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.