“Too Dark”

Too dark, the image is spontaneous surprise
Allowing for callow simplicity, widespread, not
Freely strung, perhaps, nor finely wrought.
Spoken, an oblique word to add to some collection, surmised
And measured plans without a thought to instruments of light,
Nor proper canvas housing hues and filigreed beams
To grace medieval drawings and ever-flowing dreams
In cold rejection foiled, splays to mask the monumental heights
Routine in use no matter how magnificent: you preferred hopes
To need, to full-grown trees but tiny seeds,
Or wholes that must in time disintegrate; a flute, perhaps a reed
In need of being played, the player all too often wrapped in robes
Of musk-dyed silks and ancient tides,
And all the while I merely smiled and let it die.

“I Can Suggest”

“I can suggest that no one adopts
My line of reasoning or the solitary action
Of my life,” he whispers, “I’ve a fraction
Left to me, and while I opt
For life, still, I mean to live a life
That bleeds straight out of this,
Arranged by more than just a kiss,
A promissory note, some cosmic strife
With fists raised high against the moon
Just as wolves are wont to howl
Because it’s there, or possibly because an owl
Just asked just who they are. Soon
Enough the owl is fed and wolves go into heat,
And no one sheds a tear for all those rabbits in retreat.”

“I Anticipate the Moments”

I anticipate the moments. I strive,
But there’s not it–the fireflies sweep
Through me as legacies of sheets
Of rain and sleet within a tired mind. Contrived,
My expectations are a tepid fog compared
To what I feel when you are with me. Now
I see I cannot trust myself to disallow
Disguise and art; when face to face the errors
I embroider come unravelled right
Before my gaze, and I am bound to show
Without what should remain within. Even now,
I cannot recreate myself in time to face the light
Of what I am, so plainly seen by you and all our gods, and I deny
I ever waited, wanted, longed, or even cared to see your eyes.

“She Appeases”

She appeases, others simply please
Themselves with platitudes, refined. Reeds
Produce a tone, but, lacking song, exceed
Themselves with piping. She treasures seeds
Produced but placed in barren soil
That comes to nothing. Patience finds
Reflective fields that take the sun, define
A reticence in clouds and makes them boil
To shed redeeming rain from discards
Of the winds, and melodrama in the shadows. She cares
For these her tender ones. Her signs she shares,
Her fruits, her flowers in the fragrances of winter’s snows: far
From smothering her gifts, she lifts them up and leaves them free
As imperfections, promises, and indecision, the rites of insecurity.

“Garlands”

Garlands for the banner told defy the headlines;
Bold and garish is the wording of a string
Of odd events plaited to the public’s taste; they sing
A song of six of this and sevens in the press. Deadlines
Met, the galleys in, the thing is put to bed;
And on the morrow, there before the eyes
Of all the world the circumstance disguised, the size,
The age, the details, all that is the stuff of legend.
But in the main–’the writ now fosillised–
No further reason to take note of what just took place.
Reporters gone, the guests at rest, and where in fact
There is no dust, the characters retrace their tracks
To that sweet moment when the nomial in the clause is quietly replaced;
The truth? They merely stop to stare
at something more in keeping
With the latest word than justifies the sabbatical
that glorifies what they’re seeking.

“With Every Newscast”

With every newscast comes the view, a plane
Is down in jungles, miners trapped in gas,
And then, of course, the common daily tasks
Assigned authorities to find the lost, the lame,
The disenfranchised strain of minds that lose
Themselves, and then must all be found.
The searchers spread through forests, and the grounds
Of parks, and far-flung camping paths; they choose
To find these souls because there is no choice,
Perhaps, a kind of last respect expressed, humanity
Enforced by wrote, and cause enough to see
What can be done to locate bodies, voice
Concerns, and let it go at that. And, who am I
To ask myself, and who were they to die?

“The Cusp of Things”

The cusp of things, this siren in the night’s
Incursion that scars the flesh some few days, delay in whatâ€s in between
The wanderlust of possibilities yet even to myself remains unseen;
And who has not discovered the taste of light,
The fragrant smell of vice, the convalescent wounds that lead to brief surprise,
The lyric melody of accident, the meretricious slap of coincidence; or found
All solids turned to rushing streams, no longer stable ground,
A brief belief, the body heat of truth turned suddenly to ice?
Well, yes! I’ll teach my hours to fly, but fact
Is hourly resigned to friction through an opening,
An aperture, a lens through which each scene
Rehearsed becomes a chiselled frieze. Suddenly a match,
Some luminary speaks, his light reveals veneers I’ve built;
My satisfaction turns to grief that grinds these rocks to sand and silt.
Happenstance, glory of measured breath. Destiny, the suns and moons
And distant scintillating light deranged and rearranged
To suite the insignificance of magnificence of a single page,
Another sentence, a paragraph in which I find myself within a room
To mark the hours, the Doppler’s sway that all misfortune gives.
I have revelled in these signs, these periodic tedious monotonies,
Their very rising at once the thrall before the fall, astronomies,
Recordings of a time and times again that only now appear to live
Because when all that is has come to pass I happen to be standing here
To witness all creation’s energies newly arrived. In the cold stare
Of sunlight I sense with fragile accuracy the beneficial glare
Of all my peculiars, entities and particles that occupy the ear,
Delight the eye, and not so subtly remind me that I am,
And need not doubt the ground on which I stand.

“She Might Have Asked”

She might have asked him if she cared.
But then it really mattered little; she’d left no room
For doubt, she’d other fats to fry in fires soon
To be and visions of her future flared
Up and out and all around her, the afterglow
Of hungry butterflies, and swarms of fireflies
Grown as clouds about them both. She denied
She’d ever known him…,”But I don’t know though;
Roads are sometimes forked, and as she’d said
From time to time, “It’s the early bird that gets the worm!”
He’d grin and smile: “You bet your booties, Girly! But get a firm
Grip on this ol’ toad before you leap, and put some forethought in your head,
You can fool a nightcrawler some of the time while he waits his turn,
But, they’s no nevermind t’arrive before the worm!

“Selflessness”

Selflessness–the flesh of arrogance–heeding, breeding;
Longevity in philistines to the point of ennui at last
Ignites a spark to fire in the blessed case, the righteous task
In truth’s correction, potential to its conscious meeting
Place, the heart, and outward while the fleeting
Instruments consuming consume themselves; the hour, past,
The purpose, certitude. The catalyst, Illumination of the glass
Reveals beauty, faith, prodigy of the gleaming
Spark that leaves no doubt, no time to delegate,
Discoveries address themselves as an adagio
And terminate in the very act of viewing.
Markers, signs and metaphors are no substitute for misconstruing
Immortality for license; no laughing matter culminates
In action, not in subterfuge and beyond the reach of innuendo.

“She Knows What I’ve Been Thinking”

She knows what I’ve been thinking, Joe.
She thought I’d be straight shot through
You know, and what’s more, she knew–
They always do–that in the end she’d show
Me what she thought her best side was and let it go
At that. It might just be she’s a little tight, but if
She takes a second look around, she’ll skip
The show, forget the curtain calls, and roll
The footage from the credits to just about
The point she crossed the line and blew
It all by being what she dreamed she knew
Was me but turned out to be just a light excursion, a heavy bout
Of thinking, a frame without a painting, a horse or two without a cart
Which in the end was neither positive nor very smart.