1. HOME BREW (9/11-12/88)
I seek enlightenment as time slithers
Ever more quickly around me. I feel
Leg muscles failing me with increasing
Fatigue. My goal is always one stride further.
I own each footstep as I make it, and
That is the only real estate I will
Ever possess. I own each coin I earn
Only when it has vanished from my pocket.
My wealth is realized only when spent,
Unitemized, on sundry motley causes.
What assets have I; what do I see in
The one-way mirror of my past? Reflections
Of a bioelectric universe
Stimulated by yeasty imagery.
[Home]
3. CONFRONTATION (09/26/88)
Beyond the end of the road is a broken
Dwindling path of sand and rocks overhung
By impenetrable strands of matted
Ragweed and sedges through which I push, arms up,
Keeping redolent green whips from my face.
Cadavers of automobiles decay
Around me in densely-overgrown crypts.
The thinning trail displays tire tracks, hoof-marks.
The musty underbrush rustles: suddenly
A small mare bearing a heavy horseman
Stumbles before me, startled, in my way.
Her steel shoes spark on jagged chunks of concrete.
Silently we confront each other: I wave
Them into my most recent sylvan past.
[Home]
4. DISCONNECTED STRANDS (10/01/88)
I am never alone because inside
My head shuttle realities striving
For attention. I look for familiar
Patterns seeking justification for
These spinning urgencies clamoring to
Tell me that there is no one reality,
But many, running parallel, meeting,
Intersecting, colliding, incoherent,
Unraveled. And if these realities
Are shaped uniquely by experience
Of individuals, then they are like
Fibers of flax, sisal, hair, wool, cotton,
Disheveled, disassembled entities,
Gross threads of living looking for a loom.
[Home]
5. BAL MASQUE (12/14-15/88)
Waltz me around through the cosmos,
Tango with me through the stars;
Time has no meaning when we go careening
By Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars.
Sidereal gems through the heavens
Flaunt the faint gauze of your ghost;
Space is ethereal, quite immaterial:
Life is a life of almost.
Dance with me out of the blackness,
Leap from the dark to the light;
Red shifts don't faze us nor white dwarfs amaze us:
We leave them behind in the night.
Yet as we samba from the world below,
I see no eyes behind your domino.
[Home]
6.THE PRINCESS OF DISTANCE (01/10/89)
Light my path with your eyes.
Draw me along with gentle hand.
Direct me with a few soft words
And I will march to the music of your voice.
Listen for me and I will hear.
Summon me from the darkness.
Set the table of my fantasy
With the memory of your touch.
I will build you an onyx throne
High atop a cold light-struck crag.
There you will repose in white satin
With a diadem of emeralds and jade.
You will signify all that is known;
A princess whose domain is distance.
[Home]
7. DROWNING (01/11/89)
I lie on the bottom immobilized,
Flat, looking at the breeze-rippled surface,
Held down by implacable tons of water
As bubbles gurgle diminishing upward.
Warped shapes splash nearby. Voices strangely distant
Speak from above, unintelligible.
Wavering flickering eyes look down on me
As arms and hands grope in my direction.
Apathy prohibits the slightest movement,
Fought by the stress of caving stomach muscles.
Silver light suffuses liquid radiance
Refracting through an undulating prism.
My existence congeals like gelatin;
My eardrums thickly echo waning heartbeats.
[Home]
8. LOOK INSIDE
(01/15-17/89)
Look inside: there is divinity in
This replication of cells, complicated
Harmonies of union and disunion
Beyond our hearing. We are not accustomed
To this prodigious music of creation.
What monstrous mind cryptically has composed
This score whose dissonance and clashing rhythm
Assault our inmost citadels of reason?
Bypassed are the senses; analysis
Of these phenomena yields spectral traces:
Confounded sorcery or sacred spirit
Less substantial than fleeting smoky streaks
In an apocalyptic cloud chamber.
[Home]
9. THE FAMILIAR (01/22/89)
I walk the winter residential street.
You appear suddenly but without threat:
A knee-high short-haired broad-backed jet-black dog.
You are as old as I and look at me
Impenetrably with my own brown eyes.
Mile after mile you follow, toenails ticking;
You are my shadow and my protector:
Weak by ourselves, together we are menace
As passersby regard us nervously.
You dog me. I confront you, speaking orders.
You stand reproached; reproachfully we part,
Both of us old men looking for adoption.
You sore my conscience like a trodden blister:
I must turn you away, my own black soul.
[Home]
12. DISCOVERY (03/16/89)
The one last prophet speaks through blistered lips,
Voice resonating like shattering glass
Down bleeding stark pleistocene canyons
To feathered bracken gray in shadowed sandstone.
Fiery tongues echo in ribs of mauve mountains,
Whose summits drool holocausts of lava
Crusted with black clinker silhouettes. Soot
Powder floats to the troposphere mingling
Dust turned to neon by reflecting daylight
With ionic detritus of solar storms.
We flee through sparsely-populated pathways:
Twilight besets us on all sides. Dead houses
Collapse in gasps of brittle cracking splinters:
Our way is blocked by wreckage of our bequest.
[Home]
13. DELIVERANCE (03/17-29/89)
As war is practiced for the sake of peace,
Captives are taken in the name of freedom.
Rulers know freedom is sedition;
Slaves cry for it, not knowing what it is.
Scholars cannot define it nor demagogues
In crimson words invoke its sacred name.
This hopeless scene stretches before us all:
We are not free as long as we have flesh.
True freedom is unbounded libido.
You cannot look at it; you will be blinded.
See its flickering image on the wall:
Slavery, magic, ritual, routine;
Brute shackles forged by hulking troglodytes.
[Home]
14.SLOW FREIGHT (04/05-10/89)
Harpstrings plangent attend this procession:
You shuffle tenebrous through smoking twilight
Down precipitous paths to rising vapors,
Faces sunken beneath gray draperies,
Shroud after bobbing shroud stumbling onward,
Filing serpentine into the abyss.
You are the latest shipment of mankind.
Your empty hands cannot carry your pride,
Nor even a candle to light your way.
You cannot bring your ornaments with you;
Only the memory of what you did.
I lie among you that are set on fire:
Your beauty is consumed; you are appointed
A flock for Hades. Dust is your shepherd.
[Home]
16. LONG PIG (04/26-28/89)
Outside my window on a summer Sunday
Afternoon neighbors gather in the driveway.
They look above my house with grave concern,
Murmuring, pointing: I must go and join them.
Above my roof and not that far away,
Silently billowing in black and white,
Towers a burgeoning mushroom cloud. I
Have only to wait for the final sound.
Nausea springs to the stomach. I realize
This spectacle foreshadows catastrophe:
I watch it without power to undo
What is becoming the end of the world.
In seconds the inevitable shock
Will pulverize this calm midwestern day.
[Home]
17. FAILED ADVENTURES (05/24/89)
Struck hard by burnt orange daybreak sunlight,
Shuddering stone columns, unfluted, smooth,
Shadowed, support frieze-ridden capitals:
Ecbatana, civilization's flower,
Disassembles at the touch of photons.
Mountains tumble through pale haze to the sea,
Planting among cliffs flat alluvial strands,
Along whose wrack-strewn shore pelagic birds
Snap flyblown morsels from primeval brine.
Heaped rocks reek of shipwrecks whose splintered timbers,
Cast frayed ashore, crush scattered churning bones
Against bloody barnacles on keen scarps.
All failed adventures, doomed expeditions,
Apparently originated here.
[Home]
20. DREAM-WANDERER (06/26/89)
You glide in shadows of my bedroom drapes
And when my light of consciousness goes out
You stride revealed on silent naked feet
Dream-wandering through suggestive moonlight,
Costumed only in the warmth of whispers,
Womanly, sibilant, mellifluous,
Fragrant with old familiar flower petals
Trodden to brilliance in humid summer night.
You share a radiating fever with me;
You cross my carpet, hot arms reaching out.
I lie helpless bonded in glue of sleep,
Immobile, voice attenuated, lips stopped:
Composite female, you who haunt me so,
Are more real to me than reality.
[Home]
23. ARBEIT MACHT FREI (09/20-27/89)
Corpses, cyclone victims, inherit these
Prairies and, in turn, are possessed by them:
Their substance, rotting sweetly in the sunshine,
Has leached through pebbled aquifers to form
Nourishment for angel anemones:
Spangle spirits dancing on the Baltic Plain
Among breeze-blown waves of long lisping grasses,
By stands of spindly spruces, birches, poplars.
The dust of human bone ashes turns with
A thousand plows every spring in Poland.
Autobahns, now quaint antiques with cobble
Approaches, connect cities where still reeks
Blood in the streets from floods of idealists
Surging out of the past into the future.
[Home]
24. HARVEST (01/20-23/90)
I wait for you but there is just as much
Chance you will appear as there ever was.
Over the lost years this waiting has dampened
Ardor hot only in distant memory,
And were you to come to me right now what
Would I feel but a reward of sorrow?
Those goals and relationships I longed for
So long ago have many of them come
To pass, and what I imagined as joy
At their coming has been dulled by distraction
Of ten thousand pains, ten thousand worries,
Ten thousand years; but when I get the time
To ache only for you, I reap the sad
Harvest of tangled briars of solitude.
[Home]
26. BADLANDS (02/18/92)
Warped memories, mordant visions of Christ,
First lacerated on spines of Spanish Dagger
In hardpan desert, who was pinioned by
Heatwave-bent perceptions of gray saguaro,
Dead arms upstretched in shriveled supplication,
By tumbled scree beneath mountainous sky.
Blue, baked, birdless, petrified, shimmering,
Lies brushy broken parched expansive floor
Devoid of slightest human suspiration,
Nor the sigh of wind-vanished seraphim.
Sunbeams flicker through scorched box canyons,
Animating each stone with a stark shadow
As their burning author arcs west: immortal
Touch. There is no other explanation.
[Home]
29. NAUSICAA (07/13/89)
The melody of rustling winds onshore
Calls to mind one who sings on this narrow beach
As she treads slowly barefoot through wavelets,
Which obscure and reveal white-mooned toenails.
Her slim form drifts through mists of thunder surf,
Rote in the ears in rhythm with her song,
Sung with thin sweet voice harmonious, caught
In haze sparkled by west-descending sun.
She sings of alien gods in halcyon lands;
Of phantoms, shades shimmering, disappearing,
Substantial, insubstantial, visible,
Invisible cumulus floating above.
She sings the fevered sleep of entwined lovers.
She sings of perfumed fruitful fields and pastures.
[Home]
31. INTERSECTION (01/11/89)
I bid you welcome to the last crossroads.
This is the intersection of the damned,
Carpeted by random footprint patterns
Shuffled among the grist of countless souls.
Everyone who came before us parades,
Without the benefit of ceremony,
Through this place with murmuring dissonance,
Barely audible to unpracticed ears.
Take notice of the surrounding landscape.
Observe the faces of the wayfarers.
There is none. There are none. Placeless, faceless
Spirits drifting dusty, thirsty, hungry,
A few dimly remembered, most forgotten,
Unrequited, unreplenished, unfulfilled.
[Home]
32. EDEN BEFORE EVE (11/01/93)
You have pushed my dust together again,
Reshaped it and breathed into it reprieve
From certain oblivion. I am grateful
Because I had relegated myself,
Knowing, but not caring, to certain death.
Now the sky, each leaf and blade and drop of
Water, field, mountain, bird, beast and seashore
Breathe on reality to make it truth,
Overwhelming my now-unlidded eyes.
This teeming garden is all too familiar;
Planted long ago in my mind. Redeemed
For a time, I only hope this miracle
Persists till sleep when you create from me
Again that lust which drove us down the road.
[Home]
The Touch of Photons