Of All Predicament the Predicate

First neither, then
nor.
Furor, then mirror.

Where light reverses, where rain
falls upward.

Sky, the skin
of another earth.

But the tilt is too pronounced.

There may be another season
within reason
—the sea
Its own desert.

A rhyme of time
In place of us: minus plus.

Irrespective of any speaker

presides the predicate:
a prayer-kit, a kite.

The Public Domain

—a bearded patriarch, the portrait of—

The hammer-blows at work
within the commonest object.

Words lay—lie?—always in the past.

Can there be a dance
with no step undetermined?

How blind, the earth-steps
of the moon.

All in all, nothing is listed in order.

An unlikely garment
for the underbelly.

What is to be done?—the question unanswered by Lenin or
his stand-in.

Night Sky

It’s my turn at the telescope
& I don’t know what I see.

The tiniest pinprick of light
can signify pain
—life, according to the latest definition.

Duo Session

Nature-music boxed. To work together is to work against.

To be aware is to be at war. As 1 results in silence, 2 in sound.

Wake up! says the hammer to the stone. Roar at earth’s core.

“Enlistening” re-choirs practice.

The smoke of location, the drift of rift after rift.

Touch tentative as ants’ antennas, an alphabet too busy for words.

Incessant static looks for its story.

Hit hidden objects! Let percussive ideas become echoes of perception.

X relaxes in the arms of chance: most casual causality, arbitrary tree.

Finally to find / no final line.

O lair of word within word.

The song that can’t be sung needs a special kind of lyre.

The Last Word

Real is
any medium
that remains blank
when written upon.

You know what death is like—
you have endured

One eternity already.
—signed, a Madman.

When, not if
& only if
Then why?

Light also
traces its ancestry to trees.

(Image: Vega captured May 27, 2022 by NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) mission)