(it was only your)

It was only your gaze
Gazing at mine
It was only my supreme
Confidence that made me
Certain of the stars
That were somehow there
Though I couldn’t see them
And when I could
So thick in the mountain sky
So many so close so far and so bright
I was comforted
And terrified
It was a knowledge
The children who accompanied me
With their colorful garlands
Did not expect
Four of them, two young men
And four young women
Crowned one another with flowers
Laughing in an English copse
In the English way
How powerful frightened horses are
And how sad the self-important old men
With their singing words that go north or south
Of their own accord
And fall dashed into disappointed heaps
But spring comes even to villains in their villas
As to the destitute on steroids
I don’t need insight, I need
The accursed share and to discover the hollow feeling
In my hair that comes with all perception
In a perception-resistant world
Do not stake your life on an idea
No matter how true it may be
Or false
The blame for our lost evening and weekend
Lies with evolution
I am no scientist
But I am no stranger to fact
The world hits you all at once
Like a blast of hot air from a suddenly opened furnace
Functionality isn’t fun

(in primal faith)

In primal faith
Promises are made
Even before there’s a world
In which to make them
So disappointment is primal
As soon as one speaks to another
The unspoken promises kick in
And their force perfumes
The very air that facilitates speech
The mother’s womb
Is a promise to the child
That she will belong
The sky a promise
That it will not fall, that its air
Can be breathed
The senses
Promise a world in which to live
The good person
Finds the good where she looks for it
Because she expects to find it there
For it was promised
Expecting is the mind’s great force
Requiring many revisions
In blasphemous solitude
That underlies and undermines
The social world
Whose details are always disputed

(take death)

Take death out for a walk, folks
Not on a leash but at the end of a thin thread
Outsource yourself to your friends
Who will do a better job of loving you than you ever could
They say life is brief; that
Depends on where you’re standing
How you count from where you stand
When you fall the most
Complicated things remain simple
When you don’t complicate them
And when language retains
Its linear tendency
Of subjects in control of verbs acting on nouns
With occasional modifiers
That you can take or leave
What’s the world outside your window
If not a spectacle colored by your tears
Produced by the years of torture
You’ve undergone pretending
Against the odds
To be yourself
What if that world and that sense
Too of your having lived this long
And no longer
On a timeframe that spans
Only so far and in one direction
Were a feat of sleight of hand
A party trick, an unattainable brush
With fate a handshake among stars
That died long ago
And become visible only now
When you sit at a table among tables of other eaters
Who’s to say what truly occurs
It’s an embarrassment to eat in public
To be bearably alive in this in-between condition

(I can’t be found)

I can’t be found anywhere near here
Notice that I’m a figment of Marx, of Freud, of Dōgen, of Derrida
I’m a living example of Hegel saying history is going somewhere
It’s inevitable
The goal of history is full self-consciousness
For those who mistake themselves for material objects
I love to work with my hands
Though I’ve never done that
I wait for the next thing
That comes after this thing
When I am alone, many people suddenly appear in my midst
But none of them offer sestinas
They breach the wall
And next in line should come forward
What kind of meat shall you eat?
Why part with something of value
When you can cut them off at the pass
Dampness is everywhere; the small eye scans
It’s an epidemic of frightening proportions
I’m just as dismayed as you are
But what can I do; I’ll still be alive in the morning
I’m killing it; I’m losing it
The thread; look at all I am
Accomplishing even now as my hands are tied
It’s as if my intentions had got the beast of me
I ought to be asleep by now but I’m not, I’m asleep
Yes, I feel very well rested at this vanishing
Point that provides perspective
Look, why let the world get you down
You’re only making it up after all
And why should things go according to your plan
Which was always short-sighted
Try out some alternatives; it’s not
This, it’s that; if not, it should be
Otherwise but nothing
Is ever otherwise; it is just what it was
Or is or will be
It’s, well, I’d rather not say
Let me sneak up on it and see what I can do
Because the world—and time—is slippery
Because humans pitch catastrophe beyond disclaimer
This is not how I expected this poem to turn out
Benevolence was always my goal—or, no—
That’s not so—or if it was so in a previous line
Why must it also be so in this line
For every line’s its own line; it’s a free country!
I erased what I meant to say with what I meant to say
A typical mistake to have begun
It’s too hot in here
But it’s Miami
So what do you expect?
Crank up the AC
To stay cool as it keeps getting hotter
And so make it still hotter
A comfortable body makes everything
Temporarily okay then you forget
To worry while you wait
For the van to arrive
Let’s wait together
I’ve got nothing else to do

(the rhythm of my doing)

The rhythm of my doing
A great interiority
Proceeds at speed
Then here you are
So much a presence before me
The great enigma of other
What to do
Observe the sparks in the fire
Shooting out and dying
Suppose my dark freedom
Supplanted my body’s warmth
Holding onto yours in the night
If I were the only person in the world
I couldn’t say that
I’d lose my toast in the morning
And my joy in the sunrise
With no reason to speak of it
Every morning out of the immense quiet
This canopy balloons but settles down
By nighttime in my dreams
Whenever human beings lament their fate
Some small light shines
In midst of the larger conversation
Stars have with one another at great distances
If you can follow this
You know what I mean

(the deep feelings of people)

The deep feelings of people involved in this war Are erased in this war
That has no feelings so lurid is this war This war is so romantic and beautiful This war is gorgeous
This war is desired, fondled, doted on by all those who love it and love to love it
People love pardoning and helping
They love forgetting important things
They love being angels, devils, but
They are people, animals they enjoy
Destroying the earth; they can’t help it
Small things may change
Small things are constantly changing
Small things changing changes everything
Everything temporarily remains the same

(you are the perfect princess)

You are the perfect princess
Beneath a nacreous moon
Nothing in my life prepares me for this
And I can’t quite sound the word
But I can see it even now in my mind’s eye
As if I could touch it but can you touch a word?
I’m always reaching for what isn’t there because I want
It so bad, the absence of the thing
Because it’s everywhere
Fire at the top and fire below
And I shuffle in and out of rooms quietly
What anyway am I after that’s always insufficient?
There’s no objecting to the trends only the counter-trends
Some crystalline things of this world
Not subject to the weight of wit
Let’s hear it for our former masters
Above and below the various twisted narratives
My hair’s on fire as much as ever
On the snowy road out
The truck creeps forward confidently
A million words from now
You’ll still be here
Creeping behind my insight

(the bitterness of women)

The bitterness of women
The restlessness of water
As it perks its way through mountain streams
Or, salted, churns oceans
Mixing invisible with sky
That keeps its secrets in my body
The oscillation of good and evil in my thought
The confidence to head on into a dark future
For the future’s always dark
The sun don’t shine there
The desperation of men
Who must try to be what they are not
They can’t but pretend
All wars pretend wars
All heroes imagined heroes
Crushed by what’s beneath they cannot see
For sun don’t shine in underworlds
Humanity certainly shipshape now
All set for the excellent adventure
Now a brook’s a quiet body of water
And the Collected Poems a body of work
The body smirks a crooked smirk
For something comical’s surely in store
A pratfall, a pun, a rhyme that shouldn’t be fun
But it is; it’s so inept
All the pretty people are pretty to the lookers
At them who see in their roundness and smoothness
Something to be desired
A future and a past