A Notebook – Since 2007
Those words that come at night wash
swim the room like pieces of litter
flowing down a gutter in rainfall
cooling the street and gloom.
Then come the slow-moving
two-wheeled wheelbarrows
pulled by a pair of worker
words pulling like tugs
the barges of raw sense:
to to wit
to to whom
to to why
to to reason
of of love
in in fear
two by two
far and near.
Day ends with a walk to sleep,
ends again in the sober reality
of celestial shade, one awakes
in the dark and quiet, too early
to get out of bed, too late
to start some new episode
on the television or telephone,
and this is when one turns
to paper and words seep
out shy and uncertain fearful
like little furry animals searching
the brambles for food and drink
day’s fire now cool ashen,
and while certainly somewhere
in the city of night madness
drones on, an asocial tinnitus,
here in the paper we find
we can hear the pencil’s breeze
and feel the bluish-gray lead lighten.
the Word wears
nose and mouth
meaning mask
less it spread
or breathe in
woe’s poison
atmosphere
once there was
full of tears
all dried out
sand aura
current sense
dates from the
great drought age
when one stopped
drinking and
puttin’ on
the old style
no agony
approaches
nor reproaches.
What’s written by candle in yr cave
won’t be read for eons by anyone,
no views, no visitors, no likes, no
comments, until erelong perchance
some fair spelunker crawling
horizontally across the buried
rocks of yr commas, not too deep,
discovers yr degraded predicament,
etiolated undertaking to connect
images in the dark of creatures
now extinct, spellings archaic,
broken syntax of yr past, and finds
yr crushed crumpet of a skull
buried like a period at the end
of yr tunnel up against a wall,
a scurvy potation spilled betwixt.
If you fall into a round bottle,
it’s hard to climb back out.
Some fall from windows, heli-
copters, or love, uncapped
and uncorked, go with the flow.
Others fall into formation,
couplets on the go and make
do with whom or what
they find out or in line
falling in or falling out.
The stars will blow out they say
tho none have seen one up close
or this far away for that matter.
And for now the center still holds
the “deep heart’s core” burns on
of course tempered with age.
The tool worn and bent its handle
once forged so hot to the touch
now almost cold the closer you come.
The further astray and adrift
solo in space in your egg shaped
spiral lost in your milky way.
Why nine chains to the moon?
Because things arranged in threes
allow a mysterious symmetry.
He stood beneath a bank of trees
near the beach of a green spring
the wily busker taking deposits
of fruit in his cowpoke hat basket
a few choice purple cherries
a couple of greenbacks
and a nugget of fool’s gold.
He sang of broken hearts
paper torn into many pieces
litter along the roadway
how love collects like dust
up against the bent guardrails
that’s my heart in pennies
he sang out on the highway.
He worries the strings of his guitar
with his bent wire fingers
flap slaps the hook smacks the box
shapes his fretful music
the earth wants a cover
creeping vines and grasses
if any have many piled carpets.
Yes, lend an ear or
if you can’t hear
a hand everyone
needs help some
day sooner or later.
A great funnel follows
this big bang spiral
the universe a canal
of turns and twists
through a milky orifice.
The birds play the leads
the melodies while the trees
rhythm leaves in the wind
as I wile away the evening
dressed in hearing aids.
More than sound is here
to hear is to feel motion
an eyelid angel’s kiss
across the baby’s lanugo
can you hear this?
For days on end we go without
disavow our yielding yellows
surrender calls our voices
You knew what was coming
The abyss, an abyss anyway
I often want to share mine
with you but then I forget
your name your hands
Every morning now I finish
flex the memory stretch
credulity as they say no
more evidence than an empty
basement the attic too
the whole house spotless
not a speckle or a flake
of what used to take place
the romp stomp jerkings
the peaceful long sleeps
no need to hark but now
lend an ear or a hand.
I come from the east unto the west
you from the west unto the east
any day now, any day now
maybe we’ll meet.
West light floods the east woods
in the evening when the birds sing
released from their rampant pens
to frolic in the air like photons.
Elementary, my dear Watson,
east is west and west is east
when the perigee syzygy
pink flower supermoon casts
its widespread net over all
the people listening at once
searching the sky for a message
from the west unto the east.
I was waiting for Epiphany
when a crow painted me
silver and black
like a wet Cadillac
The paint a moist paste
white and yellow and blue
with what hue did she
pass her message to me
The next time I saw Epiphany
she preferred not to know me
but I knew the crow in her
parting designed my destiny.
The Coming of the Toads 