The Close Poems - a Trilogy

Broken



In the flint of things,

Between knife and rock,

A spark kindles,

Ignites to a wildfire

In the close space,

Air asphyxiated,

No room to breathe,

The center of double-cross,

I fight to fly free,

Boredom punctuated

With nervousness,

I cannot imagine


My way out…




Struck



I’m a vein of gold,

Out west buried deep

In the subterranean current

Coals turning to diamonds

Float my hidden streams,

Natives pound hooves

Into the dirt,

Grounding my deeps

So that my riches multiply,

Beneath the ghost town

I gleam, in darkness,

I thrive….







Open



On lofty airs,

Feather floating

From the brim of the hat,

Gravity in reverse,

The apple leaving

The ground to rest

On the twig,

Above the horizon,

Melting into

The receding terminus,

The bow of the ship,

Bobbing the swallowing wave,

The surreal is still natural,

In that what it is beheld with

Beholds the tree and the star….

'Typhon' and 'Wealth' - Two Poems

Typhon

My typhoon came,

It swept away buildings,

Landmarks, chewed the grass,

Nature ravaged away

All hints of who I was…

When they awoke,

They said, ‘you look different’

Completely changed,

I stood among them,

The lone apocalypse survivor,

Became god-like…

Because only I

Could admire

Their greened

Their undisturbed worlds…..

Wealth

With an aversion to paper,

Held where the moth could eat,

I became a thief,

One who stole the airs,

The winds and the rains,

Moments of earths and trees,

I crowded in what they denied,

I gained not one pound,

But of earth to begin

The amplest of gardens…

lost in space - a poem

I’m in space, unhooked,

Falling to I don’t know where,

Something is there, bending my path

And me with it, my arm curls away,

Unfolding, my leg attracts to some object

On a blind horizon I cannot see,

I remember. My wife, my kid,

Now lost, I lose who I am, once was,

Mostly cold, to no return…

it is not the apple, the orange - a poem

It is not the apple, the orange,

But the fruit orchard, collected,

The tiny bits of things adding up

The lightest pinch turning

Into the largest wallop…

Divided, the things are inspected,

Named and classified in particulars,

But ‘tree-ness’ champions ‘tree’,

That we know a difference

Between ‘Maple’ and ‘Oak’,

It is not randomly so,

That the things arrange themselves

For us into orders, genera,

For there is always a stone

With which to stub your toe,

A wall to resist your exact push,

We blind geniuses as toddlers,

Who recognize ‘mama’ and ‘papa’….

she meets the nihilist - a poem

She meets the nihilist,

What makes him most romantic

Is his non-confession,

He doesn’t read existentialists,

Doesn’t know the word, nihilism,

He simply floats through everything,

Taking the moment unconsciously

In pure experience,

He simply grasps

Only what’s in front of him,

She teeters on his edge, the Void

Deep in his breast,

Always takes one step back

One moment just in time,

Avoiding his vacuum, his oblivion,

His sheer happiness

With anything at hand,

Like ‘being there’,

He just rambles on,

And their almost-kiss

Does become something spiritual,

Two halves of the same coin,

One complementing the other,

Yet neither heads nor tails….

patience the virtue denied - a poem

Patience, the virtue denied,

Without being mired in dream-mud,

I cannot quiet the rapid beating,

A clutching bird airs, winging,

Accidentally transcending,

Lifting beyond planted feet,

Space is not denied, I rise,

Above my thought, ashen gray,

Ignited in non-thought,

My heart, leaping forward,

Grasps this, no-time,

Short-circuits my profane brain,

Opinions obliterated, I simply know,

Yet tomorrow comes, I will forget,

Enter the forest anew, entranced,

Stumbling on simple things, I forget….

by tender fists - a poem

By tender fists,

I clutch one rose bloom

From late October’s eve,

An early frostbite bit it

The scars still swell, the stem,

Punctured with dew, so bright,

The green fuse alit

By artificial bursts

Of electrical false lights,

They do no justice,

They fall too slow

And grind your bloom

So slowly, molten now,

On a dead December eve…

my brothers beneath the moon, arise - a poem

We shall never rise above earth

In this bound up life entangled

We live with contingencies

They link us by our works…

Yet by imaginations, we rise,

Above ourselves, our families,

And lay down lives no one knew

Until the pathetic moments we collapsed

Some of us in organized war

Others, stateside in our silent ways

Struggle as well, traumas unite,

My brothers know me, the quiet one…

‘Brother’ is recognition, a respite,

From the daily strangers who tide through

‘The workman knows the worker’

And life’s works for us, the brothers,

Never go undone…

at home in my brazen skull - a poem

At home in my brazen skull

Time lists slowly on the sullen breeze

Outside in the chilled autumnal wind

I catch hours from the day, embers dry

Seconds drag to minutes, then fly away,

I creep the morning hour,

It begging to be won,

I soldier under the dewy moon,

My candle burns the book I read,

The pages come alive, some words ignite

The memories of past advances, lost battles,

The real caught in verbs, what isn’t said,

Seductively unfolds to my clear mind,

Sentences bright with honesty and lies,

The concrete things caught in water’s ebb,

Flowing hither then dither, alive as my muddy river,

The good bits the deep middle, bubbling

From the wake at the banked edges’ tides,

Rivulets floating to the surface, breaking tension,

Bursting to the closest atmosphere,

Whence the arguing masses?

None to hinder me here,

Alone and happiest, most,

I recoil from the flickering flame,

Toppled it catches everything it touches aflame

My thoughts the fuel that feed it on,

Me, at home, now burning again….

i made of my son a citizen of the world - a poem

The night street is different

Than that by day,

The night boat cutting the wave,

Beneath the pulling moon

Sees differently than by day,

And dawn, when stayed awake,

Is but a hazy blur

Compared to magnificent

When one has slept…

The sun takes you by surprise,

More so than the moon,

When in the wee morning

You have fought slumber away

Deciding to brave the day sleepless,

But if you ride the cycle

Of natural night, then day,

The world will remain yet as it should,

You will wax with the sun and moon

And wane with them in time,

For the sun has his coming and going

From tropic of cancer to Capricorn….

Alas I tell you everything

Again I already taught you,

I have pushed you into the world

As it’s citizen,

For it is a fool that looks for a country,

When beyond this world lies your oyster…

the crossroads - a poem

I’ve been to the crossroads

More than I care now to admit…

Even in cross currents

In the deep-winged ocean,

Lying at the horizon of riptides…

It is always a trixter figure waiting,

Yet beautiful…

They may be a devil, a siren,

But the answer is always the same:

Death….

But at ninety degrees lies the road

Usually ironically dark

Filled with thorns and brambles

That I must take to live….

It truly is straight and narrow,

This gate to life if one is to survive,

Though Nature be so liberal,

At these times

She commands we be conserving…

A night boat hugging the shore

To conserve fuel is what I’ve done

That life may continue for me

That the sun may still conquer

My tropic‘s humid and beautiful skies….

out to sea, adrift - a poem

Out to sea, adrift

No star to guide me,

They’ve disappeared,

Gone to the land

I’m in when asleep,

Perhaps they mark no time

Now drifting

Through the silken skies,

Maybe they finally melted

One into each other,

Back to their pleroma,

With everyone in the world,

Me left adrift

On this deep winged sea,

Time is non existent now

I the lone sailor

No boundary

For referencing distance,

I lie motionless

While gliding this ocean,

Aware I’m dreaming

Not lucid like day,

Yet self conscious, aware,

Of myself and my boat,

Nothing more,

Just nothing evermore…

in the plane of the desert - a poem

In the plane of the desert,

Arid airs burning my lungs,

I cry for her beneath the rage

The sky has turned malevolent,

The deep azures

Swallow the horizon,

The line blurred,

Mountains forming

Where plains lie in repose…

Deep waters wing

From beneath

To the cirrus floating,

The pressure

Is that of beneath the seas,

Compressing, no quarter,

Like nitrogen,

The available airs

Suck the life

From my bony cells….

Cacti bend in perspective,

The iron oxide, martian,

Rusts everything it touches,

The green melts verdigris,

Everything accelerating in age,

Motionless, beautiful,

I too bend with the light…

A small visitor

Landing on an alien plain,

The moment caught

In the aperture, my mind’s eye,

Burnt permanent

In shifting synapses,

A forlorn image rising

The wave, not the water,

That yet perturbs

My sweetest dreams….

entropy bright and alive - a poem

In the lunatic sky

The humid airs compel

The disembodied light

To spread in waves, falling,

Impossibly reaching my shoulders,

I feel the weight of it,

The night itself prescient,

That the moon fills

The lunatic with pulling dream

That he cannot rest,

And pushes every maternal water

To flow and then ebb,

Nocturnal wanderings of liquids,

They adjust to the lunatic clock,

The calendar, solar, dishonest this night,

When the moments, haunted, flow…

The second hand ticks

Lying, seemingly metronome,

The sound a drip of water,

Filling a vacuumed basin,

Pushing the minute

Into the hour,

The clock slowly winds down

Like everything this night,

Entropy bright and alive,

The sheen of lamplight

Falling on a sickened orange…..

come to us, saint - a poem

Come to us, Saint,

We dreamt of you

Arriving with new revelations,

Our hands of dried blood,

Were clasped on our chests

Before becoming clasped in prayer,

The blood of the fathers

On our hands, we cry,

Come even now, saint,

We know now what we do….