How much layering can be excised
The day trembles with conjecture
He troubles each casual statement
With a doubt, a mistrust
Of what was said by/to you
He dusts off phrases like artifacts
To be cataloged then placed
Piece by piece into a context
He surmises is not his own
An objective exegesis of subjective
Encounters he continues to pretend
The conversation occurs without
His being a party to what was
As if he was not a part of his world
(July 2011)
He was caught in his thoughts
A mobius strip treadmill
A reconfirmation of beliefs
Without the effort of questions
He walked through his life
Opening doors without entering
Worried by the chance
That change might be change
The obvious was never as clear
As others made it out to be
He stumbled into walls he built
Each brick laid firmly into mind
He danced in boots made of lead
To a music he thought he heard
(July 2011)
With finality,
His last breath left with a gasp:
I shut his dead eyes.
(July 2011)
She traces a pattern in the conversation,
Troubling each nuance’s intricacies.
There is always a way into the labyrinth,
Some key cut in what they say,
A phrase coalesced into a symbol
Through which meaning can be extracted.
Perhaps the way he leaned into her door
When he said those things to her today:
So innocuous, casual in their importance,
As if anything accidental can be so simple.
Did he only mean what he said that time
Or was there more? Or perhaps is there
More resonance in her interpretation
Than can be read upon this page?
(July 2011)
he holds out his hand
to uninterrupted blue
no blemish of rain
(July 2011)
I wonder quite often how these poets get away with their rambles
Pickup an off the cuff kind of élan slip it on like a watch band
Twist the strap with a self-deprecating smirk just to let you know
Mon frere with a wink that the façade is still within your grasp if not those
Others so self aware to catch the irony a simple twist of fate
As it were even if allusions are passé modern in this post after world
We live in if not then at least around in a peripheral bourgeois manner
For god knows since no one else can that we have to have something
To react toward and the rich don’t care anymore if ever and the poor often
Are such a bore what with having to explain all of the jokes
It’s easier to talk to yourself or in this case myself when no one understands
How cruelty can be funny especially when gnawing on your own flesh
(started circa 2006, completed July 2011)
Early in the evening
On edge as usual
I walk in the park
A partial moon rising
I lift my arms
A simple dance
My edges dissolve
Into the night sky
No center point
Just fractured centers
All equidistant
From an expanding edge
(July 2011, extracted from notes circa 2006)
soft beneath my touch
the petals almost slick
as I run my fingers
across their surface
i bury my nose into
their scent drinking in
the odor like a balm
to my tired senses
i wish that I too
like the hummingbird
could flutter my tongue
deep into the flower’s heart
and be enveloped in
the primal fury of love
(June 2011)
I’m drowning in metaphor, the words flow
Like water breaching tightly-packed sandbags
Flooding my thoughts with too much to say and
Not enough talent to make them cohere.
Beneath these words I hide myself from you
Too embarrassed or bashful to speak plain
I float up yet another abstraction
Praying for a transformative response.
When I finally break through the surface,
Breathe in the cool life in great gasping gulps,
Coughing out my silent lungs to the air,
my focus follows the flow of your mind.
In waves I am lifted enough to see
The momentary salvation of land.
(June 2011)
the heat whips the trees
shade pants crisply beneath leaves
not much chance of change
a sharp demarcation
between me and you
as if a copula
is enough of a word
to engender a metaphor
this is not this
but yet it is
grammatically independent
but phonologically dependent
on another word
my meaning depends
upon you
(June 2011)
by
“Wow, I felt like I just entered a black hole,” she said.
In open air beneath the sun
I open my mouth and speak
What words I can into silence
Stripped of small talk and idle chatter
My speech forms its own horizon
Abutting up against your silence
Between all the stances I can take
Amid the ambiguity of reception
Falls a monolithic silence
All my lonely lamentations
All my whispered secrets
Mean nothing to the silence
All my words and talk
All my confessions of love
Mean nothing to the silence
(June 2011)
I desire to dance
arms raised
to the stars
praising the night;
instead,
I talk to walls:
my voice
echoes the space
I pace between.
(June 2011)
by
orderly rows of trees
lie fallow
after the harvest
apples full-red and crisp
fell alongside others
some green some gnarled
i tend to the trees
lopping old limbs
a necessary pruning
there is always more
than the season allows
the trees are here now
the fruit will grow
despite ourselves
the work remains
(June 2011)
“a responsibility to the trace of the other”
–Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
you move through your day,
like a bird through branches
bending between the briars,
oblivious to the consternations
of others as they talk around you
you remain caught up in
the net of your abstractions
“the absolute alterity” of everything:
colleagues, clients, trees,
squirrels, clouds shaped and
dispersed across an endless sky,
the reduction of the world
to your purview, the horror
that what you see is you
(May 2011)
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