Butterfly Being

So many poems birthed at dawn
or just before
when the trickster gods
are passed out and cannot
plot pratfalls for mere mortals.
Turmoil eases up a bit,
but anything can come next.
You might lose the courage
to eat breakfast or find yourself
trying to type on liquid paper.
You could be struck by
nostalgia for hula hoops or
begin to feel your teeth dissolve.
You want to make a poem that
coils, rises up and strikes
the heart like an angry snake
but it is easy to get side tracked.
After all, you are only bones
in a sack spitting out words
that vainly seek forever and
the present so successfully
hides the future. But it's early,
go down into the quarry of language,
pick up a few likely chunks,
haul them back and let the world
select the words. Be patient as
a telephone waiting to ring.
Dare to shit  a peach. Let the
words gather unto themselves
like clouds until each new page,
scarred by those glyphs,
becomes the living promise
of the day just begun, like
a butterfly gliding over clover.
No task. Only the being of.

The Writer's Life

I write when I rise.
What is palpable at morning,
incorporeal at evening.
Coffee maker fogs the window.
The dawn is inconsolable.
It would be happier with
the promise of more moons.
Empty beer bottles of fear
in the early morning brain.
Disorder of bedsheets,
buzz of flourescent lamp,
Petrified fish gasp
in the empty unnoticed bowl.
Some eyes are windows,
others packed with bricks.
Whisper of morning traffic,
hum of the space heater.
Time to get to work:
words staining paper
with random statements,
each statement evolves a mask,
each mask without a clue
what lies behind, what lies ahead.

Fateful Day

If only, on that fateful day,
my Draft Board had been on LSD.
They might have sent me to Wonderland
to explain croquet and the proper pouring of tea;
they might have sent me to OZ
to get into Dorothy's pants or train flying monkeys;
they might have sent me to Hogwarts
to get an advanced degree in something useful;
they might have sent me to Narnia
in search of beaver pelts and talking mice;
they might have sent me to Neverland
to provide anger counselling to Captain Hook;
but no, instead, imagination failed utterly
and those three patriot imbeciles sent me to Vietnam.
If only, on that fateful day,
my Draft Board had been on LSD.

The Adjunct's Nervous Breakdown

I shall declare myself the über-instructor to the world at large.
Pedagogically speaking, I will unleash wonder and enchantment.
I am committed to the fresh production of unnecessary needs.
My head will become a fully automated factory of sunlight.
All of my sentences will bend my students souls toward that sun.
I will show them how to master the art of wallpapering
so they might learn to live in harmony with the TAO.
No knowledge will be too arcane or mundane for us.
Elves in lederhosen will learn to swallow ticking clocks.
Music classes will be busy trumpeting sonatas through mutant noses.
Home Ec students will find the recipe for baking the square root of pie.
Football players will discover quantum botany while piled on fumbles.
Weavers will unravel the sociology of bed clothes.
Psychologists will take up morosely dispensing Screaming Orgasms.
Physicists will figure out how to breed better cats.
Gaia herself will imagine how to shed her current cancer.
I will accomplish all of this without a PhD or even a raincoat.
Even Dante's birds in Hell shall seek my instruction!
At first, my solitude will be that of a clothed person on a nude beach,
but soon multitudes will take up the calling and together
we will establish the ultimate university, The University of the Absurd.
Only then will the fully practical become established within the world,
only then will all the pandas be repatriated to their loved ones in China.

Perks

One more soul crushing bleak grey morning.
Ah, but there are perks to poetry.
A flick of imagination and I am gone
to a warm country, green, with beaches
and castles and four poster beds
in one of which I am just now
waking wrapped around a lovely lass
to a day of azure skies and heat.
In some ways, poetry doesn't pay well,
but in others, it can make you rich indeed.

Things To Do At Two AM

Write bad poems about insomnia.
See how long you can hold your breath.
Pretend you are really asleep.
Conjugate manhole covers.
Recall the first name of
everyone you've ever slept with
and spell them all backwards.
Try to remember when you were newly
minted and unscratched by the future.
Cut your finger nails and then
incinerate them to ward off bad JuJu.
Learn Romanian and teach it to your cat.
Attempt to remember how exactly you
ended up tonight, alone, in a small room.
Stare at the ceiling. Stare at it more.
Develop a comprehensive Theory of Regret.
Remember who you are and
be very happy about who you are not.
Chuck it all. Take some pills. Fall asleep.

You Can Never Get Your Foot Out Of The Same River Even Once

Everything arrives, but nothing stays
nor does anything real ever change.
Just try to hold one day in your hands.
It becomes a different same day.
The past blossoms at lightening speed,
the future arrives suddenly, now is forever.
Light one instant; dark the next.
All stories stretched far enough end in death,
deaths always far away until they aren't,
deaths that can only happen right now.
The door of time: forever ajar, opening
upon a wonderland of uncertainty.

Shifting Into The Future

He was generally known to be shiftless, going nowhere.
Truly, his idea of a career was dawdling in pleasure;
sitting on a deck, drinking a few beers, reading,
waiting for words to coalesce, imagining impossibilities:
A kind of intensity and freedom found in no cubicle.
Then he discovered as a poet people considered his shiftlessness work.
He wasn't merely loafing, he was on a career path.
It didn't pay much and chances for advancement were slim.
But that didn't matter, he was finally going somewhere,
even if that somewhere was nowhere, right back where he'd begun.

Cat Snow Night Perhaps

Powerfully quiet  magic hushes the world.
Only Memory disturbs the night's calm.
Winter's first snow stretches tight on the earth.
No people, nor cars, a basket of silence;
but the past creates its chaotic clamor
even in this desert of frost and darkness
making the mind queasy with reluctant remorse.
The Great Unlived What Might Have Been looms:
the vivid eyes of lovers with forgottens names,
bullets that missed by just enough,
so many impossible wrong turns taken,
forty years of working your way up to nothing,
even indigence raised to the level of art.
The cat snores on a shelf by the window.
You are caught alone in your personal mythology.
Your secret lies stick in your throat,
all of them, both futile and necessary,
all the things you killed to stay alive.
You are the archaeologist of your being,
selectively opening the book of your life
to carefully chosen pages, leaving some unread,
dreading the frightful precision of their words
that scream out, nothing means much more than anything;
and the whole tale might be told differently
reimagined in some furiously redemptive light
before the frangible spell of alternatives
is broken by morning's disappointment, the
matutinal sun sweeping magic off the gelid drifts.

The Young Dead

Imagine your young
loves all dead.
     
The skinny one
with the taut nipples
who exuded energy,
under the earth.

The short, roundish one
who screamed for
the Savior every time
she came, with him now.

The tall, sophisticated
Greenwich beauty,
out of your league,
but intrigued
and found your heart,
thirteen years gone.

How can such
living, warm, smart
presences simply
fall off the earth?

But they do and
everyday
more of them.

Until you follow.