I Wanted to Be a Poet

to use

my words

to slap

the world 

across

the face, 

crack the surface

of everything 

I could grasp,

like the undulating groan 

of fissures echoing 

across a frozen lake, 

shake you awake

from your drudgery,

confining ideas,
little screens,
petty complaints,

hack away
at the tangle
of tethers 

to that
lesser world.

Leaving Eden

You see it in the rear-view,
As you pull away.
It never was  —

The petals always wilt.

The green always fades.

The sun always sets.
All in your mind,
A fool and his ideas.

You bit the apple.

Happens every time.

Tell me why, though, when

You look in your cracked 

Reflection, part divine, part human,
Where ecstasy and pain intersect,

You still see paradise?

Watching a Panda Eat Bamboo at the Zoo

The pearl light of morning

Glazes a new green on the leaves.

A breeze stirs the wind chime,

Teasing bird song from the air.

He quizzically tilts his black-and-white 
Head at the hum of a truck going by,

Then turns toward the sun,

Shifting in the dapples of 
Tear-shaped leaves.

He snaps off shoots and munches.

Between bites, he rests on his hinds,

Allowing the bittersweet to pass

Over his fat pink tongue into

The blue sky of his Buddha belly.

Learning to Pray

At the first hint of spring,

I am a melting river

In the deep woods

At the break of dawn,

With a mild wind

Rushing over water,

Bubbles welling up

From the pebbly bottom,

That I melt into

As it rushes over me.

The Amputation of the Untenable

You are a stranger to me,

This phantom limb

I spent 20 years

Hanging onto.

Now nothing but void

And the insolid of the solid,

In this hollow un-reality,

As if the time never existed at all —

Those sunny afternoons

Or harried Monday mornings,

Babies gasping first breaths

In birthing rooms,

Funerals of brothers and grandmothers.

This is the lesson that we live each day:

Many lives in this one, and

It is all a billowing dreamplay

In which our minds and actions

Shine the light,

Create the narrative,

And drop the curtain.

I know you no longer.

You are not there,
My dear. 

Departed.

I neither care.
Nor care to care.

Shopping for God

“… how many men have copied dew


For buttons, how many women have covered themselves


With dew, dew dresses, stones and chains of dew, heads


Of the floweriest flowers dewed with the dewiest dew.


One grows to hate these things except on the dump.”

—Wallace Stevens, “The Man on the Dump”

Mend the hole, make me whole —

Miuccia, Giorgio, and Domenico.

Tag me and label me.

Notice me. Give me life.

Stitch me together and embrace my limbs.

Let me walk each step 

And be reminded of craftsmanship 

And elegance and quality.

Heap it into bags 
Bearing your blessed names

And stuff my closet till it runneth over.

I cannot fill it fast enough.

I lay down my offering at your altar.

Bestow upon me the bounty of what will

Tear, tatter, stain, fray,

And turn to dust.

I shake, ecstatic, before you.

I am made in your image.

So fleetingly happy, I kiss

The one I am with: Pure joy.

Tell me, what will a man

Give in exchange for his soul?

Dress me up in the finest leather,

Silk, silver, and stone, the genuine article.

Thank you, God, but first I must thank

Diane, Allegra, and Donatella.

As I have loved you,

You must love one another.

Sunrise

Tilt on the turning zone of all things,

Where your blazing arrow seeks its

Bull’s-eye in flight, in slo-mo,

Into my eyes — keep heading through

The tumbling summer air,

Honed and aloft now above the horizon,

With dappled, watery light fish-scaling

Orange and blue that lifts to grow fiery wings

That flap night into dawn —

Emblazoning consecutive zones,

Marking each a new horizon,

Breath by breath, ray by ray,

Babies cry, old men wheeze, dogs bark,

Pulled away in one place

And pushed toward this:

Sky flying by too fast,
Now past —
Rise again.
Amen.