Assembly Required

The flowering trees have resumed their monopoly.

They get by on their good looks and the rain.

Being full of shit is no handicap in politics.  Apparently.

If you are finished, I will eat the rest of your meatballs.

This thing we are about to do cannot be rushed.

Who “we” are is not your concern.

April is the poetry month, or the Black History month.

All history is black.  (I knew you were going to say that.)

How much longer before the poetry starts?

Of all the days of the year, you had to pick this one.

You can savor every morsel, or shove it all in your mouth.

One is not terribly happy with the results.

The critical voices are circling with their indifference.

The cruelest one can’t even be bothered.

If you have somewhere else to be, this would be the right time.

I am a person only when I am personified by others.

Sorry to keep you waiting.  It won’t be long now.

I love you more than glossolalia.

Everything returns only intensified and wilder.

The authorities are protecting us from others like themselves.

One corporation may hide another.  Thanks, Kenneth.

A slight pressure to cohere is detectable now.

The page is not the surface, the rhythm is.

The intervals of silence between sentences is growing longer now.

This poem is not on any schedule.

There has never been any more consistency than there is now.

A change in rhythm is a change of surfaces.

Cherry tomatoes, white beans, fresh basil, balsamic vinegar.

There are lines in this poem some readers may find stupid.

Beware of your own stupidity, Cocteau said.

A line is written in the air by a jet plane.

We have been floating down the river of the afternoon.

The longer this poem takes, the more unwieldy it becomes.

It is like speaking when no one is listening.

Meanwhile a spy satellite is reading over your shoulder.

Every line is unique and has emotional content.

I’ve spent a long time learning how to construct them.

You've got to break the rules to know them.
The past does not, will not, nor ever did resemble the future.

This poem is greater than the sum of its critics.

If you are still here, kiss me!

Zinc Skies

Molten thoughts disappear under the sidewalk

Where the pressure of progress tamps it all down

Something pulls a hamstring a comet unquenchable

A bundle of cracks like smiles in the ice

Your mouth pent up against the glass

When there is nothing left there is still there

Gazing into itself whence the fold or the crack

With the thumb of dawn poking out

And everything returns only intensified and wilder

If that is conceivable to lovers

Amazed by the stupid things that replace you
Somewhere beyond the last filling station

In the province of disappear

The withering honey of reality
The bride of the city one hand around your throat

Canton

Who fixes the machines

when they are buried in the deep

dark ground? The night, the train

is endless another unbroken

line that can never stop long enough

to read the faces in the windows

like fingers smoothing down the folds

of a coat feeling the weft

and wanting to go deeper,

or a drop of water, alone,

at the top of a tower of glass.

Let’s not name the ways

our hands have touched the dirt today.

I’d rather focus on the grass,

the Chinese tea and not the past.

Theory of Travel

I am the angel of speed !

My instruments—jets, wheels, and walking sticks !

The boy with the bright blue jacket soaks his shoes in the surf

The woods were already cut when he got there

Beyond them the domes of the capital rise against the evening sun

He follows the red highway to arrive at a closed hotel

As a piano established in the Himalayas

Hollows out the canyon of its presence,

A train curving along the mountain’s edge

Climbs up above the cloud-habitats of men.

She had left herself and all of him behind

For where she was not likely to be found:

“If I could demolish the rules and keep the tradition,”

She said, “romantic and melancholic and austere,

Pieces that would be handed down, like a shawl,

To escape the repetitions of afternoon,

Mechanical thought, the habitudes of house

And home.”  The widow floating on the lake

Viewed the orchards and terraces of Ko.

My angel, my soul, my hypocrite

Imagine the luxury and languor of travelling first-class

In leather seats that recline into a chaise longue

Espresso exported from Peru to Venice

The latest financial news printed on pink paper

White burgundy black velvet blankets

Sleepy cigarettes, white chocolates that burn the throat

When privacy is optimal

You embrace me like a viola da gamba

Glancing around the cabin as we break the sound barrier

Here everything is decadence and pleasure

Repose, extravagance, and leisure

We notice on the ferry bound for Naxos

The color of the sea, when one looks straight down

And not from a distance across its beveled planes

It is as the poet says, not green, not blue

I pluck you like a sheep

From habits where you sleep,

Of body and of soul,

(The last, more powerful)

To keep you clean and clear

Of useless care and fear.

I might send you on the road

To lighten up your load—

Or plop you down a chair

So you may travel there.

There Is No Recipe

The poetry of this life is the clarity of this life

The elevation and the elegance of it

The clear seeing into it—which is also transport

It is beyond the truth, not tricked

Reduced, as a sauce is, intensified

One can construct it out of anything

Cancer as bright as conception, all assembled

In freedom, jinxed, and clear

A Veil of Glass

We drift through the chatter of advertisement.

The images are thicker than the snow and cold.

The fruits of our labor are plucked by others

As we plucked them from others.

We are proudly bursting with shame

And now is never the time to unlock it.

Did our eyes invent the night and the stars?
Some part of our innermost selves erased them.

If one could cease thinking, time would stop.

Conversely, time is the extermination of thought.

When all time was spent, there remained a final thought.

We ride its echo like the crest of a wave.

This poem arrived here against the odds,

Escaping the scrutiny of the mind and the taste

Of others who like to put their hands on things.

I am at a loss to write the next words

And yet they come from an infinite converse

With disembodied spirits we call books.

We babel the dialects of God, whose existence,

Like language, in some sense depends on us while we live,

Yet in another, obscurer way hands us a deathless irony.

These thoughts came to me one evening.

I have no way of knowing if they are true.

So a veil of glass divides

So it is a glass veil that divides

So it is a veil of glass divides

Thus a veil of glass

Thus it is a veil of glass divides

Scissiparity

 division of division of division of division of division of...

one

                  branching

                                            into another

                            we come

                            in

ex-

perience                                                                     of se

                                -paration

                                                                  borne

                     between

                              a branching

(The mystery of the origin of life as it is related in mythology or the beliefs of the world’s major religions may be cast as the following problem:  how can something come from nothing?  Or rather, how can life come from death, or at least nonlife?)

                                                I and this mystery here we stand

                              above,                                                           below

beyond                                                 behind

“no name no tongue has soiled it”

                                                                  the mind / the spirit

                                         leaps!   to hold it, to behold it

HOWEVER,

The animate and the inanimate are not so logically discrete as we might like to think.  
E.g. the virus.

Why should death be the defining experience of humanity?

1. because it is universal?

2. because it causes the ego pain?

                                                                              fuck that

A collision of molecules brought you into being,

                                you in-process you

a process never present to itself as complete

                                            because,

                                            completed, it no longer           is

itself

                                                                    What molecule(s)

                              will you meet

                              that stop

                                                                           the becoming you

that you are?

AND IF (ah, the beauty of “if”)

                                                        you bumped into

other

             molecules?

                                                        (“Hey Mikey!  He likes it!”)

AND YES (good old “yes”)

the bird, the wind, the wave,                       the star, the clock

The mysterious                                   “and”

            the mysterious    “yes”             &            “earth”

                                                       a plural of parts

in

                                -finity

part AND part

                     night AND day

                                            pain AND joy

bbbbbbbbbbbbbb

               empty of unity

                                              AND

                                                            empty of transcendence

                        

                                     Yes!