It goes in and out of focus,

sometimes taking the shape
of a sketch done in a night of
schizophrenic inspiration, its
seemingly errant lines forming
a simulacrum of reality without
actually quite reaching its shores.
At other moments it
shatters into a living mosaic,
each jagged, colored tile just
going along for the ride,
happy to be part
of the picture,
and not giving a damn
whether it makes the sale or not.
Now it seems to be resolving into a
watercolor done with
an amateur’s skill
and in great haste, its overlapping
edges of streaked, ragged color
all that will be left to show
for an exhibition
that didn’t exactly pack ‘em in
and where the best piece
turned out to have been hung
upside down.

They flowed into each other

and intermingled their struggling 

miniature universes of

raw-nerved feeling,

pleading for understanding,

searching for ill-defined experience,

wanting in some way to be more

than what they were, waiting for

something to happen, indifferent

to its contours, 

looking for their place

in a world whose true dimensions

would have hammered them flat

had they known them.

They shot wounded venom at each other

and always embraced afterward, if only by

moments of silent forgiveness.

They celebrated each other's victories

and told each other truths and secrets

that were reserved for the hidden hours

of night.

No one made them angrier

than each other,

but each one realized

in his own unfinished way

the love they both felt

(though never speaking of it)

and they came to understand

that neither of them

would have wanted to take those

first real steps into manhood

(toward a world of other universes)

with anyone else.

I'll Be Back on 30 July

I need to focus my mental energy on my new book on the relationship between the evolution and nature of consciousness and the nature of human history. No, I won't be finished by the 30th (maybe 10 years from then!) but I need to do some things on that front.

You have not read the last of my semi-epic verses!

Sorry I'm in a Dry Spell These Days.

Guess my mind has been elsewhere.

He walks through

the carcasses of their vanished lives,
picking up the shards of their
workaday afternoons and
running his rude hands
over their intimate
confessions.
He is a god watching them
from their flowing birth
to their incontinent death,
judging them at every turn.
He will speak for them;
they can lodge no protest,
nor offer their own plea bargain.
He will hold them up to the light,
thinking that he has exposed all,
never realizing that they
were clever enough
to slip through his fingers
before he even knew
who they were.

The paper storm

swirls over me in frenzied
silence,
its mind-numbing flood
of words threatening
to break the dikes
of my tendon-stretched
comprehension
at any sweat-stained moment.
It hurls ideas at me like
multicolored, disembodied
bricks, and bashes me
with vicious squalls
of hot-blooded assertion,
storm-driven little factoids
that drive themselves into my brain
like straws in an oak tree,
and tsunamis of
half-blind visions
and quick little glimpses
of the descending sacred.
As the eye passes over me,
I plot my strategy for
snatching pieces from it
quickly enough
to make my stand
before I am no longer able
to stand at all,
and to give my account of its
garbled message
before I have no voice left
to express it.