Credit

Charge the cell phone and
the dormant car.  Fluorescent
kitchen lights preface
morning, catch first coffee’s
inky charm.  Charge out
and charge the breakfast
sandwich with sausage in
the bustling square of Tim’s.

A Farewell To Poets

their voices clamor, insistent
though dead, hoarding silenced

histories —  poems rampant
resident behind closed

eyes — they angrily shuffle from
literature’s harsh pitch —

writers, blessed enough to endow
each word with a long-lived life.

Distraction

In a world of many,
what focus is there on one;
I listen to a child’s problems.
The phone rings.

Reading

As a reader, you don’t see the problem,
consider it only in terms which are words,
suggestions.  Signs on a pathway,
directions in a note nailed to a tree.
Sun reflected from moon, strobed through
clouds.  And in the bones of each character.

Like night, the malaise, like storm and skies
which split on the stroke of lightening.
There are only words and a lazy twelve, open
window, travelling mind, songs in the wind,
silence in the meanings.  A shiver you
cannot stop.  Like cold water dripping.

The plot is an ocean.  Each twist carries you
further from the shore of comfort,
undertow into an alien mind.

Convention

You think through it, not into it,
a squadron of images which bring you
from somewhere down the road
to here;  a stand of experiences tarnished
by time.  Yet not without a soul.

In a republican way, I wonder how a nation
survives when athletes are paid more than
scientists, the only creativity in the way
a body twists and bleeds.  The pregnant
pause of change needs nourishment.

The past in the present, the future continued desire.

iTunes: The Definition of Music

Inspiration does not arrive by ship,
late at night, disembark, run amuck
in the city — leave a claw trail of notes
across the backs of dilatants, then
break apart at sunrise, like clouds
sullen with rain and the pain
of awaking to commutes, concrete,
the constant hammering of cubicles
in offices, abandoned to islands of indifference.

Inspiration lives in avoidance,
the indiscrete trail which appears
in morning fog bramble-burdened,  impossible
to negotiate, yet can be as intoxicating as
the moment when you first track
the lines of a foreign body — pliant
and accessible — the moment when
you first understand the rhythm
which drives so much.

After The Eulogy

things adhered — on the hard drive and in
the way shadows survived — as when I browsed
the vacation to Holguin and six photos
from somewhere I’ve never been ping ponged
the software’s interface.  Or when you now
dead four years reappeared.  A ghost
of black and white photos — in the DNA.

It’s impossible to explore a foreign
road before your death without encountering
a dozen places I’ve never been.  And may never
go.  May never see, except in photos
as though I’m invited to dinner somewhere
and the photo albums are pulled out
with the cherished bottle of Cherry Brandy.

Look, see where I’ve been. 
See what I’ve done.
See what survives. 
Long after I’m gone.

The Sky

Is falling
the sky won’t fall —
that blue —

let’s vote and form
a union to demand
deeper hue from sky
that’s trembling —
leaves in wind —

the sky won’t profit
the sky won’t cry
and I am running

in a crowd
of rain and clouds
forever feeding from
the emotion trough

the sky is falling
and I won't run.