“hope would be hope for the wrong thing”
T.S. Eliot
I wait to be reborn
in this fallow ground.
Beneath my skin,
my bones hang heavy.
They ache for release.
The muscles tighten
like wire at my neck,
etching a tense smile
across dried flesh.
My lungs grow thick
in earth’s dark blood.
I cannot breathe.
(March 22, 2022)
by
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.
-Emerson, Circles
I cannot focus
enough to see
the edges; nor trace
the slow bend in
the periphery,
horizon’s
vanishing point.
I step forward,
then back ; turn circles,
almost a dance;
it comes no nearer
still.
by
Each night
the story lies
in the embers
burning low
through our skin.
One hears more,
as in sleep,
than the tale
crackling
on the grate.
By morning,
we wake
to a stranger
world where
difference echoes
in our whispers
like curls of smoke
across ash.
(March 16, 2022)
by
“In the end one experiences only oneself.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
the old sage asks as he dies:
who has my vision
—my essential mysteries—
this blind donkey braying
my words off-key?
or the old drunk poet
who renamed himself—
the dream bordello—
then night after night
thirsted for more than water?
(March 6, 2022)
He tries to trace the shadow
his pen makes on the page
as he writes. It keeps moving,
changing shapes as if it has
a will of its own, an agency
beyond the word’s ability
to slip next to each other;
to re-inscribe the future
into familiar patterns
easy enough to follow
without thinking too much
for at least one more day.
(February 23, 2022)
by
I am as inconsequential
as a joke told late at night
as the party is breaking up,
and I am left alone
on the couch, smoking a cigarette,
with the last sip of wine
from someone else’s glass.
(February 23, 2022)
“a small part of the pantomime”
Wallace Stevens
When you gesture as you walk
alone talking to yourself
dismissive and emphatic;
or when you catch yourself
thinking someone waved to you,
but you were just in the way;
or when you sweep up all
the shards of memory which remain,
and blood slips from your fingers
in small calligraphic swaths.
(February 20, 2022)
by
If we only watch
Disney movies—
I said to my film class
through the little Zoom boxes—-
I’ll have to kill myself.
A mother overheard, (you know- Covid),
and wrote the principal
to complain.
Engels wrote:
the tool changes
the worker:
My face melts,
like cotton candy in water.
(February 16, 2022)
I dance across broken ground
with what little grace I have,
picking out patterns in my dreams
as if connecting the stars
to something larger than themselves.
I cannot find my balance:
I wobble to the left, to the right
like a top about to fall—-
with all directions tossed
into the periphery like ice.
Nor can I stand still enough
to learn the silence beneath
the inexorable chatter
clattering about my skull
like bones from a wooden cup.
(February 15, 2022)
by
Emptiness allows entrance and exit
from a space, through a space,
into yet another emptiness.
Walls resist the outside,
hold the inside together,
to create a space. We are
our walls, tracing our lives
with soft fingers searching
for a space to cross through
into something other
than here, like hermit crabs
disparate for a new shell.
(February 4, 2022)
Too many more days to be wished away
with a casual disregard tonight
for me to find comfort in their going.
Too much of a coward to let things go,
I tuck all my worries in my pockets
tightly folded like origami crows.
There are no portents hiding in the stars,
no mysteries to be defined in blood,
no plodding footsteps moving down the hall.
It would be easier to go along,
to do what is expected at my age,
but I do not know what that even means.
I do not know what to do any more;
so, I turn off the light and go to bed.
January 26, 2022)
Along a fire’s periphery, I speak
into residual silence where my words
are heard beneath darker whispers,
and all I desire dissolves into effluent
chatter like the staccato gossip of gulls
gliding near the sea’s vague edge.
As within this morning’s warmth
nestled in tangled bed sheets draped
against our bodies, our words take
shape against the shape of each other’s,
forming, like smoke, loose patterns
which trail behind in subvocal trains.
(January 24, 2022)
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