Poetry

People look at me and say, there’s a man who knows where he’s going. That’s because of my attaché case. If I didn’t carry it who would notice me? Entre nous, it’s filled with sand, which is running out.

If you had picked one life to live and one body to live it in you couldn’t of picked a worse carcass said the master to the devotee, thankyou master I brought you my wife and children, do with them what you will. The perfect master immediately had them all commit suicide while asking for…

On some days the mind refuses to play. Given paradise terrestrial, it can make nothing of it, craving instead its minimal dose of something lethal. But spring is arriving, the great forgiver, and it appears understood that we did not really wish to die. Blackfish Creek has gone into molt, sunken and gliding past its…

It seemed to me that the old family house of my boyhood was being razed. The three-story brick front had been sheared away. Sunlight glared on the wallpaper. I saw the living room and through the French doors the dining room. I looked into my room. No bed. No bookcase. No desk. Snow began to…

1 Start with the brightest star in the square of Pegasus. Follow the row of stars running Northeast across the heavens, below Cassiopeia. That’s Andromeda chained to her rock. Find the one star that makes you question your vision. That’s the Andromeda Nebula, a hundred billion stars spinning like a pin-wheel, so far away that…

I am not immune to your pleas of transformation. Today I burned all my socialist verse. Outdoors, a gust of wind lifted the oak leaves into a momentary show of hands. To build a life, brimming, like roses after rain, we pour contents from flask to flask, to float some dream. Yesterday we fed the…

A person blown to bits do not fold, mutilate or bend.

Milky Way, River of Heaven, River of Shepherd’s Hut, River of Nana, Silver River, Snake River, River of Light, Celestial River, Cloud-eating Shark, Great Serpent, Bed of the Ganges, Heavenly Girdle, Ashy Path, Path of the Ghosts, Path of the Snake, Path of the Chopped Straw Carriers, Way of the Sun, Woden’s Way, Bird’s Way,…

If only a quiet taxidermist moved in this time! Imagine, he’d sew fox paws all night, polish the delicate nails until they shone like black glass. Or a silent movie actress running her old films with shaking, arthritic hands, the reels barely clicking. Why not a crabby postman unpacking canvas sacks stuffed with dead letters…