Not Unique in Trying to Be

What is it we find in the end
that hasn't approached us so?
The crashing waves
at our vessel's hull
(china bowls skating from their decorated spots),
pounding hearts into pounding.
Fathers need tell
their sons to never stroll
in the corralling
flame by their lonesome.

Clack

Some things just sound pretty.

When Colors Wane (Return Again)

For a while now I had the suspicion that I'd fade away like the simplest memory. That at the end of a day sometime in the near future, I would become the diminishing recollection of a grandson I could not influence. It was almost too easy for me to consider my future, and to think back on my childhood youth, and all but realize that I could not return. I sense that few of us understand our departure from the naive imagination, however immature it was, and however misunderstood we were. We can never go back. I can never go back. And I'd argue that some of us feel that way: that we could return sometime in the next fifty years to those moments when we were twelve, passing the ball across the black top, running wildly into the grass, cartwheeling over clover patches, and digging around inside our desks, grabbing at objects that would allow our minds to wander away from what our teachers lectured about. But, no matter, I will awake tomorrow with the same misunderstanding: that I will become a child again, and that I will not fall apart like all things, and that when I ponder the empty spaces left on this earth, there will be something to fill them with architecture, with love, passion, propriety, fullness, and color.

From Dawn to Dust

I couldn't repair the world if I tried.

The foundations of fountains, forests,
-bridges suspended over bottomless
rivers. Those bodies like their own
suspension over cushions and pillows.
Soft things don't crumble like the hard.

And it's the hardest part,
and it's crumbling, the world in need
of repair.

O, where is the repairman?
Can anyone find him, to fix this mess.

Scoop with your hands boy! Collect
all you can, place it aside and scoop
some more!

But all the boy said,
"I couldn't collect all this dust if I tried."

And at that moment, something in
the molten core of the earth had vanished,
died.

Erosion at the Earth's Edge

Last time I lost my head.
Last time
I convinced my gray
glowing chest,
it's heartlessness,
and balance of mind,
that there rested a role for
creating an our,
and
those personas could
climb the partitions
we mapped out
without each other knowing.
When we were young,
and did things.
Last time
I lost my qualm,
but I continued
to rest under
your hand-made quilt,
and dream big dreams,
important dreams that carried
our spoken lines
onto faraway lands,
and cliffs that disappeared
with the ocean's ebb
like Orion's appropriation.

A Jawbone for You, And For Me, a Ribcage

Poetry is everywhere. And no, that’s not the most original line anyone has ever written, but it makes perfect truth out of blindness and illiteracy. We are not illiterate in the sense of reading and writing, but in the visual world of imagery. Can one truly argue the cause for those elements they notice in a photograph? Are they capable of reasoning why the next mountains shot in Yosemite will not demonstrate a perfect snow cover? And what about the portraits of Leibovitz? Of Avedon? Steiglitz? O, red wheelbarrow, where are you now. And when a picture fades into the past, does it fade from memory as moments drift away like leaflets of a maple? Or do they stagger to the ground like those shredded eucalyptus? And when all of those images settle into a cove, bones from deer, antlers and all will we bury them more? On the side of highways and roads that lead to nowhere, will those who will treat what our past has accomplished, dissatisfied with our effort to preserve theirs, disregard our belongings, and leave it be? Or will they brush off the earthenware instruments, listen to each one-thousand words, and bring about the change we so wished to seek in ourselves yet were too distracted by the simplicity of light to make..

Discovery

I need to discover something new.
Something worth discovering, or rediscovering I should say.
There's a place where my inspiration resides and it's not here in this house
where the pain of coming home rides away the joy
and exasperation of a bountiful pen, and instead, blends a
new anger inside a bottle or glass -and no I'm not describing alcoholism.
Dissatisfaction; directed at Langston Hughes, John Ashberry,
An d all of the mislead minds that taught a writ er
what it means to write, a think er what it means to think,
a bod y what it means to be.
Like discovering a lang uage disappearing
in the middle of Act 3, it's all hearkening, really.
And I need to discov er some thing new. Really new-really.