Sunday, September 30, 2012

Just Another Message Down the Cosmic Wire

 


I look out through the open window – watch
whatever current swatch of planetary influence
I’m subject to: imbibe its layers of translucence
through the leaves – listen to the hockey sticks
and playground yells of kids in games across

the street – sweet blameless light of cold and warm
September – final breath of month exonerating me –
forgiving me carte blanche for everything I’ve
ever done – consigning me to an inevitable cloud
of unremembered history – a mystery of coolness

causing anguish of such strange delicious power –
as if to feel it is to know how long the flower
has before it falls. October’s coming in with blank
New York indifference: and the inference is:
I’d better let it. I loaf upon the sofa – aimless brushes

of the air rush in – tender bursts exciting something
like a thirst: therein resides the anguish, riding
winds like an apocalyptic horseman. But nothing’s dire.
Just another message down the cosmic wire –
from my father and my mother and my brother.








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Saturday, September 29, 2012

Everybody Felt the Shock




 
 

It happened close to two o’clock.

Everybody felt the shock.

We’ll have to find another way.

Paradigms all changed today.











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Friday, September 28, 2012

Early City Autumn

 

 
You pray until the tips
of your protuberances
swell to fat abrupt tumescence –

as if to blast your gut
determination at the Universe
will pay you back with essence.

Perhaps it will. Meanwhile
the summer fades
to early city autumn chill.












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Thursday, September 27, 2012

The Way It Was Last Night

 


In the twilight of dichotomy
before you fall asleep
to merge back, hushed,
into the dusk of gentle chaos –

after all the harassment
inflicted by the edicts of duality –
its specious tugs-of-war –
afflicted by the rank egregious lie

that nothing isn’t half
of something more –
sometimes something in you
feels affection, cuddles into all

the rest of you and lets the whole
thing you’ve been being free.
That’s the way it was,
last night, with me.










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Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Shrapnel

 


 

Do what you will

but here you are.

Volatile spill.

Shrapnel of star.













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Tuesday, September 25, 2012

On Reading Henry James Again


 


Today discernments of a certain sort
resort to clauses so innumerably
and exquisitely subordinate,
we cannot make them out.

Strange, though, how exacting
and caressing and successful
and attractive they can be – in their
mission to distract his mind from doubt.











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Monday, September 24, 2012

The Thing You’re Working On


 

Strange

to have the thing

 

you’re working on

look back –

 

take in

the view –

 

know more

than you do.







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