch the Sky.

So we travel this way,

or that way, and someone says,

“Do you like this apartment?

You can live here, and work, and cook, and love,

and say whatever you want,

unlike Joan of Arc.

In fact, her ashes were mixed

into the brickwork of this fireplace;

now you can both send a burnt offering

to heaven every night.”

But this is what I’m saying:

if we drifted backwards awhile, perhaps,

we’d remember

those other names.

says the universe so staring back

my pride lies

scooped out and bleeding on the barbed wire;

and my palate, cut with bitter honey.

i am small in the ebon silence-

no sound save insects of the eve,

no medium a man might use

speaking of his devotions

each time to the air.

the cosmos is not greedy with its truths.

i raise eyes and see

the arm of galactic star-mist

spattered across the void…

this is the why of so many things-

the universe,

great eye (so imagined),

passes over “i”

and sees nothing.

great pillars of dust, my genesis;

and flowering grass, my revelation,

are more me than i.

so, am i to hurl my fragile mass upon the rock

and devoid my senses of this?

not to hear horses moving through the night-fields

or taste the heavy pine air

or suck in the damp earth’s scent?

“i am alone,” we say in small voices,

lost children staring into the black.

says the universe, “so?”, staring back.

Remains of the Great Beast

We go to the bottom,

below South Line Street, in the razorlight-

where the air is green dead,

where ectoplasm gathers on the shining walls,

and fires light the low lamentations,

below the bellows,

where the ghosts live who have no other home.

A cold vein runs in time

with the corner music,

on the edge where the air is heavy wet.

If you kept a dime, you can save your soul,

since at night the faultlines are easier to split

with gold and pirate ditties.

All eyes sweep the broken ground.

Between the concrete and the chassis, the air is still.

Between the rebar and the relics, the air is still.

Between the tonnage and the tenements, the air is still.

You forget how to define

when you see directions spread before you,

like the auras of fingers…

Can you tell me how to get, how to get to South Line Street?

We struggle topside after a while

from the gamut of the underrafters,

and breathe heavy.

See

the sun sinking; blood red waves.

Here the wind throws gritwater forever,

and is not quieted.

Question Mark

Shall I ask of you

things not seen for a thousand years?

May the common man walk on water,

if he has enough saved to upgrade his boots?

Is the logical extension of classical music

the electric guitar?

Will the rainforest

live in terrariums? Terraria?

Who will correct me

in a thousand years?

Is time only a tracing

from a to b?

If you travel backward,

what will you ask of those from the days of long ahead?

Or, is time a river

eternally swallowing its own tail?

And, will I see you

tomorrow?

Mesa

Plait leather creaks,

sinews writhe over muscle carved.

Staccato locust click-

hot breeze ripples over

patchy tall brome

sings through the tines

of hunched cactus bundles;

sandstone burnished in the photon strike.

Dust and mud

drip and slide;

sunbreak-

riding

blood bay red

and the dirt breathes.

Laughter

Have you ever been lied to?

You are Heaven’s daughter.

Some say “God is dead,”

and you say “I think not,”

and I say “That’s a free Sunday.”

What will you do?

Take offense?

It’s been thirty years since my last confession.

Here, let me tell you my sins…

I’ll start with my birth. Now you try.

For penance, let’s count the last ten years.

Tonight, I will have a dream of our childhood.

Mother will hold our hands as we wander the museum,

not so much from a fear of losing us,

but to transmit the shock of space and time and meaning.

Now that you are sure you have purpose, and I am special,

I can reflect on the fact that this meaning has no meaning;

it slaps to the ground and disintegrates

under the slightest wind.

Besides, do you know how

immense and ancient everything is?

Fine.

If you come to the museum with me,

we’ll find a drinking crowd afterward.

I’ll play guitar,

and you can dance.

Iron

They hoard their trinkets:

Children, dogs, and houses;

monuments

to the funeral of common fellowship.

And yet the wick of superstition

burns;

faith may be an island

on which one becomes shipwrecked,

and most find their loves

ashen,

carried by the wind.

But you,

I would have you stay as common,

and smoothed,

and beautiful;

filled with irregularities

like the rose quartz I hold

in my hand.

Immortalized

On the way past the park, I happen upon

Shakespeare, trapped in his personal prison garden

of perennials and succulents and iron bars.

It’s the most efficient way

of holding someone indefinitely-

they cut off his arms and legs,

stuck him on a pedestal,

and froze him like Han Solo.

He notices me,

and shouts up,

“Hey! Think you can get me out of here, man? Please?”

I stop, and think for a second.

“Sorry, Bill!

I’ll bring you a newspaper tomorrow.”

il Duomo

The vagaries of pomp,

as befitting a man…

 power corrupts him totally.

So then, prepare a table before me

in the presence of mine enemies.

But do I give myself to fortune,

which has not will

nor purpose?

My own will has been a weak support.

Are “Truth” and “the Good”, transient;

cast off?

I say now this is truth:

the unending Holy See of time and space,

the darkness dance of the heavens

whirling unchecked,

eons after man has slept.

Deny it then:

we are supplicant before the reliquary void.

Human Nativity

We are products of melting,
sloughed from the purest ore,
dismissing what insults our own souls.

Tonight, as the dark shroud of heaven covers the earth,
the mother with child will kneel, asking, Why must I be your servant?
And a sister will say, You are blessed among women.

As a light seeks to pierce the blackened reaches,
the boy rises, and asks, Why must I go?
And a father answers, No one else will.

As the lonely shadows grasp along the land,
the man asks, Why must we learn to die?
And another counters, What is God’s will?

Tomorrow, as the old man rises to greet the spilling gray dawn,
he asks, Why?
And is greeted with nothing but the rain.

We are products of melting;
if we knew, we would be God.
And as the Multiverse asks the question, it shudders under the weight.