Joseph A. Miller

He is a sordid little god,

2011-07-29T01:17:00.001-10:00

unkempt,
stinking,
and unshaven,
spitting and scratching as
he shambles through streets ankle-deep in trash
and dog shit,
covered with scars
of uncertain origin,
and looking out at the world with yellowed crocodile eyes.
He is the god of unanswered prayers
and crumpled hopes, the god of
"oh well"
and "I'm sorry, we did all we could",
the god of drawing the knife up the river
(rather than across the stream),
the god of "I can't make it stop"
and "we're too late",
a semi-toothless carnival worker/rodeo clown/pimp of a god,
stubbing out lives
like cigarette butts,
and tearing dreams out of fools
like a slaughterhouse worker
gutting a pig carcass.
He's not all shiny and pretty like the one
that lives on Mt. Sinai,
but he gives as well as he gets,
and more often than not
he kicks his cousin's ass without even breathing hard.

They waltzed in cold embrace,

2011-06-20T19:07:00.002-10:00

their forms slowly turning to ash
as they mechanically twirled around
the unseeing room, greyish-black
puffs
falling from them
like pieces of a dying glacier
collapsing into the sea.
Their silence held unspoken
volumes,
the ashen visages of the dancers
remnants
of warmer times,
when what was hoped
still outweighed
what was known.
Their bodies slowly
broke apart
with each unheard shift
in rhythm,
the scorch marks
on the walls
the only evidence
now in view
of vanished times
and ancient lives.

The air itself was alive

2011-02-23T01:46:00.002-10:00

and I looked with excited foreboding
as the trees bowed in unexpected homage
to the ancient master that was now
aloft above them.
The Presence glowed without light,
was felt without sensation, and
shouted without sound.
It hovered in front of me,
daring me to live,
and insisting that I speak,
with a command that was only mine
to know.
I stayed silent for seconds, minutes, years,
centuries, eons,
as all about me remained frozen
in deathly joy.
Then I broke the air itself, and said simply,
"Show me."
And I knew the unknowable.
And I became numbers
and dimension.
And I saw non-being
become being.
And I lived in the maelstrom of
stellar hellstorms,
and stood exultant in the middle of
the Sun,
and swirled walls of
galaxies with a casual gesture.
And all that was,
or had been,
or would be
thunder stormed by my transfixed sight
faster than light speed
and I lived all that had been lived
in any world.
And in that moment, and only
for that moment,
I was All.
Trembling, shivering in the
Antarctic Present,
I then asked,
"Why?"
And every
shrieking horror
raped me, sneering as it did,
and all the idiot suffering
tore my face with
razors,
and every depth of pain
became mine
even as it was not mine.
And in unhinged, lunatic rage, I roared
at That Which Is
Fucking bastard!
Inaudible weeping filled my ears,
and unspoken words said,
There was no other way.
And I felt it take my hand
as if it had fallen to its knees
to ask of me that which it had
no right to ask.
I said finally,
"Will I remember?"
The night sky said,
No.
But I was at peace,
because I knew,
somehow,
as I was about to lose
all that I had experienced,
that such places as I had seen,
are,
and such times as I had witnessed,
were,
and
that He and I
were of the same body
after all.

The young one meanders on a journey

2011-01-15T18:34:00.027-10:00

he can see only in part,
rising and falling in crazy-quilt fashion,
restless to be more,
if only he could know what more really was.
He is a strong, thin reed of sinew,
heart-breaking in his hopeless, aching desire
to heal the ancient scars of an indifferent world.
He burns with diamond-flash intensity,
fierce young man's desire
saturating his being.
He bursts with fiery rhythms
and raises his voice in songs
that lift up his intense, wounded soul
and wring it out like a dish rag.
A gentle, naive love
exultantly calls out
from the core of his being,
one that just wants to see
simple kindness replace the
blood-smeared brutality that leers at him, and one
that will keep the creeping bitterness that is coiling
around him at bay.
He wants to be a hero,
if only to reassure himself
that he is at least as good as the others.
The Old One looks from a safe distance as the young heart-man
teeters on the cliff's edge, so strong, so unsure, so brave, and so mad,
all at once.
The tired, cynical old one has seen the last
of his own boyish dreams
boiled away by the heat of blind reality,
and has begun to see

death's patiently waiting face taking shape.

In the young hero-in-aspiration he sees

all that was best in himself, long ago,

before he opened his fingers and let it

trickle away.
He delights in the young one's
still-green, smiling exuberance,
even though the smile masks
darkened pathways of despair.

The Old One sees strength growing in counter-point

to his own body melting away, and a belief

in the possibility of change

where his has vanished.

The Old One throws ropes to the fledgling knight,

because it makes the Old One feel

that he still counts, and because he knows

that when the uncertain, beautiful young one

finally rises to be the equal of the vision he has
for himself,

the sight of it will remind him

that joy is not just for

children, and that life still has its
occasional, battered triumphs.

If I had prayed with her

2010-10-28T00:19:00.001-10:00

in the garden while the others slept,
or joined her on that storm-clouded hill
as the one from Aramathea,
immersed in the ocean trench of his grief,
gently lowered the torn and bloodied corpse,
or if I had risen up in the middle
of the air as the joyous
SHOUT
echoed through skies witnessing
the coming of the Kingdom,
would she have
seen past my formless heart,
and kept me alive
longer?

The grief must come in silence,

2010-10-24T00:30:00.000-10:00

so as not to arouse suspicion
or call attention to
your tiresome pathos
and
your faded drama queen sorrow.
Bypassers must be kept in the dark,
so there can be no audible sobs;
that's for children
and other people who are still
unconcerned
about
their image.

I imagine a day

2010-10-06T20:59:00.003-10:00

when all of them are gathered

in some place fragrant with

sweet flowers,

and everything is finally revealed,

as we might show a child

the person holding the strings

on the marionette.

And many of them will nod knowingly,

perhaps saying, "So THAT'S what that was",

and others will bend their heads down and weep

softly, the grayish terrors finally falling from

their shoulders with a clattering racket.

And some will stare in shocked disbelief,

as the world they drove themselves into

like a tent stake

crumbles beneath their feet.
And others

will laugh gleefully as they watch the

pained expressions of those

who were so sure that the marionette

was a real boy.

Even before it was visible

2010-06-14T00:43:00.007-10:00

its brutal eagerness

made the unsuspecting earth shiver as

it cut through the ground's layers

like a thug carving open a mark.

It burst through the surface throwing

dense, thick wads of glutinous muck in all directions,

its metallic body spinning as it extended twenty

huge unfolding mechanical arms from its central drill.

A death camp sized searchlight emerged

from its top, rotating as if scanning

for escapees slated to be shoveled

directly into the oven.

A deep, iron-voiced roar emerged from its unseen throat,

and as it rotated its arms flung bricks of sharpened steel

with decapitating velocity.

Everyone else trembled in uncomprehending

terror,

clinging to the wounded ground in panting desperation,

but he stood upright and walked in wonderment

right toward it, the projectiles cracking

by his ears delightfully, the light sweeping over him

in movie-premiere glory,

the deafening roar his sit-com theme music.

He smiled as he wondered whether it would

first caress his head or snuggle in his midsection,

laughing at the delicious moment that was carried

on the freezing night air.

They sit on their respective ice floes,

2010-04-19T15:53:00.004-10:00

tethered to each other
by a rope bridge grown tattered
and strained,
but still hoping to remain in
hearing
seeing
and
touching distance,
never wanting to drift apart,
and face
the unseeable currents
on their own.
They know that they will never live
on each other's tiny islands,
but they will keep the rope bridge mended,

even if the reason they do so

will forever remain hidden from their view.

He is forced to stay

2010-04-18T11:33:00.004-10:00

because an abrupt departure

would be considered impolite,

indecorous,

bad form,

even hurtful

(in private ways)

to some of the onlookers.

So he stays,

frozen in amber

like a prehistoric insect,

mutedly visible,

accessible only to

the roughest of tools,

and destined to be a museum exhibit

of passing interest only.

The enormous, laughing woman

2010-03-21T01:50:00.012-10:00

rolled into the room

like a jovial boulder of

blubbering flesh, emanating waves

of saccharine good cheer

more insistent than the Great Boston

Molasses Explosion.

She oozed over to the black and white figure

slumped over in the unpainted wooden chair,

and bellowed in a tornado-siren voice,

"What's wrong, honey? You look flatter

than a roadkill possum!"

Not bothering to look at her,

he replied, almost inaudibly,

"I can't make the fear stop."

The gelatinous mass of femininity

next to him burst out in a good-natured

thunderclap and shouted,

"Well ain't that the shit!"

She wrapped a quivering mass

of friendly arm around his shoulders,

squeezed him like a Moon Pie,

and then snapped his neck like a Popsicle stick.

"Hope that helps, sugar," she chuckled.

Turning like a small planet rotating on its axis,

she exclaimed, to no one in particular,

"Some folks you just can't talk to,"

and orbited back out the doorway.

He stalks his prey

2010-03-11T01:26:00.006-10:00

among the knife-edged rocks

of the bludgeoned landscape,

the circling pterosaurs screeching ravenously,

the death-gray sky stretched over him

like a rack victim.

Eyes brimming with formaldehyde, he zeroes in,

and the shotgun once again coughs out

its bored mutilation.

Trudging without interest through

the liquified remains,

he ignores

the satisfied cries of the reptiles

as they feast and gorge,

and rams two more shells

into the infinite chamber.

There will be no

2010-03-06T12:00:00.006-10:00

joyous reunion tears,

and no one will take the newly arrived pilgrim's

trembling, expectant hand.

The beatific visions will dissolve as the

movie screen

fades to black one last

irrevocable time.

No scores will be settled,

no outrages will be assuaged,

and triumphant justice

will remain silent

and unexpressed.

No idiot tragedies will be undone,

no screaming obscenity of suffering will be reversed,

no lifeless child's body

will ever laugh again in sunlit fields,

no grief will be cradled in silken arms,

no Hollywood fantasies will be fulfilled,

and no union with the All,

the One,

the Ultimate, and

the Real

will be celebrated in

cascades of sense beyond

experience.

Their only consolation

will be that being consoled

will no longer matter,

and all that has been

will no longer be,

as they return to a time

when no time

existed.

The elderly guardians of the ancient gate

2010-02-02T23:53:00.008-10:00

watch with wizened satisfaction

as the heart-shaped young acolytes

clean up its rust,

fix the hinges,

give it yet another

coat of paint,

and once again make

the effusive signs of greeting

seem fresh and

anticipatory.

Their kind has stood by this gate

night and day in every battering

tempest, through every howling

battle, in every

blistering drought,

and through every earth-ripping

upheaval.

They have watched over it

from the moment

the Persecutor's brain

was flattened by the

electrical storm that

transformed him into

the Fool,

the Slave,

and the Prisoner.

The gate stands ready to greet

the only One

who will ever pass through it, the one whose

arrival must surely be waiting

on the cusp of the

morning,

the one whose long-silenced voice

is even now

readying its

glorious proclamations.

Faded invitations pass

from elderly hands to callow ones,

and all gaze toward the

heavens once more,

waiting for signs

and miracles.

He wanders through the jagged landscape

2010-02-02T01:17:00.010-10:00

of the 3-D asylum,

its inmates wrapped in shrouds

made from solemn, decaying manuscripts,

redolent of dried blood,

suffused with the color

of dead seas and prayer-filled

deserts, and

steeped in wrathful love.

They look at him

with pleading, piteous eyes,

hoping to save him from

the worst sufferings of their

fear-saturated

imaginations,

calling out to him

to join the cloud-destined

procession, urging him

onward toward the ladder set in

majestic isolation in the

heart of the windswept field,

its cobbled together rungs

boldly reaching toward eternity.

It is all he can do

to not simply

give in and clamber up

the steps and leap

off the top,

hoping to ascend to

unimaginable dreamworlds

of transcendent peace,

rather than finding out

just how unforgiving

sun-hardened clay

can really be.

The trees are resonating

2010-02-02T01:04:00.004-10:00

to the sounds of the sweet voiced

little dinosaurs,

the most earnest of them calling

I am here

into the twilight of the caldera,

convincing the credulous apes

that the song is for

them,

that its delicate urgency

is for their benefit,

and that the airy songsters

have no darker purpose

but to convince the apes

that the world is meant

for apish ears alone.

The Barbarian's Vacation

2009-08-26T20:45:00.013-10:00

It swims toward him out of the

mists of his idealized vision, its

swelling reality massaging his

tired heart as the view turns from beach to

quilted countryside to coiled

urban warrens in breath-giving

succession.

Its life washes over him

as its densely drawn picture

writing

follows him everywhere,

punctuated by the Roman letters

placed there for illiterate

gaijin like himself. He is

there, after uncounted

years of aspiration, exhilaratingly

lost, swimming in their patient

kindness as they guide him

with quiet grace.

He gapes through the rushing window

at the impossibly dense

concrete, steel, and brick

forest, its towers filled

with lives lived within

a few hundred square feet,

proceeding endlessly across

the Kanto Plain as the megacity

swallows him with indifferent ease.

II.

He gawks at the Blade Runner nightscape,

its inhabitants swirling around him

in purposeful journeys toward

home, or

toward beer and sake,

or toward rendezvous

with quietly waiting lovers

or toward laughing revelers

snaking their way

through the myriad watering holes.

Buildings from fifty years in the future

oversee the ordered tumult,

either in quiet business repose,

or blaring out eye-blazing neon messages

into the humid night, lurid with the

promise of excitement, sex, status,

and the rewards

of money spent in the lunging pursuit

of elusive happiness.

Could this really have been

the place where on that

burning night the heat flipped

the bombers upside down

and the blackened dead

lay piled up in haystacks

of shriveled arms and legs?

No trace of the ravaging fire

remained any more,

as the Shinjuku District's engine

revved higher and higher, the neatly trimmed

business people and the spiky haired

teenagers flowing in eddies of

brightly lit consciousness

all around him.

No elders ventured into this night;

it was no longer their world,

and it was no longer interested

in their gray memories.

III.

Dotted throughout

its meticulously organized

newness, he found

cross-legged Buddhas,

gracefully sloping roofs,

pious monks,

and orange torii gates.

Clap! Clap! to wake up the gods

so that they might hear our petitions.

Wrap the delicately written prayer requests

and toss them into the big incense burner,

fragrant with tradition and hopes.

Gautama is no longer a starved seeker

after the Light.

He is huge, green or bronze, luxuriant

with prosperous fat, bowed toward,

prayed to as he hoped never to be,

idolized, frozen in poses of Bodi-like

contemplation, while surrounded

by the gold

and sumptuous decoration

he scorned and fled from

in life.

The ancient native faith for this world

(please bless our new Lexus),

Siddhartha's doctrines for the next

(please keep me from rebirth.)

The sweet-faced, petite guide told him

that a million worshipers

packed the Meiji park on New Year's Day,

all imploring the ancestral spirits for good luck

in the unfolding year to come.

He imagined them all leaving

afterward on the immaculate trains and buses,

perhaps to hit the 7-11

or the neighborhood McDonald's,

ears pressed to cell phones, and anxious eyes

checking Blackberries, the world of the kami

now left behind.

IV.

It was as if they lived to be polite,

generous, helpful, and tolerant

of his bumbling, child-like attempts

to communicate in the clipped,

subtle music of their language.

They were unsurprised by his tall,

aging Scots-Irish appearance; they

were old pros at this, after all.

Sweet faced children on school trips

sometimes joyously said "Hello!" to

him as they passed, bravely using the strange

word to talk to one of Them.

In the lobby one little

sprite tried out "Good morning!"

He said, Ohayo gozaimas'! back to the

bold young explorer, much to the boy's delight.

And everywhere

in every clean street

and every safe night time

and every right-on-the-dot train door opening

their diligence and their

quiet pride were in evidence.

He wondered how it came to be

that they had raised the ordinary

up to the extraordinary,

and whether the white-gloved

men on the Shinkansen really knew

how abashed they made him feel

about the slacker tribe

of which he was a typically

disheveled member.

He could find the quiet parks

and the elegant gilded temples

of the guidebooks and postcards.

He reveled in the lazy, spoiled deer

nuzzling him in the park by the huge temple,

and his eye was caught by the occasional

old woman venturing forth in the kimono

that a proper lady always went out in public in.

He was awed in the presence of the ancient

castles that had stood as bastions in blood-drenched

landscapes of centuries past, and he found himself

reverent during the quiet dignity and fussy etiquette

of the tea ceremony.

But he knew

that the giant train stations

and the fleets of little cars beetling their way

through the perfectly maintained streets

and the thundering factories

and crowded docksides

and the endless delivery trucks

and the ubiquitous manga figures

leering out at him

and the crazy game shows

and the garish Pachinko parlors

and the school uniforms

and the office lights still burning at 8 PM

said more about their world than

Fuji-san

ever could.

He was under no illusion

that his brief incursion

into their precision guided,

buckwheat noodled world

had revealed their nature to him.

He was smart enough to know

that the preserved villages were a past

they kept alive more for him than

for themselves. He would never

know their Zen essence,

their private anguish,

their secret hopes,

their unspoken desires.

Beneath the silly t-shirts

and conservative suits were souls

that he would never see.

He was not of their tribe;

he was not of their tongue.

He had merely dipped his foreign toes into

their crowded world, seeing its surfaces

only.

He knew something of their story;

he knew the meaning of the empty,

furniture-devoid rooms where their shoguns

had ruled with imperious command.

He knew of the upheaval those like him

had brought to this land.

But he did not yet know them;

and like a novice defeated by a

puzzle box

or a koan, he left

wanting to once again

immerse himself

in the smiling mystery

of the islands that obscured

more than they revealed.

The air is hot and silent

2009-03-11T01:50:00.006-10:00

and the room is lit

by the yellowed light

of an ever deepening

afternoon.

I look at the leathery works

of dried musings before me,

the volumes

lined up like grizzled elders

on shelves bent under the weight

of doubt,

hardly daring to run my

clumsy, calloused hands

over them

lest they crumble into dust

under the artless weight

of my half-forgotten

question.

Do they contain

mysteries

and

revelations

and

Everests

of hidden glories,

or are they merely

more of the same

cocksure nonsense

that has led me in

paths grown deep

with the gouges

of my weathered

circular journey?

I never suspected

2009-02-04T23:28:00.006-10:00

(lost as I was on a grey,
cold shoreline)
that they were
(or would be)
and that they would
be
what I thought I'd

never have
and that they would
affirm
that which I didn't know I
was
and that they would
so easily
demand
my once frozen love,
my self-surprising care,
my night time fears for them,

and my almost abandoned

future,
and make me
happier
than any man has a right to be
to give them.

They hide out of sight

2009-01-24T19:50:00.003-10:00

in the mud-slicked hollows of

corrugated slums,

snatching from the

fattened, possessive world

whatever

can be clutched in hands

grown old by six.

They gather in the sewers

of night, clinging to

dank walls

while above them

the adult world rolls

through the city

like a blind

armored division,

scattering fearful leavings

in its tracks but

oblivious to the scurrying

little gullets

that pinch unnoticed pieces

from it

and hoard them in the

unseen vaults

of stillborn

days to come.

It soars up

2009-01-23T18:06:00.007-10:00

to the very foot of the

Awful and Glorious Throne

and turns away from

the sunbright Presence

to fly to Andromeda and inspect

the nether regions of its

innermost spiral, dancing

through fields of shattered

potsherds that were once

iron-bottomed worlds.

It descends into the maelstrom

of bare-nerved bloodlust,

cringing at the sight of

trembling innocents

crushed under the

banal weight of grinning

barbarism.

Shivering with dread, it

curls up in airy dreamlands

of mercy, cradling itself

in the arms of warm-breathed

mammals, until it jumps

into the breathless

depths of desire and

lovefierce touch,

careening along the way

to a (distant?) scene

of watching the garden one last

moment, eyes brimming

with the end of a thousand

unwritten stories.

It builds

2009-01-18T01:49:00.004-10:00

into a silent crescendo

at the end of all beginnings,

gathering all the chains

into its ethereal hands,

pushing at the boundary

of straining, protesting possibility

until all has been swept

into its savagely beautiful

singular embrace.

It will abolish every why,

evaporate every how,

and break down the last

barriers between here

and not-here,

now and

not-now,

and I and Not-I.

The final Amen will ring out,

and it will vanish into itself,

waiting for the next

careless fluctuation

to let it roar out of the

Jack-in-the Box

once again.

I struggle to pull myself

2009-01-08T00:52:00.005-10:00

into that tiny little world

where delirious points of nothing

gleefully appear

in two places at once.

They spin maniacally

as I try to grab them,

and slip through

my hands

with mocking randomness,

daring me to follow them

as they roar silently

and bounce motionlessly

off the daynight

zig zagged valley walls

of their inside-out

little universe.

"OK, kid, it's like this",

2009-01-03T01:21:00.005-10:00

the grizzled veteran said to the

bright-eyed neophyte

sitting in soft expectation

before him.

"You gotta dish it out hard and mean,

'cause if you don't,

they're gonna kick you where

it counts,

and you gotta get your foot in there

first.

They're gonna cut ya, see?

They're gonna try and take

your goddam head off and

laugh about it.

They don't give a rat's ass

what happens to you, so

you gotta cave their faces in

you gotta be strong

and not look back

and not think there was

any other way

you coulda dealt with

the sonsuvbitches."

With that, the young one

rose, went over

to the battle-scarred

warrior,

kissed him softly on the forehead,

and slashed the old guy's throat

from ear to ear.

And he could have sworn,

as he turned and walked out,

that he heard a strangled voice say,

"good boy".

There were so many of them

2009-01-03T01:09:00.007-10:00

the line stretched out

for uncounted blocks,

its members holding

themselves

in various postures

gut-shot betrayal,

vein-bulging anger,

curious bewilderment,

heart-lacerated sorrow,

drowned resignation.

He tried to look

each one in the face

(if it was still visible)

and haltingly offered

his croaking, useless regrets,

sometimes cringing

in the embarrassment

of a knifebladed moment,

at others dropping his head

along with theirs, letting

the tears flow in

twisted remembrance,

begging their pardon,

and reaching his

well-worn hand

around their misty

shoulders,

grabbing only air

and speaking only

in a

monologue.

He keeps his words

2009-01-03T00:58:00.003-10:00

dressed up in their Sunday Best,

and sends them out to proselytize

the natives,

and yet they seem to come back

dressed in ragamuffin style,

running their happy fingers

under his chin, guffawing

rudely, and holding up

a rhinestone-edged mirror

to his noble madness.

He felt the barely discernible

2009-01-01T02:19:00.002-10:00

sensation of reptilian skin

being sloughed off

in sheets no longer vile

but now simply pitiable, and

a new portrait appeared to be

spreading over the palimpsest

that had seen so many

exhausted and hesitant

previous incarnations.

Was it sunlight

creasing the indifferent

horizon to his right,

or was it an odd luminescence

being generated from within

a self liberated at last

from childish things?

If they didn't have the guts

2008-12-20T00:36:00.005-10:00

to grab what was right

in front of them

like a man, he barked,

that was their fault.

He saw the fish,

cleaned them out

right down the gold

in their back teeth,

and made them

thank him for it.

He vacuumed out the register

with a bent smile,

tore up his tab,

and spat in the face

of the one guy

who had stepped forward

with hesitant justice.

"Go ahead, loser,

take a swing at me",

he sneered,

"put it right here",

as he jabbed his middle

finger

to his chin.

He then put the swag

in a tablecloth,

and laughed as he

stripped them of the

last of their

expired-code

dignity.

It closes in on him

2008-12-20T00:28:00.003-10:00

when the last life preserver

has floated away,

and the molecules dance

in his ears,

and distant, unearthly

rooster shrieks

sound their absurd

proclamations of

midnight harem ownership.

There will be no

Get Out Jail Free Card,

there will be no

overtime,

there will be no

recount, there will be no

favors for Old Times' Sake.

And if he has any items

to declare,

he better get

off the Potassium-Argon clock,

because someday

he won't be around

for them to

not notice.

She was a real tyro,

2008-12-20T00:05:00.005-10:00

I mean a rock-'em-and-sock-'em

give 'em both barrels

KAPOW of a woman,

five feet five, spittin' out nails

like pumpkin seeds,

a goddam piss and vinegar

QUEEN

ridin' a runaway freight train and

laughin' like a maniac.

She had a body like a knee

to the groin,

eyes colder than rebar,

and a face that packed more punch

than a friggin' PROM night.

And when she kicked me

face first through the

bar room window,

I was thankin' my lucky stars

that she'd at least left me

one cigarette,

three dimes,

and her number

so we could crank it up

next time

I was in town.

They walk by me

2008-12-13T13:06:00.004-10:00

suddenly,

as if they had appeared

out of

the miasma of an

all-obscuring fog,

their features only

sketchy in appearance

but filled with portents

and signs,

sometimes heavy

with meaning

and affect,

sometimes only

fleeting and hurrying

their way out my

bemused attention.

Some of them can still

make my heart race and my

lost fire flare up;

others are carrying

Rwanda machetes,

ready to make me howl

silently once again, and

still others are mere

elements of a crazy pastiche

composed of the detritus

of the mundane.

They are all suspects

in the Great Conspiracy,

and all of them

are to be mistrusted,

as I make room for new

walkers

ready to surprise me

on other rainy mornings.

No faded monster

2008-12-10T23:42:00.005-10:00

from that time

when our softly naked skin

was open to its

razor wire predations

can be allowed to win more

degraded triumphs

over us.

It cannot be allowed

to reprise its fetid act

again and again.

We must see its face,

and know that it

can no longer reach us

with its scabrous arms.

We have no time to let its

tired, ancient barbarism

drag us away from the

life we have built in defiance

of it, and from those who now

feed off of the love we have

paid such a dear price

to nurture and preserve.

We cannot let it drag us into its

indigo lair once again.

We are bigger than it is now,

and every day we live

in contempt of it,

laughing at it,

despising its broken grip on us,

is a day when it can no longer

make us cry out

or freeze our legs in place.

We are needed elsewhere now;

we have no time to allow

that which no longer is

to keep us away

from that which can

still be.

A despised, hated empty suit,

2008-12-09T19:05:00.006-10:00

grown weary with rapine

and fog-clouded judgment;

unwanted, useless machines

sitting in joyless snow;

old titans crumbling under

the weight of brazen avarice;

masses living in fear of

being swept into canyons

whose floors cannot be seen;

grasping, clutching appetite,

its open maw obscene with

voraciousness;

warriors in distant horizons,

left to deal with slow motion

catastrophes;

blind "prophets" yammering

poison into frightened ears;

lives dragging on in routinized

mindlessness;

seething hatred straining the

leash of weakening restraint;

paper houses swept away

in torrents of foolish regret;

massive hopes placed on

slender shoulders.

It is the Child

2008-12-08T23:52:00.013-10:00

of distant upheaval, having

erupted from Gaia's womb

with insolent energy,

hot tempered and restless,

a brazen interloper

in the community of land.

Blasted into submission

by the implacable depths

and relentless skies,

ravished by raw life,

it was made yielding and pliable,

a malachite gemstone

surrounded by the arms

of its adopted mother.

Come stand in its

indulgent night

with me

and feel the

strength

of its

gentle infinity.

Mama

2008-12-06T11:31:00.007-10:00

Mine
I go
Look what I do
I want that
I like it
Can I have more
You promised
(mad at you)
I know, I know
Hey, let go of that
Here, you can have some
(aren't I good)
Do you want to walk with me
(I like you)
Why do I have to?
(you're unfair)
Christmas is my favorite time
(I get presents)
Did you get all the problems done
(I can't do this myself)
Yeah, she thinks she's so special
(wish she liked me)
Should I go out for football
If you loved me you would
(I want you and you should help me with that)
Sure, I'll do it for you
(you owe me)
Well, Mom and Dad, I know you two
haven't been happy
(how can you do this to me)
(good, I'm sick of you two fighting anyway)
(you son of a bitch Dad)
(screw both of you)
(I'll never cry in front of you)
I got in!
(I'm on my way)
This homework sucks
(I'm in over my head)
Yeah, I'll go to the party with you guys
(Maybe I'll get laid)
(if not I'll just get really wasted)
I can't right now, I'm really
into Karamazov.
(I've finally found something worth reading)

(I can't believe all the bullshit I've wasted

my time on)

He's the best professor I've ever had

(he knows more than I ever will)

(he makes me forget all this other crap)

That was fantastic

(I hoped you liked it too)

(But I got off anyway, so...)

So tell me all about your day

(I don't care really)

(But I like you, and you care)

(So I'll listen and pretend to be interested)

It will be you and me forever

(Love is great)

(I can't believe you really love me back)

(It's too good to be true)

Yeah, work was good today

(it was a complete pain in the ass)

Sure, Bill, we'll do it your way

(idiot)

That's the most beautiful baby ever

(and she is)

(and she's ours)

(and I'm scared as hell when I hold her)

(how could I love anyone this much)

OK, we'll move to a bigger house

(hey, whatever you want, babe)

Tell me about your day

(just as long as I don't have to tell you

about mine)

So how long was dad alive after the heart attack

(oh my God)

(Daddy)

(why have you left)

(I should have returned your calls)

(thank God that's over)

I'll do my best, sir

(it's about time)

(finally some decent money)

(now what)

I know I should listen more

(whatever you say)

Hey, we both decide on the kids' schooling

(they're just as much mine as yours)

(another power struggle)

(I know what's best)

We'll get through this

(God, please just make everything

come out all right)

The doctor said it's benign, dear

(thank you God, I'll be better now)

(darling, I don't know what I'd do without you)

(she really is everything to me)

Well, now you know what a hangover is

(stupid kid)

(serves you right)

(I should smack you)

(please don't hurt me like that again)

I've never been so proud of you

(you're the best daughter in the world)

(my baby girl)

(how did I get this old)

The woman you're marrying is terrific

(she's just like your Mom)

(I hope you know what you're doing)

(now maybe you'll stick to a real job)

We don't seem to make love as much any more

(am I losing it)

(it's not like it used to be)

(I guess you're bored too)

(I get so tired now)

You don't have to call me sir or Boss

(but don't forget that I am)

Movin' a little slow this morning

(I didn't do anything and I still hurt)

So I guess that makes you Grandma

(my God is he gorgeous)

(it's better this time around)

(another part of my youth dies)

I want to thank everyone who's helped me

out over the years

(I never want to see half of you again)

Sure, retirement is great

(what the hell do I do now)

(I guess my contribution is finished)

(if it went by that fast then how much time...)

Yeah, my kids are the best

(but they didn't always listen)

(couldn't they have done better)

(hey, their problems are theirs, not mine)

You and me to the end

(who else would have put up with me)

(there's parts of you I'll never know)

(I miss the fire)

(I miss how many times we could do it

when we were new)

(you've always been there for me, and I don't know why

but I'll take it)

(I'll forgive you if you forgive me)

(You will always be the definition of love)

(I'm so sorry for the times I let you down)

(I hope I've been good to you)

Six months, is it?

(Please God, not yet)

(I'm not done yet)

(Just let me see her wedding)

(I'll beat this)

Oh, that's better

(it's really, really good to not hurt)

I love you

(I don't know what it all was)

(I don't know what's ahead)

(thank you for loving me back)

(you're more than I deserved)

Darling

(the light is so beautiful)

He had helped turn Edo's books

2008-12-05T00:31:00.008-10:00

into luxurious white ash that night,

and the heat they generated

as they gave up the ghost

had buffeted his B-san as if the air itself

had grabbed them by the lapels.

His nostrils had never recovered

from the scent of over-done bacon,

and he asked why he had been assigned

the role

of angry Yahweh.

"It's a mystery

known only to Him", came

the sage response,

and he was at rest,

knowing that the crab boil

in the canal

was not his fault.

His body swayed unconsciously

2008-12-03T16:43:00.004-10:00

as the fiery righteousness

engulfed the tremulous morning,

lifting him to lofty plains of

sunlit imaginings.

He closed his eyes as the

Spirit whooshed and bounced

all over the room,

now caressing him,

now slaying him,

now tearing laughter out of him,

now crushing him,

now putting him in the Upper Room

where he spoke in words

unheard in millennia.

Transported back to terra firma,

he saw the sanctuary

in surprising, gentle clarity,

and headed out into

the irrelevant Ordinary.

The onlookers

2008-11-25T01:55:00.008-10:00

gawked at him as he set up

the tattered display (the one

with the frayed posters)

and began in earnest.

Words flooded from him in

Mississippian volume, lapping up

the sandbags that guarded his

bemused audience.

He then flung buckets

of explosively colored paint

in all directions, like a canine

dadaist shaking off

the wet remains

of the Louvre.

The Pollockized watchers blinked

in unanimous bafflement.

He paced and ranted, reciting

every line he could remember,

punctuating his thespian odds and ends

with St. Vitus dances of abandonment.

He sent up acrid smoke signals;

he bashed log drums with mad delight;

he fired multiple flares

into the puzzled sky,

ululating all the while,

and for the big finish, he stylishly

severed a non-essential toe.

Drenched and gasping, lying in

spent prostration, he said,

"well?"

A voice replied,

"could we see that again?"

Three Haikus (Shichi)

2008-11-23T23:56:00.003-10:00

Motionless I sit

contemplating unreal dreams;

the wan future shrugs.

Swirling ghosts grimace;

I laugh at their countenance.

Their faces dissolve.

Blessings fall quickly,

the waiting land shares their joy;

verdant smiles respond.

It is now merely

2008-11-23T23:42:00.003-10:00

a shadow imprint,
a blind-sided image fixed indelibly

on a ruined wall.

Was it ever more

than two absurd dimensions,

and two absurd people,

proclaiming endless fealty

and devotion

while all the while

Fat Man

was getting ready

to party?

She waits for the world

2008-11-22T00:17:00.010-10:00

to pass away from her patient

endurance, and sets her eyes

to a time beyond time,

and a place beyond self,

where the wearying

ordinary trials

of entangled lives

can no longer hold imperium

over her.

She yearns for the

Presence which speaks to her

in a soundless voice,

engulfing her in the ecstasy

of solitary Oneness,

and freeing her at last

from the tyranny of hours

and the stale trivia

of tomorrow.

She will be dissolved in its

ineffable Truth,

and her coarse body

will have no more import

than a cottony

seedling

cast away

on an anonymous

midsummer afternoon.

Soft specters

2008-11-20T01:39:00.006-10:00

visit him at night,

curling up next to him

in unutterably tender,

yielding love,

needing nothing

but his warmly proffered

nearness,

and never failing to

speak to him

in voiceless words,

expressing all with

an easy sigh of

contentment,

happy to let him have

dominion over

the tiny kingdom

of the welcoming bed.

It stood before him

2008-11-18T23:07:00.006-10:00

both invisible

and impervious.

He had bloodied himself

countless times

in mad

rushes up its quietly murderous

slopes.

On every occasion

he had ended up

dazed and shredded

at its indifferent foot,

a spent, dejected knot

of confused, helpless

bewilderment.

The dried remains of his

tiny assaults had begun to

reveal tantalizing hints

about its true dimensions,

but he no longer had the

ability to rouse himself

for another Banzai charge;

it was easier just to make camp

and play dark music in the

waning light, opening

weary scars

once again.

They moved through the frigid

2008-11-15T11:27:00.004-10:00

landscape where they had slain

the life-giving ones

for more seasons than their

sacred tales could account.

Father North lashed them

more mercilessly than they had

ever had known;

huge offerings

were left at the side of

the trail in tiny, heart-drenched

bundles.

The lead men could see

the herd receding in the

distance, barely visible in the

dancing white sea that engulfed

them.

The elders quickly gathered,

and pointed eastward,

toward the future.

They would venture out onto the

endless ice, and follow

the prey

to the ends of an earth

they were sure

lay just past the farthest ridge

in the faceless

distance.

It wends its way

2008-11-14T20:24:00.004-10:00

through the labyrinthine forest

and sings of its lost origins deep

in the cool remnants

of hot-blooded sensation.

Ruled by the giddy dictatorship

of sheer caprice, it bursts

through helpless walls of

accumulated yesterdays

like a tank round splintering

a log, waiting for its chance

to take its place

among the strange creatures

that have made their hurried debuts

on the wet stage

of the eternally receding

now.

He could feel himself

2008-11-07T20:29:00.004-10:00

unclenching, like a fist relaxing

after someone pulls the plug

on a simmering brawl.

He unfolded from his defensive

crouch,

and as he did the deflated demons

slid off his back in helpless

confusion, protesting feebly

in the morning light.

Breath filled his being once again

and the ossified seals on his

heart were sundered.

He stood, relieved,

silently contemplating a future

that once again seemed to him

filled with possibility,

rather than the

grim decay of lost hope

and trembling dread.

And as he looked at the

youngest one, her toddler face

filled with pirate-like mischief,

his smile

became an easy laugh.

All my energy is going into the election.

2008-08-30T00:17:00.001-10:00

I'm a political junkie and right now my on-line life is centered around getting Barack Obama and Joe Biden elected on 4 November. So if my output seems very severely limited, that's probably the chief reason. I hope to post once and a while, though.

He can set down

2008-08-26T21:39:00.004-10:00

the rusted, pock-marked razor blade

that he has used so often

to gouge out pieces of his

fear-riven corpus.

He has drawn enough blood with it

to inundate a thousand tight chested

nights.

It is still possible

that he could avoid

its final shuddering cut,

if he can decide, finally

that it is beneath

his dormant

contempt.

They couldn't see the final scene then,

2008-08-16T11:53:00.007-10:00

when they both inhaled in surprise

at that first random meeting,

never expecting anyone to grab them

by the neck with such happy ease,

sensing the presence of

one who was different from all

the rest of the boys and girls

they had frittered away countless

empty hours with.

They talked until three, and he

ran his near-trembling finger

along the electrified fence

of her right hand, wanting to make love

to her right then and there, but

knowing it was too soon,

even though she wanted him

inside of her more than any other

wish she had ever conceived.

Long telephone calls dominated

the days that followed; their desire

overflowed and swept over the

flood plains of their restraint

on their fourth date.

It had all happened so

unpredictably, and now lives

that were only possible in theory

had been launched, and children

loved more intensely than either of them

could ever have known it was possible to

love anything

were drifting casually through

the lived-in rooms of their

warm house.

Did they have any inkling

of the moment

when he would look up

from the hospital bed one last

time, and his eyes would once

again be 20 years old,

and that in that last instant

all that had been

would be swept away

and they would once again be lost

in the soaring newness

of each other's hopes?

He smiles with frozen grace,

2008-08-16T11:39:00.003-10:00

letting his sweet glazed mind

drift into Elysian Fields

of numb delight,

blocking all poison tipped

spears, deftly tip-toeing

through fields of

antipersonnel mines

aimed directly at his gut,

wearing wonderfully efficient

earplugs that screen out

the cries of the wounded

until they resemble only

a distant chorus of sighing,

bearable lamentation.

He will live in bouquets

of vinyl flowers and wax fruit,

happily embracing his narcotized

mannequin and congratulating himself

on bringing the dead tree

Hallmark card

to life so easily.

I could hear the voices

2008-08-16T11:05:00.002-10:00

in the after bedtime darkness

but I couldn't quite make out

their smoke-embedded

words, nor catch the drift

of the deep-hued sentences

not meant

for me.

They were distant signals

from another world,

spoken in a language

that was still largely

Mayan to me,

harbingers of the times

I would be speaking

in tones of reminiscence

or cynical bitterness

or casual eroticism,

sending out my own

mysterious messages

to other open-mouthed

listeners.

Their story began in desiccated hills

2008-08-12T22:58:00.001-10:00

and fields stripped bare so utterly
that even the rats starved,
the glorious aftermath
of rancid war, blind revolt, and ravening
soldier-locusts.
Tender minds that should have nestled
in warm repose to hear bedtime stories
saw adults ripping their teeth
into the tough hides
of dead neighbors.
Wandering helpless from the corpses
of exhausted parents,
they clung to each other in the
maelstrom of the dust-covered Gehenna,
their numbers thinned by the machine guns
of the proud, blocking Chekists.
They lived by stealing from the dying,
hiding in the indifferent forests,
and learning to forget the last remnants
of kindness.
Their children, born of rape,
and careless whores,
shrieked with delight as they
terrorized the soft little intellectuals
from Moscow, kicking in the faces
of the politicals who tried to stop them.
They ruled the camps, using kids
as bets in card games, and cutting
off the heads of anyone stupid enough
to object to their missing rations.
When the betrayed soldiers flooded in,
the former rulers were deposed, but their
descendants found new empires in the
concrete slab prisons, and the tattoos slithered
across their muscled torsos to keep score
of every plunging knife and cracking skull.
Now, the great grandsouls of the
original Children’s Crusade
rule the nights with shiny automatics,
collect the protection money from trembling
shopkeepers, and smear the pavement
with the brains of those who have had
a less distinguished patrimony.

He jumps frantically,

2008-08-09T11:46:00.004-10:00

trying to see the source of the distant
cries and moans that have
disturbed his magenta night
and awakened the grinning
demons from their shallow
rest.
His heart races in tempo
to his helpless fear,
going too fast in the straightaway,
and heading dangerously
for the wall.
He strains his ears, climbs
on to a ridiculous little
stepladder, and holds up
a sparkler to signal his
profound concern.
Engulfed in Plastic Jesus compassion,
choking tears seize him, and
while walking into his bear cave
he almost trips over
the darkened figure gasping like
a washed up alewife
near the moss-covered entrance.
He once again shakes his head
in noble despair
and unloads a .38 clip into
the faces of the
screeching devils.

It takes all of his effort

2008-08-08T00:32:00.002-10:00

to keep the balloon fully inflated,

so that it still casts the same

impressive shadow

on the easily awed onlookers

who throng in wet clumps

below it.

And around his torso he can feel

the cold fingers digging their

jagged nails into his reflexively

clenching rib cage,

reminding him that the day

is approaching

when the last of the gas

will sputter out

and his altitude

will dip low enough

for all the rubes

to get a good look at him,

and either lynch him,

laugh at him,

or simply bury his

comically withered

body.

No one will mourn you

2008-08-08T00:05:00.005-10:00

if,

in the blindness of your stumbling,

maliciously indifferent,

odyssey,

you let the only refuge you

will ever have

slip through your

idiot fingers.

There will be no solemn line

of pensive, drawn faces,

no whispered expressions

of consolation,

no embraces and perfunctory

offers of "anything I can do."

It has been given to you

by accident.

You were made from it,

but not for it,

and if you squander

its ageless inheritance,

there will be no rescue,

no escape,

no harbor from your

self-generated

storm.

And from the outside,

no one will notice

anything different,

if they ever noticed

anything

to begin with.

I still don't know

2008-08-04T12:09:00.005-10:00

how he came through the scalding mist

of his own fear,

he who was so lacking

in skin that it was as if all of his

huddled nerve endings

were fully exposed to the

merciless taunts

of a world cheering for his self-immolation.

How did he survive the axe-blows

to his flimsy skull, the ones that

rendered him

a flailing,

helpless refugee

in the Minotaur's Cave

of his own life?

Was it a world grown suddenly

merciful,

or was it he who grew more

merciless

and resigned to the futility

of hope?

He hurls his vaporous roars

2008-08-01T22:52:00.004-10:00

through the dank atmosphere

of his airless room,

tearing out fearful trails of

glistening viscera in

the fevered landscape

of his imaginary battlefield.

He triumphs inexorably

over foes who will never know

of his humorous, impotent

existence, and the red-hot

explosions of his stammering

Two Minute Hates

stir the detritus

from the bottom of his

cup of ranting misery.

He murders his enemies

in hellishly creative ways,

celebrating his paper-doll

savagery

from the safety of a life

grown rusted

from lack of use.

It goes in and out of focus,

2008-07-31T22:47:00.001-10:00

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

2008-07-30T00:40:00.008-10:00

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

2008-07-08T23:01:00.003-10:00

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.

2008-07-05T19:33:00.001-10:00

Guess my mind has been elsewhere.

He walks through

2008-07-03T22:44:00.007-10:00

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

2008-07-03T22:28:00.004-10:00

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.

I have never understood

2008-06-28T11:01:00.003-10:00

how they could
stand in the wistful daylight,
their heartbreaking young faces
overflowing with courage and strength,
their eyes filled with longing
for glorious annihilation,
and tie the sacred scarf
around their heads,
climb into
the flying funeral urns
and hurl themselves
at the other brave young men
in the hopes of reversing
the foregone verdict.
If there really were a hell
its deepest and cruelest recesses
would be filled with all those
who have convinced
the young men
of a thousand eras
that their greatest task
was not to grow into
honorable old age,
but rather that the
zenith of nobility
was for them to throw their
shredded, severed guts
into the endless river
of squandered human
tomorrows
for the sake of battles
that no amount of
priceless young lives
could ever be
worth.

They stood there

2008-06-28T10:45:00.003-10:00

in the fading daylight
of the Burnt Over District,
weeping the most disbelieving
tears ever wrung from human
eyes, while the laughing
mockery of their neighbors
still burned in their ears.
"What, not gone up yet? Wife didn't leave
you here to burn, did she?"
Brother William wept more bitterly
than all the rest.
He had counted
the twenty-three hundred weeks
so carefully; how could He not
have come with a shout
and ushered His flock
to Eternal Life?
Many shook their heads
at the spectacle, and concluded
that some people just didn't
know how to read the signs and
Scriptures accurately.
Didn't they know the End of Days
wouldn't be arriving for at least
five more years?

He gazes at the old pictures

2008-06-28T10:24:00.005-10:00

in the dusty history text
and sometimes he wants
to jump into them
and see for himself the
crimson aftermath of
Antietam, even at the risk
of destroying the last remnants
of his childish romance
with that distant carnage.
He wants to
rub shoulders with the Hasidim
on the sidewalks
of 1900 New York,
to smell the stench
of the horse-infested streets,
and to know that these people
were real, that the day
in which they lived
was as physical and as warm-blooded
as his is.
He wants to feel the breeze
coming off of San Francisco Bay
on that day in 1890 when the town
was still raw and pulsing
with the energy of naked money lust
and thick-muscled power.
It's all right there,
if only he could plunge into them
and look around for a while.
The only condition he asks for is for
the portal to stay open long enough
for him to grab the edge of his desk
and pull himself back into
the 3-D cinema
of right now;
he wants only to be a visitor,
not the guy standing
second from the left
for someone else
to wonder about.

In those scenes

2008-06-26T22:21:00.011-10:00

I always handle it better.
I always face down the idiots
and drown out the frenzied
combatants
with my outraged roar.
I always show the stern face
of hoplite courage
and I never cower
in helplessness.
I always have so much
easy confidence,
and adulation for my
shining performance
washes over me
in iridescent waves.
And she's always there
for me in wicked passion,
left in happy exhaustion by my
matchless abilities.
There is only love,
comfort,
triumph.
joy,
security,
vengeance,
and
laughter.
The scripts all have
Frank Capra endings
and the man basking
in the screen writer's
sugared sentimentality
is always Our Hero, The Kid,
The Man, The Winner.
Too bad the actual film
was ad-libbed
from start
to finish.
I could have been
a star.

He walked out into

2008-06-25T22:33:00.005-10:00

the tingling air
and ripped the top of
his own skull off, laughing
at his presumption.
A Pandora's box of raving
lunatics erupted from his
brazenly open cranium, only
to wither in the heat of the
lounging day.
He sat comfortably on
the pock-marked battleground
and looked around it
with unaccustomed calm
as the Harpies died their
unmourned deaths.
An enigmatic smile crossed
his face, and he could almost sense
the soft-focused
Florentine countryside
framing him.

He had seen many hunts

2008-06-24T21:43:00.009-10:00

and met the shivering test
of many winters.
Now, he had crossed over
to the New Land, and
many heavy tasks
had to be borne.
His woman understood why
she could not come into
the Cave of Dreams,
and stood in brave sorrow
at its mouth.
His kinsmen bore him in
and carefully arranged his
no longer stiffened body
in its intimate crouch.
The shaman ordered the
traveling brother's head
pointed toward the north,
and around the Traveler
was arrayed a tender ring
of magical flowers,
to delight him and guide him
safely to the other realm.
A spear was placed in his hands,
the men offered him good wishes
and they solemnly ordered him
not to kill all the deer
before they could join him.

I don't believe in

2008-06-21T11:03:00.002-10:00

the mythology of fate,
the predetermined script
held in the hands of those
to whom the gods themselves
bow in helplessness.
But I am glad nonetheless
that the churning Universe
created us in its blind
ferment,
and allowed me the privilege
of meeting the woman in the
quilted coat on that dreary
February night,
an event that changed
the biography of one
individual from the story of
withered pipe dreams
and dark loathing to
one where the light
of fragile hope was again
reborn, and a chance at
redemption
miraculously resurrected.

It does no good

2008-06-21T10:55:00.003-10:00

to think that you know
when in fact it will
always be a mystery novel
with chapters missing
and characters appearing
with deus ex machina
improbability.
The best you can hope for
is to sign the armistice
and to find your place
in the arms of those
who have forgiven your
trespasses
as you have forgiven
theirs.

They wrap around me

2008-06-21T10:40:00.003-10:00

like invisible spider silk,
encompassing my being
with more threads than
I can possibly know
or even hope to count.
They were spun
in the separation of gravity
from the rest of the birth process.
They were spun in the RNA world.
They were spun by the spike-furred
little animal that retreated, terrified,
into the trees to escape the
carnivorous wrath of the saurians.
They were spun by the hungry woman
using her lousy spine to stand up in
the tall grass.
They were spun by the tribes making
epic journeys through
landscapes of sun-blasted cruelty
and ice-stormed
mercilessness.
They were spun by
desperate men and women
casting away
all they had known
and running to embrace
glittering promises.
And they are now spun by
multitudes of strangers
from every landscape
ever known
and every time ever experienced,
and I spin my own web for them,
(although neither of us knows it),
and they are just as entangled in my
blind struggles
as I am in theirs.

In the present

2008-06-18T23:34:00.003-10:00

they flood me
with great, windshield-paralyzing
sheets of words and blinding walls
of imagery,
so I push down the corridor
and the flood diminishes somewhat
but still roars at me at near-gale
strength.
So I push
farther and the torrent seems to
settle down some more,
and I need my searchlight
as I head into the
darker reaches.
In those nether regions the
voices dwindle to a few,
(though sometimes astonishing
choruses sing at me in brief
eruptions)
and I have to take their word
for what I'm seeing.
And farther back there are only
shredded paragraphs,
then disembodied sentences,
then words floating like
wreckage,
and then all is silence
with only bones and
shattered pottery
lying about in
taunting
disarray.

I listened

2008-06-18T22:31:00.004-10:00

to both of them
speaking to me
through the veil
of the darkening years,
their words pinning me
helplessly to the ground.
He had witnessed his family
taken in the selection,
and later
rained down upon him
in gray ash.
And the One Whose Name
Must Never Be Spoken had ceased
to exist at that moment.
She stood at the gates of Birkenau
with tears of gratitude in her
joyous eyes, feeling an
overwhelming closeness
to Him, and knowing for the
first time how the Lawgiver
had felt seeing that which
was beyond sight.
And I realized
in hearing them
that there were arguments
in which I had no right
under heaven and earth
to say anything.

Its cathedrals are not

2008-06-17T21:29:00.004-10:00

the product of leaden,
patient devotion,
but rather were
brought forth
by the unconscious,
multi-million year
unfolding
of an island's
birth pangs.
Its spires loom
with unperturbed
authority,
and in its
impossible cliffsides,
myriad valleys, and
sudden, darkened
sea caves
can be found
the refutation
of all that is
ordinary,
and the reward
for patient
surrender.

(In honor of the Na Pali Coast)

Three Haikus (Roku)

2008-06-13T22:18:00.002-10:00

Pictures of old days
wrap their fingers around me.
I hear faint echoes.

A darting gecko
seeks protection in our home;
Kane shelters it.

We bid fond goodnight;
we embrace with practiced love;
we are one spirit.

He spoke a language

2008-06-13T21:22:00.009-10:00

descended from the tongue
of Cicero and Ovid,
and he stepped ashore
on the sweltering beach,
clad in a sweat-drenched
dark cassock, wearing
his savior's tortured body
around his neck, and
marveling at the alien landscape's
ferocious greenery.
The rough men were bringing
the tools of conquest off the
ships, and
a group of luckless
donkeys had been landed
to carry the
shining excrement of the pillage
to come.
The man the others
called Father asked if he could
borrow one of the animals
to explore.
"Bring it back alive" was the blunt reply,
and together the tired servant
and his temporary master set out.
Clutching his magic beads and
murmuring appeals
to the ominous heavens,
the holy man and his mindless
companion pushed into
the tangles of foliage for
more than half an hour.
With a start, they came upon
a group of men as naked as
Adam before the Fall, and for
a moment that spanned centuries,
they stared at each other with
frozen amazement.
Seeing the living embodiment
of their legends in front of them,
the reddish bronze men fell to
the earth prostrate, and chanted
their humble welcome.
"God has delivered me", the rider said
in a barely audible rapture, and he
knew that the New Jerusalem
could not be far.
And holding his head high,
with the Divine Countenance itself
reflected on his face,
he rode the starved little donkey
toward those whom he would
baptize into the Kingdom,
and the bare-skinned welcomers
leading them
quivered with anticipation
at introducing the centaur-god
to their soon to be enlightened
brothers and sisters.

They are never confronted

2008-06-13T21:04:00.003-10:00

with comfortable dilemmas
or too many options.
They have only one choice--
to get up and crush the
vertebrae of their backs
into dust to have enough
to swallow each night
so that they can rise,
and ignore the complaints
flooding in from every part
of their pack animal bodies,
and repeat the process
until,
when they are no longer able
to bend wizened hands to the
task,
they are thrown onto the pyre
to be mourned and wept over
in the interval between
shifts.

It quietly branched out

2008-06-12T20:10:00.004-10:00

and linked
and created
a fine-meshed
net, day after day,
until, finally,
like an old television set
fading into view,
from it
emerged
the first,
primordial image,
as remote now as
the caves at Lascaux.
It is an anxious woman
with a soothing voice,
reassuring the sick
little boy
in the
strange setting
of the hospital room.
Is he summoning it
from the recesses
of soft-edged time,
or is it merely a legend
recalled from an early
hearing around the
campfire?

She sings

2008-06-10T22:34:00.003-10:00

into the blueness
and her voice is heard
by no one,
only the scurrying,
indifferent
chameleons.
Her song is like
none other ever
heard
or imagined,
an impossible
glory
that she will never
sing again,
nor even be able
to remember.
Its reality will die out
with the last note,
to remain
forever unknown,
but part of the
universe's
heritage
nonetheless.

"We'll need salt."

2008-06-09T22:05:00.007-10:00

Nodding his assent, the
dour assistant added it
scrupulously.
"The soil can't be too
heavy with clay" the first
one said, superfluously,
as No. 2 was already
selecting the dirt
with rigorous care.
"Add the water slowly",
was the next command.
The able partner poured it
artfully.
"The trace ingredients will
be a problem."
"I'm on it," the other
replied, never taking his eyes
off the carefully measured
spoons as he added their
idiosyncrasies.
After all had been done,
they hit the button and
the glutinous mass was
folded and stirred
vigorously.
The first one said, with
unsettling gravity,
"Now, this is tricky.
You've got to pour it in to
the mold juuuust right."
Beads of sweat dotted
the assistant's forehead as
he carried out the delicate
process with infinite
care.
Relieved that the hard part
was over, they slipped the form
into the waiting oven
to let the heat transform it
overnight.
In the morning, the two
returned and carefully
freed the figure from
its temporary encasement.
Once the last of the mold
had fallen to the ground,
No. 2 stood in inexplicable
rapture, unable to
tear his eyes away.
Cursing himself, No. 1
said, "I meant to tell you--
don't fall in love with her."
"Too late," No. 2 said,
as the Tigris and Euphrates
coursed down his face.

She kneaded it

2008-06-07T12:07:00.005-10:00

and stretched it,
puzzling over
which shape looked best,
and then tossed it to the boy,
who let it sit
for the longest time
until, fully grown,
he did a body slam
right into the center of it.
The little girl,
picking it up gingerly,
thought that was
how it was supposed to look
until she read a fairy tale
that showed her what a happy ending
she could make out of it.
She thereupon set out
on a multi-decade quest
to reshape it in startling
new ways.
Upon seeing the outcome,
the people of the town
all agreed that this was
how it must have looked
since time immemorial,
until, many years later,
some started to wonder
why it had to be there
at all.
They broke pieces of it off
and rolled them into
amusing little cubes and triangles.
Eventually,
the restless motorcycle gang
stole most of it,
(ignoring the little
cubes and triangles),
and used it
to build their new headquarters.
Age killed the last of them off,
and the really bright kid
who was sorting through their
tattered clubhouse's remains
pounded it into a
wonderful pillar, covered with
beautifully detailed inscriptions,
all describing its eternal
and everlasting
nature.

Their sense of being solid

2008-06-06T21:25:00.009-10:00

objects is deceptive,
a byproduct of
the rubbery-like blob
they slosh around in.
They are, in fact,
cloud beings,
shape shifting
and billowing
in thrall to unseen
crosswinds,
little universes where tiny
particles
jump and race like
children on the first day
of summer vacation.
Within them is the entire
twisted story,
buried in a quivering cap of
cauliflower-shaped gelatin.
They are walking, breathing
metaphor factories,
and the sum total
of everything
that they are
is merely
a Rube Goldberg device,
only with a more serious
punchline.

He was outdoors,

2008-06-06T21:14:00.003-10:00

casually crushing walnuts
between his biceps
and his forearms
when he heard the
alarm.
With no thought
of his own safety
he crashed
through the plate glass
window,
spraying the room
with savage
bursts from his
pulsating dual Mac-10s.
As the last reverberations
died away he swiveled
his powerful neck toward
the kitchen, strode
over to the stove,
and sent the timer
to HELL where it belonged.

They surround me

2008-06-06T00:03:00.003-10:00

on all sides
of the narrow-aisled
maze,
waiting patiently
for me
to forget
where I am,
lose focus, or
let my guard down.
They wait for me
to be distracted
or complacent
or tired
or simply confused
so that I'll run into
their razor-sharp
blades
again
and allow them
to have one of
their cheap
little thrills
at watching me
writhe.

They see the Golden Dome

2008-06-04T23:49:00.004-10:00

where the Prophet ascended.
I see the depths of the human will
to believe.
They bow in prayerful rhythm
before the last remains of the
Temple.
I see a building ruined by
Vespasian's thugs.
They come seeking the place
where He pointed to the
Mount of Olives;
I look for his shadow
but see only tourists.

He is fetal curled around it,

2008-06-02T21:23:00.004-10:00

holding it to his midsection
as if
it were a rabid animal
ready to gouge out
his insides
were he to lose control
of it.
No one on the outside
knows
how fantastically lethal
it actually is,
but the daily blood it draws
convinced him
a long time ago.
He will grip it right to the
last moment of his
sad little melodrama;
then, like a decapitated
machine gunner
at Verdun,
he will grip it even
harder.

He held the shiny glass object

2008-05-31T10:59:00.003-10:00

in his 13 year old hands and raised it
into the sultry air.
A spectrum of multicolored light
emanated from it,
astonishing one and all.
Many voices expressed delight;
others looked at the miracle
with thinly veiled fear, as if
a darkly magical force
were at work
in the world of the everyday.
However they reacted, all knew
that a door had been suddenly
pushed open
into the Divine Mystery.
They knelt before the boy
and raised their arms to him
in tribute to his command of
unseen powers.
The boy-man was at once imbued
with sacred nobility, and he
knew that the turning point of
his no-longer humble life had now
been reached.
He would show them The Way
and reveal the Nature of Him
who sent the glassy messenger
of prophecy
to his hands,
hands that had been destined
to receive it
since the creation of time
itself.

She haunts the old office,

2008-05-31T00:00:00.007-10:00

kicking up the dust and laughing
at the ones who sneeze.
She glides like Ginger Rogers
through walls
and twirl dances on the
desks of the infamous.
She looks at all the "secrets"
and stifles a yawn
before flying into the
Van Gogh night
to stand staring through
the picture window
that used to define
the sodden limits
of her world,
before her real birthday
finally arrived
to liberate her.
Smiling, she vanishes
like rainwater drawn down
by sun cracked ground
into the memories
of those who think
they knew her.

It takes me into its arms

2008-05-30T13:42:00.004-10:00

and erases every desolate Monday morning.
It converts the memory of knife-cutting
Siberian wind into confetti.
It urges me to walk out of
the dessicated lake bed
of my stale anger.
It quietly gets me to turn off the
endless reruns of scenes that
cannot change however many times
I stab myself with them.
In its ever changing light
it reveals eternal verities,
and in its genetic Mardi Gras
it dares me to hope
of what might be.

The damning indictment

2008-05-29T23:20:00.006-10:00

intensified into tornadic fury.
"He once used the word anthropology!",
the Prosecutor cried out.
Involuntary gasps issued forth
from the confused spectators,
who sensed the presence of sin.
"He knows the days of the week in order!"
"Bastard", a frustrated voice shouted
from the rear
as the judge gaveled
for calm.
"He once ate with a fork!"
Several women in the room
spontaneously turned into
pillars of salt.
And the final thunderbolt was
now hurled.
"He knows who's buried in
Grant's Tomb!"
And with that, the judge
rose from his seat,
walked sternly over to
the filthy miscreant,
shoved him down
on his knees,
pulled out a .357,
and converted
the wretch's head into
a Rorschach test
right on the courtroom floor.
Deafening cheers erupted,
and when they subsided
the smiling jurist announced
his upcoming campaign
for Governor,
the gun smoking merrily
in his hand.

It jumps and whirls

2008-05-28T20:22:00.005-10:00

from tree to tree,
riding an electrochemical wave
like a crazed surfer on a big board,
zapping a whole forest
into a cerebral firestorm,
blasting open a bank vault
of shuddering introverts, and
ripping off the top of a circus tent,
exposing its weird, energetic denizens
to the shockingly bright sunlight.
Groups link up and shake hands
at a hundred summit meetings,
and suddenly the place looks
livelier than Reno on a hot night.
And with that, she leaps out of bed
and writes them an ending
that'll have 'em
begging for more

The pile glittered

2008-05-26T21:59:00.005-10:00

in from of him,
its dimensions a rival
to the death house of Khufu,
and its appearance
no less breathtaking
in its exquisite obscenity.
Its construction
had drained
the mitochondrial fever
of every cell of which
he had ever been composed.
And now, it lay before him
on the windswept plateau,
the reason for his being,
and the consolation
of his solitary
contemplation.

His name was on everyone's lips

2008-05-23T13:40:00.008-10:00

and from them praise that would
embarrass Caligula
flowed in a quacking river of
obsequious syllables.
He was "Great Leader and
Teacher",
"Our Inspiration",
"Towering Genius",
"Glorious Father",
"The Greatest Figure
in History", and
"The Pinnacle of Humanity".
His face adorned every bent-backed office,
every frozen classroom,
every starving farm,
every grimly hustling factory,
and every obedient home.
His statues graced every empty public park
and every darkened village square.
His words were heard everywhere,
pounded into the heads of the people
in endless hammerblows.
Delegations of fearful peasants
in colorful garb
crawled to him, clutching
declarations of fealty
in their decimated mouths.
Robotic parades, shellac-smile festivals,
coldly synchronized athletic displays,
and deafening rallies proceeded each
other in a continuous orgy of
groveling worship.
He Who Smiles Upon Us
had the power to show his love
for The People
in a dozen polar labor colonies
and a thousand torture chambers,
and a multitude of eyes and ears
and three million submachine guns
were ready to do his bidding.
And still he stood trembling
before the bedroom mirror,
fearfully suspecting that the
withered old man
that stared back at him
was ready to betray him
at any moment,
the one treacherously disloyal
traitor
he had never been able
to purge.

They dreamed of how it would be.

2008-05-23T13:25:00.002-10:00

The young man
who had spent too many nights
in choking loneliness
pictured endless rounds
of erotic ecstasy, with himself at the
center of every erect fantasy,
a submissive, enthusiastic harem
at his tireless, red-hot command.
The woman who had struggled all her life
to be what other people thought she should be
dreamed of endless, sumptuous banquets,
of never-full days of exotic dishes offered
in endless, gloriously indulgent procession.
The man who had worked himself
into premature old age
only to find himself clinging to the edge
with calloused hands
imagined a jaw-dropping mansion
with a hundred servants at his
beck and call, a life of ease
and fantasy-levels of comfort,
surrounded by every object
the hungry imagination could
conceive of.
And the woman with the sunken eyes
and the body ravaged by the
never-ending outrage in her joints
and bones,
simply wished for some place
where it didn't hurt any more.

The huge, stumbling mass

2008-05-23T13:13:00.003-10:00

careened down the road in a
deranged zig-zag
that bore no resemblance
to a planned direction.
They crashed into walls,
stunning those on the outside
of the seemingly eyeless flock and
splashed through muck-drenched
rivers, drowning the shorter ones.
All the while large numbers of them
shouted at each other
in rage, neck veins bulging,
teeth bared,
muscles tense and at the ready,
roaring out their opinions
about where they were
and where they should go next.
And the great mass moved on
toward the twilight,
most of its stumbling,
weary members
just trying
to keep up
as best they could.

I was an alien there,

2008-05-21T22:49:00.004-10:00

a stranger in that chill, tired place.
It was as if the half century
spent there
had been a hallucinatory dream,
a vaguely remembered vision,
a series of black and white pictures
from an album lying dormant
in an airless attic.
I walked familiar halls and felt
no nostalgia,
only relief
that they were no longer
my day to day reality.
I reveled in the company
of those I knew and loved,
but I could no longer
be with them;
my true home insisted
on my presence,
and I was overjoyed
to obey its green, flowering
command.

I'll Be Away for a Week

2008-05-14T16:56:00.001-10:00

Back at it on Wednesday, 21 May.

(Not that anyone will notice.)

I will venture back

2008-05-12T23:53:00.004-10:00

to Flatland
(if only for awhile)
to see if it's recovered
from its winter
battering,
and to let my story
intersect
(if only briefly)
with those who
are still real in
my heart and mind
(if only sometimes
in distant memory).
It is now the
Temporary Destination;
I have escaped its
exhausted gravity,
and when I return
to the Garden,
it will be a homecoming
made more blessed
by the reminder
of what I have left
(if not who).

We shield their eyes

2008-05-11T23:56:00.007-10:00

from the death camp images
and we erect as many walls
as we have mortar for
to keep the shapeless evil
of the lurking, unknown
others
away from them.
And if we're the people
we say we are,
we shield them from us.
We put our own hurt
and own fear
to one side, and we try not
to let them know about
the things that would make us
choke with shame
were they ever
to be revealed.
We want that nice, glossy picture
in the living room
to be their image of us,
no matter how much of a lie
it really is.
And they would be frightened
and confused
if they knew how fiercely
we pray for them
(even if we think our words
merely drift into an uncaring night),
or to hear us make a desperate offer
while lying in sleeplessness
(as if we were in any position to bargain!):
Lord,
if there is any suffering you demand of
us, put it on me.
And if you need to take someone
from our family,
please let it be me.
Their time for understanding
is not yet;
their epiphany
is still being constructed.