POEM: Jones Beach

This Neptune calm
deceives children.
It pushes green foam
like rushing lava
lapping white
on the fresh black cement
of charcoal beachhead.

We’d run from the stealthy
water, with lips chilled
blue as the claws
of crabs, evading
waves that made the
sand boil with
bubbles from below
then we’d know to hunt
for clams, or pretend
it was the place
where mermaids lived.

Horizon ghosts
were just boats with secrets.
The smiling gulls
hung on wires
above trash cans.

The teeth of biting
salt clenched sandy
bathing suits,
so everything itched.

The foreign cold
water picked at
our aching muscles,
the skin was as tight
as singing kite string.

The boats grazed smooth
across that flat line
with the pulsing of a snail
they’d glide, these tankers
that were nameless shadows,
like empty shells we’d
stuff in our pockets
for display later on
on our nightstands at home.

The tide, like oil,
snuck up on the sand,
bleached white from the sun.
Then carried things off
to the blue-black waves
that carried off names
of those who’d been pulled
into the rip tide,
like the bottles we’d stuff
with our secret notes
& throw out into
an endless & blind sea.

We hoped to make contact
with some foreigner
who didn’t know the language
only to have the
bottles tossed ashore
by a wave just a mile
down the road, near the night-
black jetty, slickened
from seaweed, expelled
by the lonely ocean,
where, picked up as trash,
they were thrown away
without a thought.

POEM: Truth & The Internet

I click the chicory-colored hyperlink that reads A BROKEN LINK
on a web site & receive a THIS PAGE CANNOT BE FOUND message

This self referential link, accurate as cesium, is a random truth
of the internet: sad as it is, unable to connect to any page, it is
a dim blue incandescent Christmas bulb with its color
chipped off, white light needling through the cracks,
gleaming totally inconspicuous by a dearth of self knowledge

POEM: Geologic

I will also give him a white stone with a new name written on it, known only to him who receives it.
- Revelation 2:17

Sometimes I believe words are stones we toss
at each other, to make the same hollow
thud rocks make whenever they land &
strike each other. There is a life of bedrock
Beneath us.

We sculpt with the tools of isolation
yet we are also hardened jack hammers
aching metallic aches, yearning to drill
through what is geologic with carbon
fists ablaze.

Each day closes somewhat more uncertain
than the previous, unless the bedrock
which entombs the beating heart is present.
Such is the territory each of us
has homesteaded. There is a life of bedrock
Between us.

POEM: In February, Wearing Sloppy Snowshoes

In February, wearing sloppy snowshoes, you trundled over,
dragging all the ice & snow you could with you the entire way,
Asked my forgiveness, & to hand me back the coffee that you borrowed
That last time we circled each other before we went on desperate paths
in the heat of July, we danced to cicada.
& now, & here - you promise me the heat of nuclear fusion,
wishing to make more energy out of colliding words
Which I mention to you is how sunlight is made.
Blood shot red light carves out a soft occupation of the hills,
As it casts its doubtful shadows.

POEM: An Ordinary Song

School is still out & the town is out of breath without its kids. I am constantly tired, not eager to rise in the earl grey light that peeks between the college’s gothic steeples. Maybe I want to sleep in but can’t. I cannot enjoy the leftover time in bed, the barricaded cold, coma warm blankets, the twisted bodies, our sheltered forms among the sheets. I sleep the way a father does who cannot sleep so deeply knowing his children are out, until the door finally latches behind the last one in at last. One exhale.
Thank you ice on my windshield spreading like a stitch
Thank you slate sky, scratched with fingernail white lines of ghostly planes so remote, off to warm lands. Thank you strangely anxious light over mountain sleep, dreaming of summer heat.

These days when I wake, I reach for my partner wanting to feel her body heat, because the warmth assures me that I am here, I have not been disappeared. That the sun will rise today, that I will dress & join the circular ordinariness of others: will shave, will eat breakfast, will drive to work & be consumed by daylight. The sun that rises appears to me as a grand gift reopening. The soft white noise of the car defroster offers me wordless song in elephant frequency.

Behind the ordinary is sadness, solid, waiting like soil in winter, what we must eventually immerse our hands in getting the scent over our fingers, go through the day with it, like cologne. Leaving dreams behind, making a way, I make eye contact with total strangers & hoping for a moment that I know him, co-resident in this opening, the contact, however awkward, hovers like coffee aroma.

Thank you ice on my windshield spreading like a stitch
Thank you slate sky, scratched with fingernail white lines of ghostly planes so remote, off to warm lands. Thank you strangely anxious light over mountain sleep, dreaming of summer heat.

I don’t know why in the play in my head it is always she who dies before me. Why do I think that? There is the shiver of a razor in first reactions. It is not a fear of being alone but not knowing what to do next, who am I in such hard absence?

I have always been afraid of growing disheveled, of having others say, “See how he has let himself go since her passing.” I do not want to let myself go. I want to keep a tight grip.

Since light was born I measured all distance relative to her body, her azure eyes, her loving hands.

Thank you ice on my windshield spreading like a stitch
Thank you slate sky, scratched with fingernail white lines of ghostly planes so remote, off to warm lands. Thank you strangely anxious light over mountain sleep, dreaming of summer heat.

POEM: What The Kindle Cannot Do

is cuddle my pen, or splay violently onto
my living room floor, with textured pages
curled in all directions like morning hair,
it will never be as bedraggled as
a beggar, it cannot be an open palm,
asking for alms or be the leather smell
of wisdom or ever offer me a
spine to finger, a tab to yank on, tugged
from shrugged shoulders of oily wooden racks,
face smirking outward like an audience.
it cannot surround me, or remind me
that i am half army & half a monk.
it can never be the ligament of
wisdom’s muscles, for left on its own, words
just coagulate, glomming a body
to lean against. the growling CRT
paints evanescent reflections of green
sickly skin, but no analogues of flipping
pages or hi res simulations of
dog ears, nor the slick licking of electric
fingers into some form of pixelated
saliva cradles me the way books can.

Every book dreams of corporeal life.
The virtual (from the same Latin root
as virtuous, as in”strength”) offers weak
bonds between spiritual & convenient,
ignoring that Presence is another way
to know everything.

POEM: A Person Can Break A Neck Trying To Write An Honest Poem*

I have sat zazen my entire life
& committed every infant pink &
bruised purple morning to memory. I
have fasted & grown gaunt seeking visions,
having raised Presence to my soft red lips
as one lifts a chalice filled with Holy Blood
Of saviors, saints & the wisest madmen.
But it was not until the dim flicker
Of simple light, shadowless on the wall
of the cave that is my heart, scratched in an ancient
hand, that I was so stirred to finally
make out the blessing, once too blurry to read:

"let your writing be your practice,” it said,
let your practice be what you bleed."


*(With thanks to Charles Simic for this favorite line in one of his poems for the title.)

POEM: The Path - Lament

silver nitrate maple leaves
fallen as an act
of remorse & snow
o dubious spring -
can color be so disowned?
can faith be so disrobed?
Disarmed & bereft & godless
was it for this
you was born?

POEM: Ghosts Reciting Poetry

Once we dreamt of marbled ash, of tooth & bone as rubble, a post-war Europe, tossed between fingers.
The holes of us, the atomic solid space of us, now a marbled space, the way we think of Rome as always indestructible.
Once we dreamt of sculptors releasing figures trapped in stone, it becoming clear that art is only beholden to the artist.
Once we dreamt of what we would say when asked “what would you like done with your body after you die?” and it froze our love, dead in its tracks.

When we are cremated, words escape steamlike, just pebbles left behind to play with.
Hardscrabble lint, kept in a pocket, perhaps, to scratch another’s inner thighs.

Which is how you will know it is us.

That and the poetry we will recite.

POEM: poems are not clever things

[they are silence]
[hidden in the junk drawer]
[where do you hide yours?]
[in a stream?]
[inside an 18-wheeler?]
[playing center-field for the Mets?]
[bypassing ears]
[striking at the heart]
[of every heart]
[just out of reach]
[of everything]

Poem: The Surly Sea

[the sea is the tint of money green]
[beyond everyone's reach]
[it explains color]
[using violent language]
[how mums shiver]
[how forlorn pumpkins]
[have had more orange days]
[do you remember]
[the viny days of fields]
[in the refuge of the gourd sea?]

POEM: The Path - Is Everything Found In Early Morning Fog?

Is everything found in early morning fog,
The one that dances softly with sunrise?
I cannot contain it, it rests in the lap
Of the valley. I cannot stave it off
Only shave off its occupation of the tired hills.

POEM: The Path - If it is to be me

If it is to be me,
Then let me be ready.
Let it be my heart that is
Clear spring water
Quenching the great thirst
and the place earth herself calls
home.

POEM: One Second

Is the time it takes for a cesium atom to bounce around a special container that a very specific few people measure for the very general masses.

It is as motion & wasted motion,

It is as the object of early time studies done during the twentieth century
Or as money, as goods and services produced in an expedient manner as possible, as efficiency, and as part of the GDP. It as of employment, as of a rate that is at 8.6 percent,. Can time be measured by the bouncing of the unemployment rate?

It is as wealth.
It is as families & taxes for schools & road repair. For snow removal in winter in the northern states.

It is as the impoverished social fabric, stretched taut & anguished

When we discovered the relationship between time & motion & then motion & money & then money & family & then family with community & then community with democracy & then democracy with equality & then equality with spirit & then spirit with a universe that never measures the vibrations of cesium atoms neither does it calculate leap days or leap minutes or even leap years.

Music too, is vibration.
Can time be measured by Mozart’s brain? Always composing in ever radioactive decay

POEM: Chemo Mother

You walk in grace
my Mother, my daughter,

A rising love as steel.

who carries life like water
in hands shaped from prayer

said life dripping unabashedly from between fingers.

You are invisible light
Radiant faced, a chemo-mystic

Caring lunatic, patient visionary,

Balanced on a high wire
above the pit of my stomach

Freefalling these dreams I have

these own bad dreams that
I cannot honor: of you in bed,

holding me hostage, rife with unable.

You walk in grace
O grandmother & sister

abandoner of logic,

whose upturned heliotrope face turns
toward weakened light

quivering at night, a weakened night, a

fevered flesh, a weakened night of shivering
and a mouth full of sores,

clutching one day tight as a fistful of spring grass,

and me, with insomnia that is my shivering,
at last cut free from my own wings of pain.

POEM: Poetry As Religion

There is a stillness in humans that can unnerve poplar leaves. That entreats us to surrender. That avoids the velvet space, the terror that can be heard in voices, voices that bubble like air in a water cooler. It is religion for those who cannot stand large crowds, for those who prefer the comfort of pajama bottoms and sweatshirt over Sunday bests. Baptism is by silence. A tattoo is burnished into writer-skin by needles of language. Fire consumes wood. Water extinguishes fire. The hollow sound of pen, the clackety-tack of a keyboard, is Latin. Writing as an earthmoving tool uncovers prayer. It is an archeology of spirit. That empty hole in the sky is target we aim our metaphor toward.

POEM: Origami Christmas Ornament

Marvel at the purples of a King that
Rises to greet luminous corollas.
An uncertain heart swells and you wonder
Is it just the heat of the fireplace?
In a moment of insecurity,
in amiable light that catches an
ambling dawn, the stockings dance. A quest of
night air, in cat whiskers, the somnolent
fur of dark scrapes walls, a soft fir leans in
the corner. The tree is a dogstar of
illumination. Flakes cling with panicked
abandon to the mascara brush of

lonely frozen eyelashes.

POEM: On The Edge of A Preposition

Your scent rises like that of
laundry, stingy as thermometer-mercury, through
miles of
arterial roadways, through
stringy muscles, through
a fibrous jungle through
branches of
bone, wrapped in
a web, around
lumps of
flesh, around
growths, around
striated meat, around
a skeletal frame, spiraling upward through
the skull, through
the scalp, through
the spot that was once the fontanelle, before
your bones knitted together, when you were a baby, before
speech, before
the genes lovingly molded by
the hands of evolution that enable walking kicked in, before
you knew what words were, toward
the centrifugal identity of your soul, on
your deathbed perhaps, toward
the centrifugal Milky Way, with
its gawky spiral arms flaling hapless as a drowning man, beneath
the very nose of
God, Who returns all motion with
Countermotion & Like lips, like the shape & pursing of
lips, proffers
a kiss.

POEM: Defund This!

Defund my high lead content crystal privilege
Defund the way art & music programs must beg for scraps
Defund carbon every chance we get
Defund the name-calling & Tea Party effigies, the Hitler & Gucci knockoffs

Defund corrupt union bosses but also soulless corporate hands locked
around our throats.
Defund myths about our slave owning fathers & just what
Exactly Paul Revere said

Defund the quiet dismantling of town commons & the privatization of
charity
Defund drone attacks

Defund bloodied brown children & keening mothers
Defund knot-headed dictators
Defund brutality in the name of the helium balloons of freedom or faith

Defund cardboard box homes
Defund machismo & marianismo –

Fund bread & hands & Arab springs, fund work & soulful eyes.

POEM: Drink The Woods

Get drunk on the reunion you have always desired,
On humid air that splits summer like a melon.
Drink green shade of tree canopies,
The morning vespers of the woodpecker with its morse code,
The secret language of water, wending its way through humus,
The flamboyant choir of birds,
Step over colorful mushroom,
Over decaying pine,
Over kestral piping, long and high,
Over the soft-shouldered mount:
Take a drink of the woods.

POEM: Red

Red in the morning, sailors take warning, but what if it is red all the time if eyes are not bloodshot, but if the color of the air were red, if the red was inhaled deep into your lungs. What then?
Waiting for the swelling to subside, this is what the day is for. Anger as red, passion as red. Blood is red because of these things. As signs go, red is a good one. As a sign of infection, it sends a clear warning.
Sailors aren’t the only ones who need to be warned though. We sway over swells of ancient seas, where is the courage to examine these? Who put those away and why can’t I find it? Life requires Dramamine.
Red as a balloon speaks of childhood. The pimples of teen-hood too. The red of your tongue that can savor everything also speaks to me of love, which is also red. A dentist or doctor who cannot discern red
Is a liability to his craft. The red of day break and sunset vary slightly. There is a way to tell the difference you must look into its eyes and see how much softer the light in the evening is.
The red is less swollen, but that doesn’t mean it is not a warning just the same. Sundown is just light that drains over the horizon, dripping into the dreams you eventually have at night –
Dusk is the great hush that ends all the commotion.

30 Poems In 30 Days - 2011

http://30poemsinnovember-2011.blogspot.com/

Seminar: Teaching Thinking - Creativity and the Unconscious

POEM: Intercourse

Every tongue a verb
Every pair of eyes adjectives
The nouns of our lives just fantasy dear
the moment is a spring this force of life
An uncoiling fern as if April or May
Was a permanent mailing address
The instant of our meeting
The friction of our gaze
The microseconds of monosyllables
Oh all that space gobbled up with a touch
Creates fire at the speed of breath
Fire for heart & fire for bone
we ash foreheads
this only reminder we need to
start the document of us

POEM: Jury Selection

about the pattern of the blood spray
about the blade & the DNA
about his clothes now tactically draped
upon a manikin in sad resurrection

how long do i need to talk about it
i can dress the blank face as a mother would
with his crooked smile
i can dress the blank head as a father might
with a thicket of close cropped hair
he wore so wild

it does not go away [to answer your look]
it is a lump of lead carried around in a pocket
not giving it a thought
until i bump into a table &
feel it & remember what it is I am carrying

how long do i need to talk about it
before words now lame & tangled creatures
lose their heart
lose their inclination to explain things
like why the many russets of october
like the faith of tulip bulbs
like why i am inclined to jettison
every word in my feeble vocabulary

POEM: The Sky Bleeds Mercilessly

over us these last
few days
the shredded, skies
the angry skies
drops to
its knees
right onto our
necks
witness
shorelines choke
blue-grey from
the grip the river
had on its throat
i see misery as well
swell like dance music
in the distance this
music of a new moon &
high tide
envelope the urging
of its storm surge
over the deserving &
the innocent
alike
while slumped
trees implore
like Job - “ how long o
god?”
water sluices
through roots as
if shoots as if
from the spiral
barrel of a gun
as if it might
just as well
have been a bullet

trees grip
swampy earth
whose roots resemble 
bunched fists
clutched tight
as a junkie's

if with a brush
of its watery-hand
it can sweep away
that truck
like a child’s
toy what chance
do i have?

anchoring prayer
anyone?

POEM: The Day My Toaster Was Replaced By a Cactus

Today I went to make toast but the toaster had been replaced by a cactus.
I am not afraid of cactus, but toasters scare me to death.
When I was young, I’d heard stories of people getting shocked
sticking forks or knives into the trap-like slots that hold the bread for toasting.
I was certain that my toaster would lure me into its mouth &
I would be the victim of its sharp electric teeth.
Perhaps those living in cactus climates – Arizonans or Texans – have their
Own horror stories about cactus, of those impaled on barbs & left for dead.
Maybe there are stories of hemophiliacs bleeding to death after
A sad encounter with a cactus rescued from a local nursery.
We carry our orange-cone stories as a warning
but the things we acquire through saturation are hardest to quit
No cactus has ever threatened me
nor born me any ill  will
save for this craving for a single slice of buttered toast.

POEM: Storm Clouds

the saddened grass
has weak eyes
it has the slack jaw
of a coward
under the gray ceiling
of storm clouds

i hold coffee
close my true friend

the rhododendron seem indifferent
who am i to care?

the college kids so yellow
are ready for another school year

it is difficult to move
in the pictures i see


it appears
like film drowned in developer
under a red light.
in that way
so ghostlike

it rises like fog
crawls up like disgust
it covers up the chintz of living

the rain all over
everything. If

POEM: Aztec Poems

Aztec Poems

I
I am soil
Flower is my heart
Held in cupped hands
I, a whisper
You, an ear.
Words are seeds taken to the wind
They plant themselves
In the walls of my heart

II
We are beaters of drums
We are makers of song
Daylight is just men and laughter.
Alive is the yellow and gold dust
That covers everything.

III
Only we know life
The song-makers
The root-pullers
Drum beaters of the deep.
Send out voices into rooms of the heart
And wait for an echo back.

IV
For a short while I walk among the living
I break off heart pieces
The size of bees
And offer them as food as I go.
For a short time I am here
And cover you in honey
And eat flowers.

V
You have come for me
Shortened light angled
And in steep cold
Gold as pollen.
You discover my wanting.
Return, revoke, renounce
But never oh god rebuke.

POEM: Runners in Pre Autumn

Off they go in a spandex flurry
Those famine-boned runners
whose skin is anerobic-mushroom-white,
whose hearts are larger than organic cantaloupe -
(I imagine them as pickled tomatoes floating in
magnifying mason jars larger than my fist!)

There they go - off in packs like wolves or some religious order -
These predawn priests who spread their gospel in beats-per-minute,
In recovery times, and later, in personal-bests over lattes.

They are trimmed in the fur of Velcro watches and Ipods,
And flexible wallets that stick to their shoes
They are the trappers of asphalt,
& the assailants of hills, hatted & visored,
gleaming gimmicked with GPS and altimeter -
Past colleges, around flower-skirted ponds
Over drowsy streams, past panting dogs
& cats aloof with puzzled faces,
Enrobed in the prepubescent season.

All around, leaves are stricken with the color of weakened tea.
Outdoors is a shivering pulse on the treadmill of a winter.
It waits for them, limbering up, performing calisthenics,
& the tuning fork of sinewy limbs, ready for the day’s route.

POEM: TO GET LIFTOFF SOMETIMES YOU NEED TO PUT YOUR HEAD IN A CLOUD

Land Of Do As You Please
Land Of Know-It-Alls
Land Of Cholesterol & the
Land Of Missing Organs
Land Of The Inverted bordered by
Land Of The Slanted
Land Of Change
Crayonland whose money is wax
Land of Heroes
& Land of Cowards (the capital constantly moves for fear of invasion!)
The Land of Breastless Women & the
Land of Contraindications (a headache to visit!)

Passports all in order please
And no pushing in line.

We are all immigrants, after all.

POEM: September

the dried mud look of disgust on your face
covered me with a skin of lurid air one
that draped humid over us like spilled ink
& the sharp smell of chlorine was present
that we used to clean up the mess
it erased that greasy part of me away
with the sibilant strength of air
released from a derelict tire
soft, & pliant so mercurial
the way we are told to let things be.

Nothing was the same now with the sun-as-truth returned:
not our plans not our love not the "we" of our youth.

POEM: The Surface of Things and Its Effect On Inspiration

lazy water carry my body
home cicada this lawn-mower sound

these coughs that flit through drowsy light
this lady damsel silk-delicate

that skims saffron lillies by day
ephemeral sprite by night

plays tag with the meniscus
that is the surface of things

spindly legs ripple skin
now torn up like first trod snow

flowers just ghosts
drift suspended - just veneer

air hangs itself upon the accretion
of yellow which also drifts alone

suspended too as if embraced
by the cool licking shade

i am present to the song
so holy, so upright, so free

i open up my notebook
i draw my breath my pen and pray.

POEM: How Like A Vista

On this bluff, eagle & I scan see everything:
Expansive earth carved in a woody green carpet,
buffalo clouds graze on blue fields above.

Yes, yes I can love like this –
Horizon to blurry horizon.
I can unfold every painful
& joyful inch of it,
This experience,
these dizzying heights,
the chance to shout swears at the top of my lungs
& to have words torn from my lips
& carried off without ears around.

Today is about drinking in the panorama
keeping nothing secret,
the large cave of me alive,
& everything in plain sight.

POEM: A Tree Shall Be Known By Its Fruit

if you want to know something you must learn to stand perfectly still

what we speak is wind across open fields,
when earth shakes, then everything sits up and takes notice
& even the clematis worries

another way I have heard this expressed is that we are containers
carrying all the things we have ever done

what we aspire to these are paintings we work at in our lives
we splash globs of red here
& a dash of verdigris there
get it on our hands & face
some on the brush ferrel
some on the handle
& some into our mouths

drink it
follow all movement
&
break out the muck boots
muscle & tendons, cartilage & skin & bone root us

POEM: Mapocho River

Once it was known for its headless &
handless bodies bobbing through
Santiago, the mutilated city.

Today, Chile sends its wines and grapes
North, exporting its fruit rather than a vermilion grief
That could always turn the river red

as wine with impotence.
The past is a fleeting ghost but that is what the people
are accustomed to (even Pinochet is dead!)

You can hear the voices of the disappeared
in sibilant hush of moving water
that sluices through every anguished heart.

It is said that everything comes to
light of day, we ask for truth
to disinfect everything,

But this is not always so.
So much is carried in the shadows,
in crying hearts of the mothers

in the dark alleys through the city
in the saintly ember of el Estadio Nacional
amid a night as inky as hopeless prayer

of the tortured, of the lost
as inscrutable as the unfathomable hand of God
black as the unknowing & fog of the lost

deep in the flesh, where no one ever looks.
In lost family, so much surrendered to memory
Like a garden that is overgrown

In humid South American air, 
where every fragrant thing is caught for a second
remembered & then is never seen again

a flaccid dream pressed into
Soft earth, where the fortunate dead get to go.
Not a bloated headless cork

speaking the language of loss
Along the fluent snake of a river.

POEM: Lakelife

When birds converse,
I try to listen.
Their sounds tongue-in-groove

together like
fresh carpentry.
Each one sends up

a chirp, then listens
to the other.
In the distance,

over the lake,
Hammering takes
on the quality

of birdsong.
Humans cough up
their own banging

call-and-response.
What is that like –
to live in a way

that blends in with
the soft sunrise?
To rise & run

down to water’s
edge, to meet friends
& take off water-

Skiing before
others have risen
to morning coffee?

Is this the outcome
of some master plan
Or just the result

of sinewy thinking?

The Incarnations of Elvis

Nothing attracts a group of white people like an Elvis impersonator. It’s Lake George and the cheesy feel of the “authentic” Adirondack experience is in the air and clings to my skin like bug spray with that same balsamic feel. I walk around in shorts and a t-shirt, in what could arguably be the t-shirt capitol of the world. I feel privileged enjoying the July festivities, taking in the glorious iridescent colors and sounds of Lake George during Independence Day week.

The Elvis impersonator has a mellifluous voice. His dress and hair style and big belt buckle (BBB – note: please refer to Dara Weir’s poem about BBBs) are reminiscent of Elvis to be sure, but he is subdued. He has not adopted all of Elvis’ traits. He sounds like Elvis, but he appears uncomfortable with his other signature traits: the hip swinging, the leg bowing and arm sweeping, even the guttural tics that made Elvis who he was.

I have always been fascinated by the Elvis cult. I was a Public Enemy fan in college so when Chuck D. rapped “Well, Elvis was a pretty big hero to most/but he never meant shit to me,” I could relate. But this idea that there are these many incarnations of Elvis at various stages of his life floating around in the public consciousness interests me in the same way that there are many incarnations of the Buddha or the various Hindu gods. These multiple identities reveal a deep human need to contort primal forces of nature into what is required in order to survive, so we create visions of Elvis bookmarking moments in our lives, marking the momentous in our personal narratives, and in essence signposting to others who we are.

There was fat Elvis, skinny Elvis, post-Hawaii Elvis, pre-drug addicted Elvis, military Elvis, etc. From these perspectives of how we create our heroes and gods we illuminate our own fears and longings. Which Elvis we relate to is what we fear or long for in some fashion.

Perhaps in connecting to that specific Elvis quality – the sneer, the irreverent sexuality, the cockiness or showmanship – even his tragic ending incarnation, when he was too drugged to find his way out of his prison – we reveal something about our own wants. Sometimes I feel that way. Sometimes I want to just phone it in and not be present, wishing it would all just go away. In this case, this incarnation of tragic Elvis, the one where he has lost all zest for life is the one I can relate to. There are other times I feel on top, in control. Perhaps then the pelvic-thrusting idol would be my Elvis. It may not be profound to say, but I think it is true nonetheless: the heroes we get are the heroes we need.

POEM: July 5th

a july 4th on a monday
means there is work the next day
so we become realists and eat and drink
over the weekend instead.
no one wants to carry around
a leaden head on that tuesday.

in tepid sunlight shy as a duckling
making its way to shore,
the lake exposes its slender face
its pianist's fingers,
its alabaster skin
and delicate bluest eye.

A mosquito motor-boat
leans hard against the flat water,
fog, its morning coat

after the celebrating
is just the deep hole
that silence hopes to fill.

POEM: Adirondack Morning

there is
always
the romance
of the plains
to fall back
on, a fest-
ooned event
with the speed
of tam-
arac trees
to measure
our growing
children by
there is
the promise of
graupel
in after-
noon storms
& growing
a little
grim about
the mouth
in winter
then there is
the throaty
prehistoric
diesel
engine slap-
ping against
the soft green
pine. "sapiens
growling,"
you say to me
nodding
& this sound is
loosened in-
to the air
that circles
over the
lake slic-
ing thin
as a canoe

thrashing
like a
silver-bod-
ied trout.

PICTURES: Stacking Book Poetry

Riding The Dragon

If you want to write
Sadder than water
The dispossessed
Night,
The book that changed my life,
Unfortunately, it was paradise.

Color

Pale horse, pale rider
The bluest eye
The stream & the Sapphire
Dispossessed.















Born To Kvetch

Sand in my bra,
The red thread,
The denial of death:
Love is a dog from hell,
War is a force that gives us meaning.
Smile at fear:
Death, be not proud.

Deep Community

The prosperous few and the restless many
The universe in a single atom,
The audacity of hope
Rising to common ground,
The life you can save.
Listening is an act of love.

Book of Longing

How much is enough?
Bird by bird
One small step can change your life.
Finding our fathers,
The namesake,
Going home.

POEM: Music Everywhere

I swear by the breeze
By which mosquitoes dance
There is music in the trees
In squirrel coughs & flapping leaves
In the evening mystery of bat-play
& in the hum of green midday.
In the family of birds that speak our names
In the gauzy light of a squint-eyed rising sun.

Let the walls of the Adirondacks shake with kinship.
Bond each one of you to the other
And then each to the woods & to misty mornings
& to the solitude of blue midnights
We rejoice that each to a person is a varied meter,
Each a different note of the same melody.

POEM: Pentacost

on the evening of that first day
when you left with dessicate hands
with corn-stalk hands

gripped tight onto what you knew
was left the drafty room, was your ghost. we saw
the flickering candle & lifeless eyes

nothing spoke as loud as what
was pushed through thin lips
steel-ruler lips,

coerced into a scar lying lips
brave words forced into a corner
this whimpering dog

me, seeking scraps of wisdom
fallen from the table.
air blew distended green curtains

of the room. you boarded
for unspoken places,
the latern dimmed & the flame inspired.

POEM: Looking Over One's Shoulder

After the tornadoes
can we ever trust the skies

again?

POEM: Valedictorian Address During A Spring Monsoon

from inside the old-church-
converted-to-a-theater
the valedictorian drones on
in gold-capped tones
staining everything like mustard.

outside, water toe-taps
sounds of life as
an IV mud drip.

then monsoon rains arrive
at first silent as an uninvited guest
but soon sounds pour in through slatted
stained glass windows.

we await the cliched
power outage but
somehow it never materializes.

only when it is done,
do scowling clouds remain
& everything wilts
with the intention
of drying flowers

save for the red faced
laughter of
fresh graduates.

POEM: Everyone Loves The Street-Sweeper

Everyone loves the street-sweeper
That fat old sauropod
With flat teeth suitable for grinding dirt
& glass & schmotz
Of misspent winter.

Lumbering in yellow
It removes the grime
And peels away the cabin-fever
And faith in global warming.

Like hyacinth and flowering trees,
Another sign that spring
Is beginning to fill out its new suit
And is looking more and more
Like a grown-up.

POEM: Real Skies

When I dream of skies
they are a tantalizing blue -
But when I raise my eyes
I am awash in gray

Real skies take on the hue of silence.

POEM: Let me fall upward

From the ground upwards
Let me tumble into the damp air
Until clouds heavy with rain
Become my earth
And I fall up into snowy
Landscapes of a sky
That is usually reserved
For wishing children
& which cannot be rebroadcast
Without the express written
Consent of dreamers
& story-tellers everywhere.

POEM: When Traveling In a Car

there is often a moment
when sky is a smoky sonogram
of a fetus
scrolled with the arch
of an upper case “C”

shafts of sunlight
are long, thin vaginal
walls as
earth catches whatever falls
As afterbirth

ontofarmlands
ontocities
ontoforests and foggy dales

ontocraggy-shale-hills
formed long ago in volcanic frenzy

everything just smeared with life.

POEM: The Chair’s Reaction on the News of My Sister’s Death

The chair took the news hard with a wooden glare.
It was prepared for the worst.

I cried seawater into its splintered hands
But all it could do was stare back

Bound to that table like an old wife,
It would not answer my questions

Instead, It offered just a flat angled face,
Polished to the slickness of marble,

Wishing it could cry too,
if only it could,

if only that would help.

POEM: Let My Country Awaken

Where brothers see themselves in others’ eyes –
Where children are precious gems -
Where women as sisters and daughters and wives
are savored fruit &
they sit at the table of authority, feasting
-
Where the culture releases yellow freedom
into springtime air like pollen -
Where all men have work -
& trust is the local currency -
Where faith in the broad softness of things
Replaces the decay of dogma
Encrusted with privilege -
Where every name has a history
and belongs to something
Or someone else –

Oh Mother – Let my country awaken!

(Based on a poem by Tagore)

In Praise of Slowness

In the same way that as William Carlos Williams wrote “so much depends upon a wheelbarrow”, so much depends on embracing a slow way of thinking.

Carl Honore’s book In Praise of Slowness first caught my eye listening to an NPR story. I was already aware of the Slow Food movement, initiated in Europe, which sought to be an antidote to the “Fast-Food” culture with which we find ourselves at battle .

Honore examines many areas of our lives that can benefit from taking a slower approach to things. This is not to say Honore is a “Speed Biggot”. He does not advocate avoidance of speed at all costs. (What does an adherent of a Slow philosophy say to a person being whisked away in an ambulance?) There are times you want to hurry, Honore assures us.

But in so many areas, from food, to traveling by car, to sex, to exercise – there are benefits for the taking.

So after reading the book, I decided to attempt to consciously slow down my driving. The chapter on driving is interesting. Honore peppers the chapter with some interesting factoids: the chances of killing someone at 20 miles per hour is only 5%. Raise the speed to 35 miles per hour – not exactly warp speed – and that statistic jumps up to 45%! By speeding in our cars, zig-zagging through traffic, Honore mentions the average time gain is only 53 seconds. Now granted, that will vary with distinace. Driving across Texas or Montana, for example, on an interstate highway system garners you some great time savings over an 8,10, 12 hour drive. But that is NOT the type of driving most of us do.

So I tried it. This is my fourth week, and I have been playing with my cruise control (where I live, the roads are often country 2-lane roads, without lights etc. so use of cruise control sort of makes this a game for me. What I have learned has been most interesting.

In a way, this is very much like yoga. When I started doing yoga, it was for the asanas, and for the physical benefits, but unbeknownst to me, it was opening up something in my heart as well. And of course, that is what yoga means: to yoke. It yokes the physical with the spiritual. In a similar way, I just assumed I would get bored, would maybe save some gas. But I found a most interesting thing happening as I started driving the speed limit everywhere.

At first, it seemed painfully slow. I was looking for something to fill in my idle driving time. To be sure, the pressure from drivers behind me still bothers me. My one fear is of being murdered in a road rage incident and I am aware that driving in this manner does nothing to placate potential road rage initiators. Occasionally, while driving at 25 or 30 miles per hour, where I can see the green light half a mile ahead, I feel my knee twinge and want to step on the gas so I can make the light. But then I ask myself, what for?

In the 4 weeks I have been doing this I can attest to the 53 second statistic given by Honore in his book. I have at most been 1-2 minutes slower by driving this way.

But more than this, something else has happened. I am seeing more when I drive. Because I am going more slowly, I take time to look at the sidewalks, to glance at people I pass, to look ahead more earnestly and it is making me more cautious about possible road hazards ahead. Another thing that has happened is I am recognizing these houses as neighborhoods, where kids play and families live. I begin to connect the 25 MPH speed limit with the fact that some precious people are living in these houses and really, I am just a visitor – instead of interloper – of their neighborhoods. I am, in essence, a neighbor.

So one of the effects of driving more slowly is that it has connected me to people living in the houses I pass doing nothing more than reducing the throttle.

Other side benefits include better gas mileage, less wear on the brakes, and the freedom knowing I will not get stopped for a speeding ticket again! As doing anything with intent, this sharpening of focus allows me to be in the moment more. I still feel pressured by drivers behind me, but I have taken now to pulling over and letting them pass, thus, removing any cause for road rage and my reducing my fear of being in an incident.

As I drive more and more of my familiar routes, I am learning what the limits are, where they speed up and where they slow down without having to strain to read signs. Sometimes, especially when descending small hills and where the speed limit is 25, it is impossible to do this. The impact on my state of mind however, is the biggest benefit. I arrive at work calmer, less stressed, less likely to think anything can be that important. This is not an effect one wears over one’s shirt, like an overcoat.

Thinking “so what?” more than once while driving (“I can make that light” “So what?”) adds value to my life. Paul Simon in his new CD entitled “So Beautiful. So What?” says that the trick to making art is to care like hell and not care at all. Driving slowly makes me care like hell but not care at all if I get to the destination 53 seconds sooner but have lost my soul in the process, then what i have i gained? is another way to look at it. What was I going to do with that 53 seconds anyway? Meditate? Find the cure for cancer? Maybe lengthening my life so it fits in a longer, slower template by taking time from point to point is a better way to longevity than rushing to meaningless deadlines. It may not add years to my life, but maybe a fuller life in the end is the trade off.

Maybe what matters is not who arrives first, but the trip itself. If this simple test can yield so many positive feelings, what else could I do slowly that might yield unexpected results? The outward action has turned my insides around. Fake it till you make, I hear some folks tell me. Keep plugging until habit becomes faith. What we do affects who we are in the same way as who we are affects what we do. It is a cycle, but sometimes all we can change is what we do. What depends upon embracing slowness is our sanity, our connectedness to others. Speed for its own sake causes us to push past all things in our lives that make us truly spiritual beings.
It is a faith in faithlessness, a certainty of doubt about living and in the end, squanders life in the most pretentious way.

POEM: Poem For St. Francis

St. Francis that clown had it backwards
And should have been taming the lepers
And kissing the wolves –
We lepers are such an unruly bunch!
But you can’t argue with a crazy saint
Especially one who is not on his meds.

His love was a fine mist that clings to
Everything around him,
But people on the subways always
Clear a space whenever the voices
In his head tell him to give up the Lexus
And take mass transit instead.

You can’t talk sense into a love-drunk fool
Who would send disciples into the world
By making them spin in circles until
They get dizzy and fall to the ground only
To head off in whichever direction they face?

What is the crazy I carry on me
& will I show it even when I am not asked?
Where do you hide yours and will you use it?

If not given to fits of love
As rebellion to the sanity of cruelty
& indifference then who will be?

POEM: Single Point Perspective

In the distance stands the white grace of birches
smudged as any blush on a daughter's bleached cheeks
against the scalp of small hills that mount
the purple scrape of horizon.

The bronchial tree tips &
cigar-like leaves brush against staccato sky.
These are bony hands that hold hollowed-boned
birds, just as any grandmother might, with swaddling voice
singing: "you are mine, yes - you are mine!"
The oranges and mauves perform their acrobatic tricks
while I mindfully sip the grainy coffee I am so fond of.

Beyond the tree-line is the corpulent river where
waters swollen from the northern melt –
rut on in guttural moaning, in the background,
choking on what ice remains
& even now, is always receiving.

POEM: Invite a Corporation Over For Tea

Invite a corporation over for tea
Ask him to borrow the car
Go out drinking with him.
Make a cake and surprise one
With a surprise party –
Have a barbecue and ask
Your favorite multinational
To bring the beer.
Or let him make the dip
And promise him steak & shrimp
Because you know its his favorite.

Marry off your corporation
To the best suitor you know.
Plan the wedding shower,
Let her pick out the most expensive
Dress and let her plan the seating chart.
Ask her to write the invitations
& wedding vows & hand out tissues when
Everyone begins to cry.
Dance with your corporation
While misty eyed others applaud.
Promise her always your heart & your hands.
Promise her music when she thinks there is none.


Put your favorite corporation
On the bus for his first day of school.
Wrap his finger with a Snoopy band-aid
When he gets his first cut.
Scoop up a lock of hair and tuck it
In an envelope when you take him
For his first hair cut,
Then label the envelop with his name,
The date and a big red heart.
Rush him to the hospital whenever he
Gets sick & wait nervously in the ER for
The doctors to come –
Make deals with God for him to live
& that he always be kind to others,
& will marry someday,
& will have lots of children to spoil.

The Social Network: A Review

So i finally watched "The Social Network" last night and my feeling about the movie was very similar to my feeling about Facebook in general: "Meh"...

It was not a bad movie, but biopics (which let's be honest is what this is) tend to be weaker vessels for good acting in my opinion than original screenplays.

From a technical view, the sound mixing and editing was just bad. I missed a good part of the dialogue due to poor quality: too much sound or too little. The scene with Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake) and Zuckerberg sitting in the disco was laughable. I mean i actually laughed because i could not hear a word of what Timerlake was saying. I get that this is how those places really are - but did we have experience it that closely? I thought it was a Saturday Night Live skit because, well WAS Justin Timberlake.)

But from the get-go, the dialogue raced. Maybe that IS how college kids speak but if the audience can't hear the dialogue what is the point? The other problem i had with the movie is the one i have watching English movies - movies with a lot of White/WASPY people confuse me. The Winklevoss twins et al - all looked and sounded alike (and not just because they were identical twins either. ) i had the same problem watching "Out of Africa" though too. I need people to look like real people mostly in order to hold my interest.

As for the subject, it sure portrays Zuckerberg as this semi-reluctant anti-hero. I thought the movie was very good to him and not so much to the Winklevoss' (Winklevi?)or Sean Parker.

The betrayal of the friendship with Savarin is probably the nearest thing to an emotional tone in the movie and the writers suggest as much. They make Zuckerberg appear to feel that he lost something in that transaction.
It was almost portrayed like a bad misunderstanding one has with a good friend and it makes me wonder if they have reconciled now that the stakes for Facebook are pretty well established. As one of the attorney's says toward the end of the movie to Zuckerber, "Your not a bad guy Mark, but you are trying so hard to be one."

Clearly this kids is as likely an aspergers victim as anyone in history, which could explain his inability to relate to people. The movie does not bring this up but after seeing it, and knowing stories of Zuckerberg, it is conceivable.

The "meh" part really comes from the fact that Facebook only moderately interests me. It is the next in line of series of these upstart, culturally pirated concepts that soon become fortune 100 companies. (think Microsoft, Google and now Facebook - )

The ubiquitous Facebook blue is everywhere, we can rest easy knowing that Facebook is now successfully branded. But placed against the context of a global rise in the disparity of wealth between rich and poor, an oncoming climate change problem, and the fact we may be within a generation of the removal of public education in this country, the importance of Facebook sort of pales.

Much has been made of the importance of Facebook in the revolutions sweeping the middle east and north africa, but it is my belief that the media uses "Facebook" as a short hand for all sorts of technical/ social networking tools. e.g., twitter and SMS texting in general. I think the media blurs all of it as "Facebook" (is Facebook on its way to becoming linguistically the equivalent of Xerox or Kleenex in this regard? Has the branding been THAT successful?

There are dozens of other social networking sites but only Facebook can boast half a billion people using it. (Again, against a context of 7 billion people soon to be populating this planet, that is certainly a lot but it is not most nor will it ever be most.

What is interesting if you go up to the Facebook statistics site, is how much the development of Facebook is owed to the open source movement which has gained steam over the last couple of years. The site boasts that "more than 70 translations available on the site / About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States Over 300,000 users helped translate the site through the translations application "

And that "Entrepreneurs and developers from more than 190 countries build with Facebook Platform. That People on Facebook install 20 million applications every day Every month, more than 250 million people engage with Facebook on external websites Since social plugins launched in April 2010, an average of 10,000 new websites integrate with Facebook every day
More than 2.5 million websites have integrated with Facebook, including over 80 of comScore's U.S. Top 100 websites and over half of comScore's Global Top 100 websites ."

Facebook is NOT an open source project, but clearly it benefitted from the movement's pressure to open property for the common good. In some ways, Facebook has been the beneficiary of this.

Now here is another point: do i really believe these people in Egypt were running back to their laptops and updating statuses? In the streets? Really? No, cell phone technology and the creation of the like-wise ubiquitous "app" has enabled these people to stay in touch in real or near real time. But i would suggest that we have no way of knowing who was using twitter and who was using simple SMS texting during those demonstrations in Egypt or who was actually using Facebook. The media uses the term "Facebook" to denote social networking of which all the afore mentioned tools are part.

It is clear this is much bigger than Mark Zuckerberg. Like any other technology, there is an element of genius, an element of timing and co-inspiration with other technologists having breakthroughs at the same time.

The fact is, had it not been for Facebook, people in Libya, and Egypt would have used texts or other networking tools to coordinate logistics. What the model does do as never before is allow news and ideas to go viral in what could be construed as a global nano-second. That is the power of networks, within nature and without. Swarm theory has long been studied what bees and ants and schools of fish can teach humans in making logistics infinitely more flexible and speedy.

The movie is a solid B or B+ but i think in the attempt to convey the frenetic tenor of the subject matter (it was only 7 years ago, after all!) some clarity and artfulness was lost. And this is the other thing: a biopic on such a revolutionary subject coming out so soon after its inception leaves no space or time for historical perspective. How would this movie have looked, say, if it were made 10 years from now? Perspective always colors the message.

Personally, i don't think we will ever know how much of the personal angst that was portrayed in the movie was true or how much was dramatized. I think the movie makes Zuckerberg look almost innocent if that term could ever be applied to a guy like that. The notion that personal anger and resentment could have been the fuel used in creating something like Facebook is believable, but is it true? And if so, how much is it true? In the same way that the movie implies Zuckerberg did not steal the idea of Facebook from the Winkle-vi, the subtext of this story nearly missed is what constitutes inspiration and what constitutes stealing? Where are the open "commons" to borrow a term from Raj Patel's book, "The Value of Nothing". In a world where more and more "spaces" are being enclosed (i.e., bought, privatized, closed off from the common good) this movie asks the question what is mine and what is yours in the intellectual world - and what is the role of "ours"?

POEM: Kind of Love

No one ever told me that there were so many kinds of love:

There is the kind that catches the light
And decorates whatever it surrounds.

There is the kind that is silent, small and unobtrusive.

There is the desperate kind,
Struggling like the last orange autumn leaf

There is even messy love that has lost its way, forgetting what it is.

Then there is the block-of-clay-immutable-and-square
-the-gray-that-anchors-the-promise-of-morning-when-I-wake
-kind-of-love.

It never gives in but just wears on –
It is as aromatic as a sky-flower, as fecund as warm
Cakey soil below.

POEM: Hopeless Liar

I will grant the force of gravity, the power of raging wild fires
The tsunami of your binding care.
But alone is the wardrobe that I choose to wear
It stands up as true, and me, the hopeless liar.

POEM: Michelle Obama’s Red Fashion

michelle obama is wearing her communist red gown again
which is different than sarah palin’s red suits she always wears.
Which red is which? And how do you decide?
Santa must be a socialist, a vermillion give-away of all those gifts.
And what about the bloody Pope?

“Everyone has to get dressed in the morning,” michelle says
Preaching fashion beatitudes.

Style is an enzyme that creates a mental shift
In red or not
Buffed arms or hot
– the hint of a threat of lust
In Manolo shoes or out
With or without the graces of Versace.

POEM: Moorings

During long days,
The shawl of needless worry
Wraps its legs around your fleshy heart
eclipsing the birth and death of solar systems,
the breathless horizon, and
Even the felt of stormclouds.

At my best, i possess tunnel vision
That bores directly into that beating ghost
That cups you like a ladle in its thirsty hands.

Have you dreamed of how proud I am of you?
How glad that we hitchhike that same glory road?

Our hearts are common moorings
Of thick wood buried feet deep in swift river
Currents that carry away what is impossible to hold
On to anyway - ineffable
as the song of migrating geese -
inexorable as melting snow and ice.
The target light is where I lie in wait for you.

POEM: The Secret

The longevity is in long quiet winters
& tsunami springs that never look like much
But turn you upside down just the same

The secret is that there is no secret
Drop your leaves right where you are
Grip your roots firm as a tulip poplar

This life has not been given to you
With the flickering ending of a cinema in mind.
It’s not how things work.

Throw what sharp snow remains against the wall
And burnish a path through it all.

POEM: Riversong

The valley slips into bridal white
patchy lacework above is
Ironed onto the ribbon that is flat light

Black crows like plump musical notes
On a staff sit on the bare arms of trees
And make a visual music.

Poetry gets at what is unspeakable
But only a photograph tames the sun
And shackles color, holding it fast.

The Seven Sisters have never looked so sleepy
Reluctant to raise its recalcitrant head
Against thick, smoky air.

The throat of the river closes
With the sludge of nascent ice
Winter silences a great song.

POEM: Holy

It’s holy because I was born in this place
It’s holy because of the red-meat of sacrifice
It’s holy for the hollow loss
It’s holy because we sanctify it with semen and vaginal juices
It’s holy because we bleed all over it
Because you cannot separate land from sky
Or the tumultuous blue-green of ocean from
The pink of a fresh born child
Or the gray of the grave

It’s holy because we say it is
Because of voice
Because of heart
And the savage wounding we endure.

O – it is holy without priests or prayer
Without faith or sight of any kind.

It’s holy because it commands silence.

POEM: Primitive Blessing

Home is a primitive gathering
Of fresh baked breads and gourmet hope
Where your story begins
Gather friends here
Simplify in peace and joy
Give thanks
Love more
Ask the Lord’s blessing
Ask for Angels
Be what you might have been
Take the shoes
And find your own way home.

POEM: If a Father's Wish Had Any Clout

if his love had any power
you would be whisked away over
wide oceans steepled mountains

these words,
these things,
these poems
these useless limbs, i know this now.
these are incense a cry sent up as curling smoke

but if you were the yellow moon
or in your room feeding me on your smile
or your spirit spread like jam into every corner
these thousand blooms

i would know how to be a father once again
my strength would flood my arms again
and i could maybe breathe again.

POEM: Kissing Corpses

The first time I saw a dead person was my grandpa - the German one.

His face was waxy and his body more clay than flesh.
When we went back to my grandmother's after the wake
I met my Uncle George – grandpa’s brother –
whom i had somehow never met before - sitting in the corner of the room
looking so much like my grandpa, drink in hand, animated as wind,
that I turned to stone.

For that one moment which I remember like light, I believed that when
people died they popped right back up like a cartoon character
whose head is flattened by an anvil and simply re-inflates to its original shape.

On the Italian side of my family there were many wakes
where I learned through breathing the air and eating the marinara
with clams that it was respectful to lean over a corpse,
to kiss it squarely on the forehead.

I made up rules about when I should kiss a corpse and when not to:
if it was someone I kissed while he was alive then I would kiss him at his wake.

The first corpse that I ever kissed was that of my Uncle Al.
I kissed him whenever we met.
He was a brusque Greek with a temper like frayed wire.
I kissed his chocolate skin, felt his white cactus stubble.

Even at the end of his life, I knew what that spongy kiss
on his cheek meant to him.
Even when it was behind the plastic of an oxygen mask,
lungs filling with fluid as he grew smaller and smaller.

It was like kissing marble.

I wondered if it was a safe thing to do but I did it anyway.
I knew that he would approve.

The most difficult corpses of all are babies.
How the leaden appearance of miniature coffins commands attention.
How complete everything looks, tiny as a doll house except
for that one glaring thing you know but cannot shake off:
there is a baby in there.

It is the realization of a razor.

When Conor died it crushed me like an empty paper cup, as wrinkled and small.
A balloon burst deep in my stomach and I thought I smelled the acid.

Teenagers are so full of shit which is why they appear so brave and bold
but underneath you know they are just quaking leaves.

But here in a bundle that resembled laundry, waxy,
more clay than flesh, dried fruit body, shriveled and narrow,
approaching the size of dust, sliding toward disappearance,

I took him for the child that he really was.

POEM: Do You Even Know How to Hold Her?

how you said the sadness of the springs
of the couch reminded you of me?

how the whole fruit of me was rotted,
from seed inside out accompanied by my favorite fruit flies
to seal the deal?

how we pledged allegiance to a flag
that could never fly stiff enough in the wind of all the shrapnel we let fly?

how the christmas lights we strung made shadows and that was all?

and how the dim halos you took in like a straw with teeth and hair
dwindled you down on the sharpstone to a point so fine that neither one of us
cared enough to blunt it?

POEM: My Heart is Missing

Have you seen it?
Wet and rouge

Damp as a sponge?
It slipped through slotted hands

Now, what will I do?
An orphan, I wished

I had met my grandmother, Josephine –
My heart was a birthday gift

Boxed and wrapped
In the memory of family.

I placed it into your fingers
Outstretched like whip coral.

I have searched for it everywhere.
But it has vanished

Without leaving so much
As a forwarding address.

POEM: Hardening Season

warm coffee
squirms
on my tongue
presses its nose against anorexic trees
skeletal remains
liquorice crows stapled to pale blue window dressing
of a cream cheese sky &
evening stars hold court and sway

everything balanced / everything at rest -
dusky bedroom light
the "i loved you" croaked voce sotto
this gravesite

bloom spring empathy for flower bulbs turned
below gray surfaces of the hardening season.

POEM: Musician

You don’t have to be a trainspotter.
Count Basie wasn’t a real count

He claims to be a textualist at heart.
Songs are just an emotional anchor.

In the Joe Loss Orchestra,
I’m a secret lemonade drinker.

If he could find a piano here he would play it with his toes until the girls
All take their clothes off.
Only two things matter: revenge and guilt.

It’s the lash and rum sodomy.
About love and lust, infidelity and betrayal
And all the tawdry pleasures and difficulties that arise out of them.

“It’s too bad for people who want to know, ‘cause they ain’t gonna know.
Songs don’t tell the truth.”

I’d bind his e-mails and give them to his publisher.

He’s tried to learn how to do it.
How to keep moving
Not out of perversity
Or some desire to impress

Avatar of English punk.
Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

His mind works a bit like one of those impossibly complicated
Pentagon PowerPoint presentations.

Music is more like water than a rhinoceros.
It doesn’t charge madly down one path.
It runs away in every direction.

It’s taking a long time to die, like big things do.
Believe me, it will remake itself.

POEM: Rock Star

He emerges in a shiny silk midnight-blue suit,
Black patent-leather Chelsea boots,
a blue shirt with white pin dots,
a black-and-blue polka-dot tie
And a Stetson Gambler

He darts into his tent stall and comes out in a different hat.
He is sucking on a lemon.
I sneak a peek at the mint-green Stetson,
Size 7 ½, with a blue-and-yellow band
Purchased at Meyer the Hatter in New Orleans.
Tucked into the sweatband., the card reads
“Like Hell It’s Yours.”

In a previous life
His duties included printing out invoices for the moustache
Waxes of the occasional Duchess who visited the company’s West End salon.
He spent a lot of time with just a big jar of instant coffee
and the first Clash album.

There was the “Look-at-me-I’ve-got-a-big-hairy-chest-and-a-big-willy” rock’n’roll
&
The “Fuck-me-I’m-so-sensitive-Jackson-Browne” school of seduction.

He eschewed both
How comical the whole knock-kneed stance seemed
To photographer & subject.

He is the king of the cameo.
Discouraging admiration and flirting with a controlled fall from grace.
Control is hard to come by in this feat of self-sabotage.

Playing fast and a touch rough
A set list taped to the soundboard had already been abandoned.
Remembering what his father always told him,
“Never, ever look up to a note. Always look down.”

Despite the gift of an old favorite,
A din of inattention spills past the soundboard toward the stage
The way rock’n’roll sounded in 1921.
It ended with him whistling into a full breeze of indifference
From the back of the room.

He narrowed his attention and shrunk the hall.
On a blond Gibson Super 400 guitar
Which he thrashes with little hands of concrete
Into a long, not always tonal discursion.
Arms outstretched at the finish,
Combining sincere appetite for applause
With half-ironic self congratulation
And a task master’s impatience for the guitar tech –

It was time to swap out the Gibson.

A honky tonk show
A honky tonk audience

The VIPs sheepish and beaming.
The where-you-froms burble on.
A mention of Spokane soon had him talking
About getting ill in a motor lodge in Boise, Idaho.

POEM: The Bloody Scratch of Me

The flesh beneath your fingernails,
Excavated for an autopsy of us,
Was all that you could not burn
Or give away to Goodwill –

The bloody scratch of me is what remains
Of the clods of our earthen bodies
and black & blue ocean limbs
Once smothered by ripe certainty.

We tripped into bed sheets and blood,
The disintegrated crumbs of who
We’d wished we had been -
Found long after we’d vanished into thin air and

That bloody scratch of me was
Left to decompose in memory.

POEM: Waiting for the Bathroom

the last of my four children has lain siege to the bathroom,
a bloody battle, with barricades and foxholes, replete with its own fog of war
and collateral damage
of depleted ozone and the hazmat yellow of a superfund site
defending the honor of young female adulthood about which I have no business
speculating.

what can she be doing in there?

how can it possibly take her this long to get ready for bed?

the house is stuffed with cotton. the others are gone, ghosts now wander the gray-black light of late nights, watery shadows of text books and dishes left in the sink now just a wish.

off at school or in their own place, off in their own time and pacing.

it wasn’t always like this.

there was once the quaking of Rock Band, the thump of rap and the jittery twang of world music in every corner of every room. There were the Scattergories and Buzzword marathons, all night Harry Potter and everlasting sleepless sleepovers.

but now my bathroom door is a monolith. singly massive.
for me, an anchor.
i breathe easier knowing she is here and mine and for now, in our bathroom doing whatever it is that 18 year old girls do before going to bed.

it’s her bedtime story to me. i listen and grow sleepy. i read a little longer, think how good it feels for her to be in that room and for me to swim against the
tide of this
arduous waiting

POEM: november

she flirts with me as
a mountain shadow that retreats
like ebbing tide. evening

is draining water a landscape
disrobed a curtain with sparrow-breath
and felt pad feet.

bellowing leaves can be heard well into the next valley,
steeped in dewy gold
express sunlight drip by shiny drip.

billowing ocher cracks air crisp as toast
with the sharp edge it needs to shatter
glassine darkness, to coax a cornfield’s wish

for summer a secret now divulged:
day can start in earnest, punch a clock
take all her allotted coffee-breaks.

but the start that is a streamstone.
smooth miracle held in raw palms of revelation.
she hikes her skirt just a bit

& asks if i am interested.

POEM: NIGHT

Night: that outlying gutter
Sealed in wax and put under glass
Consuming predatory drugs
Put on a butcher’s coat and wine drunk
From glasses of blood
In the shade of peek-a-boo poetry

It is ether or orgy for me
Guided by a logic of madness you could not understand.

Still, I have this recurring dream of me
In this monastic cell, drunk, chanting prayers
With the hint of a smile
Writing letters, eating mints and chopping wood
In perfect rhyme
Willing and able to build a fire for the godly purpose
Of keeping cold at bay.

POEM: Halloween

Sequined October is a match head struck
While we put on our masks
And do our best
To scare each other to death.

We stumble into ourselves drunk
With death
Walking dashed yellow lines
On snakeskin roads - Find
Day old candy
Hardened with ripped paper edges
Not quite as sweet as we’d remembered

Everything rummaged through
Old pillow cases
A beggar’s holiday
Where I hold out an empty sack
And wait for it to be filled.

POEM: Impossible

Impossible?

Let me explain impossible to you –
Me the bastard child of “Never In A Million Years” and
“When Hell Freezes Over” –

I am a child of the ’69 New York Mets.

I am an accidental cancer survivor.

I have impossible programmed into the speed dial of my cell phone.

I have touched its coasts, shore to shore
Planted a flag and put all ten toes into its vast Pacific Ocean.
And still, I count the white capped waves as among my most ardent admirers.

It is the astronaut bouncing on the pockmarked face of the moon
Swinging a golf club, reading from Genesis.

It is a July 4th firecracker that goes off in my hand
The sense of phantom fingers followed by the tingling and the shock.
Like the morning after my father’s death
When that, too, was impossible.

POEM: Wake Up!

I want to shake you by your shoulders
And pour the thick mud of steroid coffee into you

I see your stretching arms and your yawning mouth
I see your slitty eyes, rub out the eye goop with a fat twisting fist!

In the ambient light of goldenrod trees
I want to rustle you from your lolling

Green pastures, your dewy wet dreams
From insomnolent harvest moonlight.

Get up and eat some steel cut oats
And multigrain toast with fresh preserves.

Put on your loudest rock’n’roll and Q-tip your ears
So not a decibel is lost over the silence of awakening.

And quit creeping into the broadest of daylight
It does not become you and is more than just a little creepy.

POEM: On the Serengeti Plains of New England, Searching for El Dorado

I sit in the company of working class potatoes and flamboyant onions that are just so full of themselves amid grandmotherly faces of piebald gourds
there is a pride of cartoonish mums maned with purples, pinks and rusts
which makes these flowery man-eaters seem to growl.

They wince with every tendril-killing frost that coats shadows like white mold
bear witness to this nub of autumn as an oil slick of night seeps onto azure fields above.
The lost gold of conquistadors rolls off its table edges into a leaden dark.

Daylight falls without an ounce of grace unable to walk that flimsy scar horizon like a tightrope any longer.

POEM: Sonoma Blues

Can you sit in luxurious quiet?
  Can the noise fall into you
    Down the deep hole that is you -
       Spreading outward, in ever
          Flattening ripples until it is

                                                          No more?

Can pebbles raked carefully
Into rows

Straight as your desire
Take on the razor edge

That you have sought
So long?

POEM: Renga

Snow covered trees reach
Up with meaty muscled arms -
Bones replete with flesh

Spackled gray - craning shoulders
That hold up the sky.

In razor water,
Those gray cranes stand tall crossing
Primal horizon -

An eastern cross in braised light
The purple of blood.

Bruised round purple fruit -
As kisses go, this one comes
Close to violence,

Tender sunrise, slips its bonds –
This birthday balloon!

Rolling, I cannot
Escape the laughter of day
Or sheltering clouds.

My sleep, shrouded in felt fog,
Holds open its hands

As parallel lines
Like rails as long as dreaming,
Gives off diamond tones -

Shards of bright awakenings -
These milky jet streams.

POEM: Soft

I understand how hard things run this world
And how it is crucial to have the heart of a lion –
But sometimes we must have softness drip into
Our lives like fresh brewed coffee, too – and with the same aroma.

We need to give away the sharp edges
And avoid the need for uncommon bravery.
To be open to all sorts of possibility
We must first give permission – for
Giving in and up are two entirely different things.

But even giving up is not a permanent choice.

The permafrost of our lives always
Gives way to spongy mud
And the sound of the spirit is the sound of water:
Rambling and aimless and a little mad,
Relentless and playful – and slightly sad.

POEM: Habit

Smash habit into shards of “what-the-fuck?”
We are high priests of some ancient religion
Performing with mechanical grace.
Color is not reflected light,
As we were taught in school.
It is shells splintered against coral reef
That wash up as pink sand.

Habit is that piece of pulverized living
We allow to wash up onto our beachheads.

POEM: Things That I Have Never Known Before

Everything
Humid air can hold -
Humming road sounds
Sounding road songs,
Grimacing clouds
The scent of thunder
Hunting mountains that roll
Over horizon, a texture of cotton.

Everything
I know -
Voice of that familiar face
In pointillist crowds –
The feel of lostness
To touch slippery and murky –
Smooth as how cranes skulk above in flight.

Everything points to things I have never known before.

POEM: Trust

Trust the things that tickle you -
That gently brush up against your leg
Trust whispers of wind that cools you
To carry your name -.
Trust clouds that hold rain and
Offer shade.
Trust the things you will never touch.

POEM: Flight

Can i float?
Loop through the gilt edged leaves -
Balanced on giving branch
That bends so worried an arch -

Will you swoop, too?
Will you follow
Into stillness - is a challenge -
The descent about
The open wingspan, wide and loud -
Will the curve of you give
Lift enough to rise -
Can you swoop
Comma shaped -into dimming light
Just behind me?

POEM: Shadow

There is an outline of myself
A shadow of what always escapes me
About myself
Not good or evil, really.
Unknowable parts that move,
From which spirit ebbs and flows
Into the world then edging back,
Then into the world once again.
Parts that point to a deep, deep well
Parts immersed in untelling black.

POEM: Morning As A Flag of Change

The way morning, as it appears, unassuming.
The way it sees me with freshest eyes.
The courageous shades of blue.
The way cool air become grateful prayer.
The playful pair of mourning doves.
The flint-spark of fire on blackbirds’ wings.
The yawning cornflower face of chicory.
The industry of a garden spider and
The web that glistens in muted light.
The coffee that soothes the jangled morning.
The freedom to be so alone.
The silence that rubs cat-like against me.
The chance to change once again.

POEM: The Poetry That Is A Church (Version 1)

Among the faithful and the doubters,
In the presence of loyal sons
And shameful prodigals alike -
Scrub congregants fresh with tears of baptism –
A promise from the searching for the Living Christ
Like a lighthouse that calls out “home, home”
Out into bottomless black fog that is the night.
This is a contract of hope written
By the contact of family;
By the beat and the rhyme
Of the poem that is a church.
Recite a prayer: it is incense
Rising like returning souls -
It is a whisper that longs for the union
That lies deep in the mud of everyone.
Let us fast hold tight each other’s hand
That we may each account for one another:
Hold what is sacramental near as words -
Comprised of saliva and breath, of mind and soul.
This world sparkles so when viewed
Through her stained glass of hope, so blue
Or the mystic fire, the red of blood, the sacred and true

POEM: I Want To Lasso The Hearts of Everyone

I want to lasso the hearts of everyone
and bind them together
i want to tie them up into one giant organ
that pumps kindness into thin air.
how hard it is sometimes just to smile.

i carry shells of the ocean in my pocket
just to remind me where I am from:
full of brine and sand, relentless as wind.

POEM: The World as a Prey Animal

Whose eyes glare out at me from the brush?
Whose hot breath keeps time with mine and hopes for blood?
Whose very being-distinct from my own
Wishes me dead, as food alone?
As a victory kill in the glorious hunt?

Let me sleep tonight, sacrifice that I am.
Let me sleep tonight as a lamb in the wild.
In grasses hidden, where destiny thrives,
In chaos neatly tucked away in ordinary lives.

POEM: Read Me

Read me,
When the lines between us fade,
When memory thin as morning light
And voices cool as shade
Carry promise of distant thunder,
When all that remains is the cicada song,
Unabashed and unable to fathom summer’s end.

POEM: The Poetry That Is A Church (Version 2)

Let loose a prayer for anything and like incense it rises, a returning soul
Longing for the union that hides in the mud of us all.
Let us hold fast each other’s hands and account each one for the other.
Hold the sacramental deep like the air in our lungs,
Or the steely resolve of a wedding vow
Or the soft goodbye over a coffin -

Like a lighthouse, the Living Christ calls out in a lovely lonely baritone - “home, home”
Into the black fog that faith can sometimes be. A contract is scratched
Onto our fleshy hearts, by the beat and rhyme of the poetry that is a church.
This world so sparkles when viewed through her stained glass trust, so blue -
Or when lit by mystic fires, the red of blood, of what embraces and what is true

POEM: When You Meet A Grieving Friend

When you meet
A grieving friend
Be like pine.
Offer her
Sturdy wooden
Presence - open
Arms like feathers -
Sway and creak -
Misery
Dances for her.
Cry your fresh,
Sweet sap –
Inch roots deeper
Into earth –
Let your heart shoot
A tendril
Toward open space –
Hold fast the earth
She cannot find
No matter what -
Be anchor,
Let her find
Home in rough
Quiet bark
That is an embrace.

Letter To Olivia

December 4, 2009

To my dear Goddaughter, Olivia:

By now, I am guessing that you think your parents know absolutely nothing about anything. This is perfectly normal.

You are feeling full and vital and able to do anything, right now. If your parents have done their jobs right, you should feel capable of doing anything you set your mind to.

Revel in that feeling! Act on it!

You will never get from any other person the kind of unconditional love that your Mom and Dad have for you. No one – no other man or woman – will love you as much as they do – hard as that may be to believe from time to time.

At 18, you probably have already learned that the world can be a cruel place.

You will find others who will go out of their way to make you hate them. No matter what others do or say to you, no matter how hard they try to make you hate them, how mean they are to you, how badly they behave towards you –you will always have the capacity to love them. This is deep within you and is as infinite as space. It is always, always, always your choice to love, to forgive, and no one can ever take that away, or diminish your capacity to love even more fully.

All the great faiths of this world point to the same sacred source of life for their strength. I pray in time you will recognize this more and more and in turn, realize your kinship with the whole world. May you expand all your worship experiences and find God in each breath of every living being on this planet. May you find God in the whispering winds, as Ezekiel did.

Embrace the mysticism of your faith, Olivia, and never be ashamed to proclaim that your greatest faith is often in things that are not explainable at all, except in the quiet whispers of your own heart. It is what we don’t see but still experience that is most often truest.

Take time at college to cultivate a habit of solitude, for it will serve you well in this culture that thrives on distraction and noise. It will bring you peace and perspective. Never stop learning. Never stop moving, never stop trying to discover the many facets of who you are.

Pray constantly and learn that prayer is not just uttering words, but can be the act of listening too: to a friend in need, to yourself. Be forgiving to yourself first and foremost. It will be easier to forgive others. You have a pure heart and no amount of wrong-doing will ever change that.

Have fun. Make lots of mistakes. Admit when you are wrong. Never be afraid to laugh at yourself. Know that even the hurtful times that will come are important too, and you should not avoid them, just because they hurt. (You will learn the most about yourself!)

Nothing remains the same – neither the good times, nor the bad. Savor the sadness in that fact, but enjoy its virtue as well and remember this when times are bad.

It is only through serving others that you will find out who you really are.
Bring love fully into this world for that is what you were made for. You are a miracle – made in love to bring love and light into this world.

Follow your heart in all things and you will never be disappointed. You may get hurt, but you will never be disappointed. Learn that being lonely is not the great enemy people will suggest to you that it is. Know that loneliness is nothing more than a hunger to find God, however you perceive him or her to be.

Be faithful to your friends and family and also to yourself. Protect those who are weaker than yourself. Be honest, always, hard as that is, but always be compassionate for others and for yourself.

Know that you are so very important.

Befriend the scared and uncertain parts of you. Love the brash and the loud, the shy and the quiet parts of you. Remember to dance as often as you can. Sing constantly.

Always forgive. Always. No exceptions.

I pray that when you read this, you will feel that you have so much to be grateful for. Be grateful for each morning – the fact that the sun rises, we wake, and we greet the daylight is nothing short of a miracle.

Love always,
Your Goddfather,
Uncle Mike

POEM: At Rest, From A Hammock: On The First Warm Day of Spring

I breathe freedom as deeply as air
While brush tips of swaying birch trees move
To a melodic voice of spring breezes.
Can every creature, just now climbing
Out from its burrows’ damp confines –
Can every bud that holds the tension
Of that first moment of opening –
Can every wasp that preens itself in
Tender warm light, feel the potential
That a day – a simple day - might hold
Out in the palms of open hands -
A gentle gift to every one of us?