1992-93
Existence
I am full to bursting
I am a dandelion drooping with dew
I am my swollen lower lip and quaking eyes,
lusting for her flesh and loins
I am a cat tensed to pounce
I am my skin stretched tight and tingling
over clean sinew and bone
My muscle strands stream over them
Like the river over stone
And it comes
Finally
To the sea
I am awash
I am alone
I am come to me
Axioms
Words I cannot hold
For the stars shine right through them
It is the stars that I contemplate tonight
They are steady and quiet
While meteors and eclipses
Bustling this way and that
Fawn for attention
Their presence is subtle and final
To those who look
They are indifferent
To those who see
They are obliged
Seeker
Pause
There is breath beneath your breath
And words
Beneath the words which escape you
Words that should
In every waking moment
Hum in your head
In stillness
One falls
Touches old bruises
Exhaustion
Longing
And returns to the meanings of those
Underwords
Who Needs It
– to the memory of Ayn Rand
By definition
I am conscious.
Correct
It can work
Only one way
It: everything there is
What is it?
Name it
The feeling of identification is pleasure
And nothing can alter that fact
I wanted so much to want
I could not break any laws
Then what?
Which way?
What had scattered the signs
From the roads that lead off from here
Could it mark them again
The thing to pull it all together
What would it be…
What would it be?
By definition
Philosophy
My Father Lives in Twin Falls, Idaho
I am not the kind
Who can walk down a main street with impunity
My body is a monolith
My blood stands still
The numbness is a forcefield
Which a draws a dangerous man close to me
I am going to the open desert
For safety
To be worn clean
So that I may never have to walk down a main street again
Right Now
The very best thing possible is happening
I am living
Food falls down my throat
And my chilled flesh
-it does not go to the bone anymore-
Warms in this temporarily benevolent fluorescence
I have just enough time to regain my direction
And the will to reenter a damp canyon
Where again
I’ll find the courage to sleep
To walk a mile
To go from this glow
To trees and a moonlit creek
Is to crumple into the hand of a giant
Who rests a world away
I am ready
This was worth six bits
Disguise
I have collapsed into depravity
By way of prodigality
I hoped that you are fooled
And I hope that you are amused
By my efforts to nobility
Mine is the disguise of a spy
Who is about to depart enemy territory
For the last time
He is tired
More and more
He feels that he did not penetrate it
But that his own fatherland
Deeply screwed him
Ergo the appearance of a wastrel
Yes, I’ve squandered the money I’ve earned
But what I’ve been given
I’ve spent well
Now
I’ve laid the plan
And collected the gear
I am vacating my place here
Listen for a whoosh
Then a crash
An implosion, I think
Will be a fitting end
To this place and this mask
Man
No proper adjective
No possible qualifier
Common: Contradictory
Independent: Redundant
Pluralization: Impossible
Exclusion of the unwilling
By definition
His identity
Free, alone, complete
A city-state-nation unto himself
This… [lost lines] …
Quiet, he says
The mob absent
The comportment of his soul
Named
The Words
Hear now the words
Which beseech thee to perceive their origins:
Freedom
Heaven
Life
Dumb and still you were
Till their vibrations
Cohered inside your head
Flowering language
Trumpeted from every peak
Drowns if a child whispers them
In some lonely glen
The crickets and the wind will cease their own movements
And conspire to aid him
Lifting his feet
And covering their fall amidst enemies
Who writhe and languish all around
First the air into the lung
To start the friction for the tongue
To forge into a rapier drawn
Thy thoughts! behold thy foe hast gone
No potent threat can be heard
By the one who seeks and speaks these words
May I have this last dance?
I have my secret
And I am going
Do you hear?
I am going, I am going!
At last the boat docks and I depart
The oars and sails are my spokesmen
Do you listen?
They bid you adieu
You needn’t hear me say it again
For I am going
A thousand, thousand times you’ve heard it from me
But now it is true
I am going
I am going
I am gone
untitled
In the dark
In the deep
In the stone
In the keep
There is I
With the key
And the sky
Envelopes me
The sea’s drops
The Earth’s rocks
The jetty heavens
Time stops
Breathe in, breathe out
The seething din and the shout
Resonate in the settling calm
The tones, now heard
now dancing in my palm
Planet and World
Never have I considered these things as the same
Here is the planet, Earth
I can touch it
And live here
It sings to me
And if I break a limb
I bury it
And cease eating
And rise in three weeks
Whole
There is this world
—a coalition of polities on a planet—
In which people live unsecretly
There, we cannot hide what we are, what we do
It all comes out
It is all there
And look at it
Then there is the world that could be
Another world
Separate or greater
A world of freedom
That one can found
Tinder gathers on its blueprint
Some now aim their sparks there
A breeze collects itself
You will see others smeared with grey
Some walking
Some dead
Before the rains, everything will be grey
This new world will rise
From ashes
1999 – present
Eating Bitter
I see every truth
And every falsehood
Resolve to truth
Finally I am fed
By all this bitterness
For it was salt that grew it
Salt and humus
The blood of so many gone before
Including me
Yes I was here before
I wept and died here countless times
Horses would crush my body
And kick it into the canal
Where it would catch
On branches and barbed wire
And decompose into beds
For native flowers that never bloom
And malva and sheep sorrel and fat hen
That today
I sit by the water
In the seat of longing
And eat
And eat
Until the hunger is satisfied
Twin Falls 1999 Jul
Not Quite
What happens
If I tell you
That ecstasy always plays at my bones
Catches my breath
Wipes out history?
What will it be for me-
Cross or scaffold?
Do you have any idea
How much you hate purity?
How ferociously you cultivate
the drama of pain and achievement?
But this only provokes
Your “Work,”
As if, somehow,
God left something undone.
Grass’s benediction
Grass is benediction
To my feet
I had forgotten
Shoes clogged my brain
If you’re strong
You can eat it
Said the tough-footed boy
Across the valley
Bare-limbed disiduous trees
The beard of the hills
And the clouds
Write themselves
On paper
Audience With Myself
If I could meet myself
At this point in my life
I would place all my hopes in myself
My secret longing for the sacred
Would find second wind
In the clues falling from my lips
In the excited tension throughout my back
In my sweet wish to make love
To marry any one
Of the beautiful, perfectly loveable women I meet everyday
Everyone of whom I feel myself falling in love with
I would throw myself at my feet, sobbing,
Deliver me! Deliver me! You are my only hope!
I would beg all the saints
Disguised as the ordinary people
Who surround this self of my present
Please help him
To help me,
To remember me
Remember all his own failings, which I am
Remember everything that led me to this point
Remember everyone like me
Sobbing at our own feet, Deliver me! Deliver me!
If I could meet myself at this point in my life
I would place all my hopes in myself
Seal my love
For myself, for life, for others, for this lovely Earth,
Seal it in wax
Feed it to the flame in the hearts
Of all our selves
Whom we might now meet at this point in our lives
Again and again and again and again
LV 2001 Mar
Kamikazes
When love becomes a life and death matter
Even sweeping the floor is urgent
In washing the dishes
the universe hangs in the balance
Swallowing morsels of food
stuns and dumbfounds even the quick and articulate
A salad is a vision of god
And just sitting down is an act of war
Who is the gremlin
That gives things meaning?
It occupies my heart
It has locked itself in
It is making ransom demands
It intimates that you are in its care
But for how long?!
These things cannot, however, concern me
I lean back
Let the sun hit my neck
Like so many kamikazes
Coming in
Seattle 2001 Dec
2002.01.19, for B
Did I storm your yard?
I bid you relax
Then caught you off guard
Now I know the facts
Now your face is too much
Only your feet can play in my mind
These I can see and touch
Without going numb or blind
These rhymes spring from love
Won’t you believe this old heart?
Fly to me flitting dove
May we nevermore be apart
You are wine, I, a drunken cup
The sky opens and you pour down
At the first red drops I look up
At the receding blue before I drown
The crest and the trough
Waiting for an opening
And then
Into the breach
Endless controls
Waffling toward zero
I touch a place now
where I cannot
Move against my feeling
Anymore
Satloka 2004 Jan
Corduroy Classic 2001
– for Micha Grainger
Youth, man: that’s IT
Said Micha
Micha chases a lost rabbit
The furbearer of his people
Multiplying
Soft
Despised
Elusive
See his comical corduroy cap
His flaring pants
The missing white member
Of Fat Albert’s gang
Showing up late
The party’s second wind
Look!
Old-school court shoes
Improbably shined and flashing
Twisting on the carpet
Hands waving like daisies
Laughter springing up goofy
and hip:
For the people
For his people
Others chase their own dreams
Micha chases the dream of his people
Assured and fleet
On his lucky furry feet
Breathe
There is no agency
—let alone free agency—
Only one long chain of life
Binding us all to its winding course
Belong to it!
Your strains against it
Only pull it tighter against the rest of us
Against we
Who will bear it smiling
Be assured
For what choice have we?
Strain, do not strain:
We belong
It has us
Has us
en route to Boise 2005 Aug 11
The Battle of Wounded Knee
– for Rob Bolman
The traveler of pregnant faith
Sets foot on the distant path
God is with him
God is with him
Sing god’s name with his
God is everything
And he is only dust
Yet sing their names together
Many hopes follow on his heels
Like friendly cats
Longing pours from his eyes
Unbearable tension rips his limbs from his body
But he pulls himself forward by his chin and forehead,
his abdomen and pelvis
God is with him
God awaits him
With prostheses that work better
Than the arms and legs
Of a born champion
This one will be made
Among the six billion cells of Maitreya’s body
This one finds his way home twice:
in leaving and in returning
Godspeed, traveler,
Closing his door and already far away,
Godspeed.
Eugene 2006 Jan