So much death and pain today: slaughtered fowls,
reminders of genocide and oppression, celebration
of abundance denied to billions. Cousin, did you know
400,000 Ethiopians are suffering famine?
At what time the fog took over, I do not know:
I was, if not sleeping, attempting to, tossing
and turning like a Heron’s wing, lost in fog.
Love, like light, has no mass, is information.
Not that which is found in books, newspapers,
sacred texts: Suns laugh at our quest for
knowledge. Imagine a poem with no beginning
or end, no author or reader, words or meaning—
What momentary peace in the yard!–The peach tree straining under the weight of its fruit, the sound of water giving itself to gravity. I stir my coffee and breathe. A solitary ant scampers about my foot; in no mood for […]
Jeff Bezos did not leave the planet any better than
he found it, though he is rich enough to leave it and
return, alive. As I watch the skies, greedy mosquitos
stalk me like a herd of tiny buffalo.
My early poems aspired to Keats and Blake;
were about magic, dreams, and heartbreak.
Most rhymed, were trite, and told more than showed;
rolled off the tongue, no taste of the acid down below.
Tonight I’ll dream that a colony of ants has dragged
me out to sea, where I discover my belongings and I
have become so much flotsam and jetsam.
I want to smash a violin on the tree
it was made from. To soak up the blood
of martyrs with my eyes, die a glorious
death and live on, weeping, sweating
blood. It’s 118 in Siberia.
I had a dream where from an impossible height
I took in all the splendor and all the pain
we’ve learned to live with.
What is left after the groceries are put away?
Dishes on the drying rack, nothing to clean:
all is as it should be, or so they say.