“..truth is often nothing more than meaning”
—Trinh T. Minh-ha
I mean–
what can I say,
you know?
I’m just talking,
to myself.
You know
what I mean?
I imagine you
do, since
I hear what
you’re saying–
You understand
what I mean?
(November 13, 2018)
Category: truth
sculpture
“chiseller of inaccuracies”
–Fernando Pessoa
I would not speak
if I knew what to say.
There would be no need
to form words around
an unrealized dream.
It is the unsaid
which must be given
shape; which calls us
from its shapeless dark
to speak into existence
what we cannot know.
Yet, I know so little
about so much, I must
speak about it all.
I start where I am
which is always here.
First, I must listen,
discern the shapes
before I can speak.
My words carve out
what is there
from what is not
as the silence unfolds
a new kind of truth.
(August 23, 2018)
Perpetual Reinterpretation Machine
It is familiar enough
to be familiar, but no
more: a scratch in the dark
which stops when you stop
to listen to what you think
is a sound somewhere nearby,
but it’s just you thinking
in the silence to the dark.
It’s absence breathes heavily
as if aroused with metaphor
still clinging to its half-formed kiss.
It waits on memory to form
a shape which conforms to desire’s
simple reduction to a truth.
(August 17, 2018)
Cleave
the carapaces begin
to fall away
in a clatter
of old consciousness;
I do not know
what will be left
beyond this moment
I walk through
secrets are
an inauspicious
start and must
divulge their hold
on the heart
to transform us all
(July 18, 2018)
sedition
mostly now, I stay at home
rarely driving farther than work
or to a nearby market
for the night’s dinner
tomorrow, I travel alone
two thousand miles from home
to meet with other teachers
with other poets to talk
about poetry and its teaching
in an age of blatant lies
(July 8, 2018)
return
we have been here before:
the muck,
the blood,
the clarity
of violence
in the word’s
brutality,
the complicity
with death
(April 1, 2018)
Way of Knowing
a gathering of fears
like strands of mist
collected to a fog
to drape the landscape grey
these are my intuitions
the way I move the dark
my hand outstretched
as if looking for a friend
in an incomplete gesture
toward a familiar stranger
yes it is her wait but no
then I quickly look away
these are my truths
vaguely concrete
(March 24, 2018)
