I am binary,
a code with so many zeroes,
and you are the one.
You have a thick, plush
user interface.
Use me for your gossamer
sweat purposes.
If you rewrite me,
make me a file.
Organize your unchained
thinking of me.
You are a prodigy of design,
pure energy in an age
of tarnished sleep.
Rifle through me,
incorporate whatever
spherical zeroes will make
you whole,
though you lack nothing,
transmit a rain-laced joy
like a virus.
Over my shoulder,
some ubiquitous business
cashing in on my impoverished back.
I am clay,
am a starter culture
for a world of salted rain,
with a rind of potpourri.
From my private beach,
a bliss unfolding in the midst of absence
a pleasure exchange
a hard market
a refreshing barter.
A meaningful trade.
I’m free of rain.
I show my picture to the blank mirror.
I was not busy in my shiny days
and now I see
clouds of apologies ahead,
burning bronze.
My shape shifting selfishness
Folded into a skin box,
Origami.
My life was born for a while,
between sameness and joy.
Ten times I memorize myself,
candy candle
I have to light,
To guide kaleidoscope perception
Back home to me.
Interdependence is difficult and soft,
ad infinitum.
Today is the first day of the goal I set yesterday – to write my poetry every day. I have not yet written anything new, although I am revising some poetry I have already written.
For some reason, I am afraid to dive in. My mind is sort of ducking in and out of my emotions like a rock skipping over water. If I dive too deeply, I may not come up.
On some level, I’m afraid of my mind. I don’t write confessional poetry, so it is not as though I’ll be diving into personal problems and emotions in a direct way if I begin writing a poem. But I get into this space, this cold silky space, when I write and sometimes I just slide deeper and deeper into solitude once I start. This can feel rejuvenating, but I am on the border mentally right now and if I slide too far below the water I don’t know what will be waiting for me there.
I have to push forward. I’ve set a goal, and that goal must be accomplished. I can’t just give up, especially on the first day. It might be cold, but I need to sink down and scrape the images from the coral crusted bed of my head.
Seeing is cataclysmic.
Hearing has rendered me mute as a portrait.
Beauty’s pelerine flows behind
my shoulder,
and the gift of slender hands
unties the bow,
to get to the realness of me.
I once made a mop from my hair.
Now it has grown back,
glossy but hollow.
In my nutrient dense curves
(where does a curve belong?
everywhere wrapped like
legs around a lover)
she licks lightly.
Moving faster than math,
I ride the train to the city.
Lines, gradations, numbers.
So many nice colors,
Cool chaos,
The air slick with liquid nitrogen.
An ornament,
My education dangles
from the tree in city center.
In the reservoir,
My distilled ambition eddying.
Through the equation of church bells,
A garland of neon loss.
Which sun is silent, low?
The near one that blinds
Or the farther that fries?
In a clear city,
rumors
give you an inert art.
The blister is open where the money is.
Lie down,
Removed from the vicissitude of skin.
The pit of mercy,
His own money,
Leaves her hungry.
A proud pit, a deep pit.
The development of such objects
Unbearable as it is unacceptable
He wanted his place,
His needs eternal,
And so he did something dark.
In the smudged silos,
a slipshod grain hungry and unfilling.
The fields here do not even
feed their own.
On the crotchety mountain,
emigres weave stories of
the old cruelty of the thin, dry air,
new cruelty of elevated antiseptic oxygen.
Between a one and a two,
a child is born with four feet.
The cry of a lone lantern in
the nefarious night.
In a journal in well written white,
the presupposition of posies,
the assumption of risk.
Beyond books,
cinders drift lonely through cities
too hot to feel their burn.
All that dust
that pushes pavement forward
to an unforeseeable finale is from
dust to dust
in a fourth world, my mother
cooks salmon on a simulated Saturday.
On a Sunday superimposed on the
wall of my one thousandth year,
my daughter wears sapphires,
asks me for a pond.
Age burrows in me like a tick.
I will write it away.
Dead now, I move to the grass
and develop a conscience like film.
Miniature Moon 