Category: Poems

Look up
Drink up the whole night sky
Feel its weight pour down upon
your cheeks
your eyes
and stain your favorite shirt
while you attempt to do two things at once
Images reflect
course upon course
Someday you will dance

Work becomes apparent and your
place within it
There is no time limit
for making amends
singing heart-felt songs
or speaking a special word in an
English accent
Sound shapes its special burden
Who gave it weight and force and mass?
Why can the songs that men sing lift you up?
Why can they draw you down?

Why can we drown?

Who told the waves to move
and to keep moving?
Why does water work together,
rolling up against your neck and shoulders?
You don’t go out in bad weather
You can’t breathe beneath the shower

You don’t bother with the blue
fascinations you outgrew

Your steps appeal—
how could the sound amount
to much

The daily rite of your
approach
The door whose boards
you never knock

How hard the species
of the stock
How firm the feel
when knuckles touch
How dark the echo
or how bright
on either side of daylight

That double door that keeps you shut
stays double-locked
You double-check it every night,
within, without

At the London bruncheon
We spoke of matters concerning
We few

But the last of us spoke
In the airiness of the moment,
Juxtaposed between greatness and dissipation

The facts being what they are:
Mildly runny, old and ruddy,
Young and bubbly, strong yet cuddly,
Ugly —

Eggs, Irishmen, debutantes, union men
And the habit of chewing tobacco
in public —

Let us consider
The mark of a leader
It’s the mark that was given
By the hand of decision

And let us dismiss, remembering this:

As long as a choice
And a word and a voice remains
So does the song we sing
Among men

Shew forth thy shoveled concrete, build
thine house upon the crushèd rock
Thy fingers curl and cramp as they attempt
to lock a hold upon the heavy hammer

Thy discipline is earnest not, but plenty eager
Blows, disgrace are not thy lot
But thou hast lost the wherefore in thy meagre,
hasty manner

Be not afear’d
There time remains to grow thy beard
to preternatural measure
Some length of wisdom, some of nature
Either way, the grey thou seek’st
Doth now appear upon thy cheeks…

And just above thine ear

Set the ship to sail, I said
You promised we would catch the tide
Yet here we sit
With little time to bide
Rowing in the busy dark

I stink; my stomach aches
You laugh and shake it off
I threaten you with angry looks
Your back is iron stuff
It knows my every trick

Plow the ground and plant the seeds
Before the sun goes down, I said
It would be done, indeed, you vowed —
Instead, now, side by side, with lamp to guide
We goad the ox and move the rocks
Sowing in the busy dark

I squint; my neck is wrenched
You grin and march ahead
The evening moon is faded, dim
I mumble curses on your bed
Your foot is sure and steady

You’d write the contract, line by line
You knew the deal was due anon
By candlelight, with drippings white
You scribble swiftly as I yawn

My eyes are red, my breathing, slow
Our penmanship, a messy show of
Marks that built this room
This ark
Glowing in the busy dark

You should be screaming
the news
Are heralds nascitur, non fit?
Is the top of your lungs
A height you can’t climb, as of yet?

There’s barely no one,
No one who’s set,
Ready, seated, on the jet
To carry the king’s news,
Delivered with the king’s hands,
Remembered in the king’s words

Not telephoned and graphed,
But heard,
Each syllable a public-private pirouette
In thirds
These servants three
Kilo Alpha Charlie
Tending to their master’s birds

You know where we have been
Here we are
The mingled sky
Boundless
We
breathe with pain

But all outcomes are not accounted for
The prognoses of the prophets true

We wish to escape
the grippe
of rewharewha
So does everyone who stockpiles

If the sun was meant to rise in the East
’Twas also meant to set in the West

What matters is love for neighbors
“And that is a very encouraging thought”

————————————————————-
*Credit to LOTR throughout,
especially the last line

Let us snake
Victory into our armor
Building without regret
Our eternal empire

Let us inspire men to view us
As champions of our time
Who multiply mythic understandings
To our children an heritage
And may one among many say of us,
“They are worthy of honor.”

Who can say?
Was the Tower of
Babel well intentioned?

O Father, holy
Where do you walk
And why does the heart not work
Without you?
Angry and afraid
I see three-part answers to
this matter in question
Stirring in my stomach
like a barium solution
weighing me down

So, anxiously I drift
Underwater, in an ocean
Swirling to beach
music
laying down the beating
waves against my soft skull

Of course the sun is swimming
In the ceiling,
Circular and self-revealing,
And in my mind, a monument to the desert
I worship there
With three freewill
presents:
Ink, blood, and fire

In this world dominated by trees
In the second sky
the heavenlies,
Make your mind known to me…
illuminate this tunnel

I take my ritual
Repetitive antidote
Every day
Rocking on the porch
Like a blind man
Watching the sun go down
Gentle and dangerous
Nursing wounds in the quiet
Warmth of coffee

He conducts a
Ritual magic
Ceremony
Of sand and spirit
Performance piece of
Desert creatures
Dance of vultures,
Mice and scavengers

Midnight arrives
And there’s a
Rustling of wind
Like a malediction,
An unformed incantation
On the lips of blue souls

But this bleary-eyed
Creature of exchanges can
Still breathe easy:
He can’t see that
Danger approaches;
What he cannot see
Cannot harm

I turn in too early and
Get up too late
Slow resurrection
But not to worry
I use my hands to
Push away these walls
Betray
This house of midnight