I’m okay with silence
I’m okay with violence
But you will not mistake me
For the things that I’ve been trying
Ive heard angels crying
I’ve accepted dying
And I will live my life in virtue
May it be with or without you
They say I’m God sent
But I must admit it
This world would revolve
with or without me in it
A place in space
Pulling fiercely against the light
Building gravity through compression
What happens when a star dies
No light can escape
Blinding all around
Changing all around
What happens when a star dies
Tiny as an atom
Amassing like a mountain
Forming when the universe was born
What happens when a star dies
avoid the danger
of thinking deeply
stay away from the well
of your feelings
live well with cliches
don’t repeat yourself
leave sonnets alone
write lists & list poems
use spellcheck
check your dna
never put your check
book on the dashboard
don’t parallel park
under a mulberry tree
keep out of high grass
wear bug repellent
apply sun screen
adjust the screen door
let an expert do it
no no to sugar & fat
take your medicines
always place them
in alphabetical order
avoid the danger
of thinking deeply
stay tuned
I told my daughter – if you’re writing song lyrics
Don’t use the word orange
Cause nothing rhymes with it
All songwriters know this…
She replied, “Mom, who would sing a song about that?”
And giggling, broke into a tuneless melody about an orange. I meant the color, not the fruit.
After the Funeral
We wanted to go together
somewhere
to be together
to talk, eat
laugh and be alive
warm flesh near warm flesh.
We wanted to be something
rather than nothing.
Finishing Menifee County honey-laced
Breathe Easy tea this morning, the last
and sweetest mouthful, checking Snopes
to find out if
Einstein really said or wrote “if the bee
disappeared off the surface of the globe
then man would only have four years of
life left.”
Instead of FALSE or TRUE, Snopes rules
UNDETERMINED
because no records of his saying so,
or writing so, exist.
A bit of a letdown. But what an excellent
idea to ponder, grateful for
skeptics, always
combing data for the benefit of truth
and to remember that we’re still
at liberty to behave as though it were so.
For the Waitress
She brought a menu
& took my drink order.
Often, a poet will see
the different truth
in things.
At the moment she brings
my beer to the booth,
her smile owns me.
No border
separates us. The venue
becomes the place
where poetry, the only
answer, alone, could
capture the light,
reflecting from her eyes.
Her silence, her guise,
bespoke a write
me, paint me as you should
& my lonely
emotions race
after her. She returns
to the kitchen
& peeps around the door,
taking a long time,
to measure me
before she
takes off her apron, rhyme
falling to the floor,
which in
retrospect, burns
her disappearance into memory
which I recreate in words
upon a recycled paper napkin.
As we sit cold and dark
The thermostat becomes an argument
That winning means freezing and losing means paying
What we might have spent on a new chair or a bag of weed
For a few BTU
We watch the old and rich quietly disappear
Following the vee of geese
To another round of golf
Another glass of Montrachet
Behind the gate that keeps us out
And smile
Thankful for these months with no mosquitos
Or din of lawnmowers,
The buzz of flies or evil heat
That makes our faces red with misery
Nothing like children’s cheeks
at the bottom of a snow covered hill
Red with joy
As the snowball misses Mom
Estival; An Argument for Autumn
“Now is the winter of our discontent,
made glorious summer”
— Shakespeare
What is the inclination
to summer love? Spring already
washed away by rains, like lions
and loins frolicking, acts
of procreation passed like so much
gas and dense exhaust, where light
the breezeways of the lungs, filled
with drifting, petaled scents, and
new birth, new life, new wonderment
curled like moss in hidden, dying,
glades.
What is summer but the searching
for elusive shade? fear of heat and
sweat like icy streams along the spine,
the misplaced valentine of lust
in its grasping one more day, one more
season, when we know it’s already gasped
into pools, lakes, rivers, escaping
hoses, sprinkling hope to coming
droughts.
Help me out, here, Fall—
explain the reason for the sun
and all his green, when all I see
is beauty in your softer, subtler
hues, your branches building views
from bridges between his death and winter’s
silence of the snow, your covered arches
set afire by love in its leaving.
national poetry month began in ’96. allen ginsberg, national poet, passed in 1997. and now 20 years later i sit at a counter in a coffee shop writing freeverse as heather & steve try to stave off all-of-racism and prostitution as gender trap and the patriarchy of all the new non-profits in proliferation in a neighborhood that is eastside in name but cartographically north and hipster southern redneck in fadish tradition… anyway, the sun is flowering through the window onto a table of honey and fake sugar and stir straws as steve flips over his chair and heather slams him with a bookshelf so hard that the print flies off the pages and gather in a cup forming a latte and they both begin bleating and howling and then i recall that ginsberg wrote of sunflowers and i google it and he did…
and now
heather is talking about a rumor of drug dealers and drive-bys and they both are still sitting and sipping and everything is the same and nothing has changed so i bite down into a galette and stop fretting shit
until i slip out my skin ascending into eclipse as my remaining tendons thumb a poem and hit a submit button that transits bytes to bytes and aint a damn thing bitten and is this shit really written if god is a son of a glitch and darwin is bitching to him on how now are we to separate seed from chaff if all our harvests are intangible and our hearths digital and our lives are just light-based poems inside a dream at sunflower dot com.
