Tearing out his own eyelashes, gritting his teeth, Barney grinned at the one story without a murder in it. Wholesome at last.

Stephen put on his favorite bib. That meal hit the spot. The next morning awoke, they still could not find the senator.

The West Coast

The inability to escape

Whatever it is I’m trying to escape

A rib on my lower left side is burning

Listening to Johnny Cash’s Daughter, Rosanne

Driving through forests that were once on fire,

Trying to find out if I was leaving home or coming to it.

Sleeping Parallel

A perpetual lift, and a turn inside my stomach
Relieves my active mind. I am afraid
Of every speech within my brain designed
To hurt that hidden part of you that wants
The best of me before I have that piece
From you. Every little soldier is made
Believing he's a full grown man
And born to fight: your army will not lose
As long as there is war. Waves will crash
On all your favorite beaches. You have no books
To still the ranks who shred the pages

There are some holy threads of yarn no hands
But yours will bend to cloth. Repeating this truth
One hundred twenty times each day makes idle
Those hands that might work some miracle
So I ever fear my tongue, and lie
By locking down in chambers of sounds and silence
Hurricanes and thunder to crack your smile.
If we only knew. We rip the dreams
To shreds, pick them out, and carefully destroy
The very last one, until Hope, Love
Birth, Desire and the opposites stand up
Face to face; we stand there too
And each fights the other to the end.

The Idiot's Daughter

While joyous Ophelia runs up the stairs
In the 1980s, orchestrating her own madness,
The boy tears up all of his letters,
Written in the improper state of mind
Familiar to philosophers
And lovers who loved once,
He spends all of his money in revenge
Loses his servants
Loses his friends
Loses track
Loses all final destinations
To wonder occasionally of Ophelia,
Brilliant smile
From deep within her chest,
Whether that is a lie,
Or his heart still feeds him the truth.

History by the Victors

Sobriety couldn't survive the market
Blacking out time before history.
2,011-plus dead drunk.

Angels

"There it is!"
And they walked away
A flower in the snow
Placed. It was their job.
Robert Frost could make something of this rose
Rising out of the snow. I haven't a clue
Whose job it is to stick a flower in new city snow
I'm not accustomed to running into angels
Walking across third street.
Pass me by,
Pass by your own rose!
Are you construction workers?
I have no job for you...

Spread the news: Angels stick flowers in the snow
And holler "There it is!"
If you hear that news
You may be up for doing some work.
Labor for those willing to work with Angels.
A flower planted above the pavement
Until the snow gives way.

The Woman Getting Out of the Other Car by Dick Cunningham

Ancient flesh
Caught on the fly-
Boiled in rum and pickled in rye.
Why!

A Leaf

Green capillaries
Of fractal-born hungry skin
God of life in root

Emanuel Swedenborg by Jorge Luis Borges

He walked taller than the others,
That man remote among men;
The names he called, if he would call them,
Secret to angels. He could view
What earthbound eyes can not see:
Ardent geometry, the crystalline
Structure of God and the whirlwind
Of the sordid infernal appetites.
He knew that the Glory and the Underworld
Reside within your soul, with your mythologies;
He knew, like the Greek, those days
Made from time are mirrors of the Eternal.
Registering in arid Latin
Ultimate things without why or where.

The Sea by Jorge Luis Borges

Before the dream (or the terror) could weave
Mythologies and cosmogonies,
Before the time could mint itself into days,
The sea, the always sea, it had been and it was.
Who is the sea? Who is that violent
Antique being that gnaws at the pillars
Of the earth and is one and many of the seas
And abyss and splendor and chance and wind?
Who looks on it sees it for the first time.
Always. With that wonder which all things
Elementary leave behind, the beauty
In evenings, the moon, flame of the bonfire.
Who is the sea, who am I? I will know it
In the days to come that follow the agony.

Finally

And to think for good
This all could be made quite well
With two open mouths

I by Jorge Luis Borges

The bones of the head, the heart that beats in secret,
The pathways of the blood I can not see,
The tunneling of the dream, old Proteus,
The viscera, the nape, the skeleton.
I am all those things. Incredibly,
I am also the memory of a blade
And a solitary sun sinking downward
Dispersing into gold, into shade, and then nothing.
I am the one that sees the bows coming to port;
I am numbered books, the numbered
Engravings worn away by time;
I am the one with jealousy for the dead.
It is even stranger to be the man stitching together
All the words inside of the room of a house.

One for D. C.

I have the window
You have your back to the sink
My solution's yours

L. A.

We meet eye to eye
Right before you give me up
Down and up speechless

From fragments of Sappho: 57

Who's the country girl seducing wits
Wearing country dress
Unable to keep the cloth down with her ankles

The F Train, Grace is Wild

Grace finds you in your place
Just as the lids come down
Ready with arms in tucked ecstasy

Chest uncovered at once
On trial for too much passion
He laughs
Mortified at the pure reason
Leaning against a water main
Pushing it open
Making sure it doesn't go to waste

(c. Spring 2009)

Pondering Whitman

After good night
I didn’t write Genghis Khan
I played some war games
I didn’t do very well, but it looked like I might pull through
The more he pondered the more he focused less on what he thought
And more on
Not on, but in
Or inside
But what is inside me cannot separate
Itself from what is without it

His cold body was pulling
Pulling at the possibility of his mind
(Or was his mind pulling and his body warm)

The bug that landed on my computer
Is a pest. By many definitions he is a pest
So big, too armored for me to think that squashing him would be easy

Typing away so that bug will think that I’m working hard on this paper about Genghis Khan

A Trout Sayer

Trout, I say, trout! Trout!
A trout it is! A trout! A...
Trout! There! Trout! There the ... -

Haiku 1

Don't you dare do harm
To my Renaissance! CONSERVE
You dastardly cur!